The disgraced press baron Conrad Black is seeking solace in God as he awaits sentencing in America for embezzling millions of dollars from his Hollinger media empire.

In a 1,400-word email to a journalist at Men’s Vogue magazine, the former Telegraph owner continues to insist that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice - although for the first time, he appears to acknowledge that he may be destined for prison.

On bail at his beachside mansion in Palm Beach, Black says his faith is providing comfort: “It has been helpful … in reading apposite passages from ecclesiastical authors, especially Cardinal Newman, and in conversation with several very knowledgeable clergymen.”

The peer, who was stripped of the Conservative whip following his conviction, is passing his evenings sipping good French wine on the terrace of his 21,000 square foot Colonial-style property. He laments that his fall from grace has taken its toll on his social life as invitations become fewer and small talk becomes tricky.

“The subject of these travails becomes an 800-pound gorilla nobody mentions,” writes Black. “We and other polite people don’t want to talk about it, but it is hard to ignore, and some awkwardness results.”

A jury in Chicago’s federal court found Black guilty on three counts of fraud and a single count of obstruction of justice in July - convictions which, legal analysts believe, could consign him to 10 to 15 years in prison when the judge sentences him on November 30.

Black still asserts that he was “wrongly accused and assaulted and defamed” but, displaying a rare chink in his bombastic demeanour, he concedes that his efforts to overturn the verdicts may fail on appeal.

“I still hope for a complete acquittal,” he writes. “And on a worst case, not a severe sentence.”

One of the trial jurors, postal worker Jean Kelly, offers Black little comfort by revealing that nine panellists initially wanted to convict him on all 13 charges - including the most serious, a count of racketeering.

“I don’t think anyone realises just how close Black came to being found guilty on everything,” Ms Kelly says, explaining that three hold-outs persuaded others to examine the counts individually rather than convicting on “emotion”.

Black has hired a high-profile defence counsel, Andrew Frey, to lead his appeal. Mr Frey helped the former Credit Suisse banker Frank Quattrone to overturn his conviction for obstructing an investigation into possible kickbacks on flotations.

The peer does own up to one mistake - his decision to surrender his Canadian citizenship in order to accept a peerage in Britain, which offended many Canadians and has disqualified him from serving any sentence under Canada’s lighter penal regime.

“I do regret giving up my Canadian citizenship,” he writes. “But I always said I would take it back.”

Six Asiatic wild elephants were electrocuted as they went berserk after drinking rice beer in India’s remote north-east.

The 40-strong herd uprooted an electric pole while looking desperately for food on Friday in Chandan Nukat, a village nearly 150 miles west of Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya state, said Sunil Kumar, a state wildlife official.

“There would have been more casualties had the villagers not chased them away,” said Dipu Mark, a local conservationist.

The elephants are known to have a taste for rice beer brewed by tribal communities in northeastern India.

Four wild elephants died in a similar incident in the region three years ago.

Also last week, five rare Asiatic lions were found electrocuted on the edge of Gir National Park, in western India. Authorities said the lions were killed on an electrified fence a villager had put up illegally to protect crops near the sanctuary.

The north-east of India accounts for the world’s largest concentration of wild Asiatic elephants, with the states of Assam and Meghalaya alone estimated to have 7,000 of them.

“It’s great to have such a huge number of elephants, but the increasing man-elephant conflict following the shrinkage in their habitat due to the growing human population is giving us nightmares,” said Pradyut Bordoloi, a former environment minister in the state of Assam.

Wild elephants have killed more than 600 people in Assam in the past 16 years.

Satellite imagery by the National Remote Sensing Agency, a federal body, shows that as much as 280,000 hectares of thick forests in Assam have been cleared by human encroachment between 1996 and 2000.

Villagers have also been killing elephants with poison. Nineteen wild elephants were killed in 2001 after feasting on standing crops and demolishing several homes in Assams Sonitpur district, 180 kilometres north of Gauhati, the capital of Assam.

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are to team up for the fourth time on the 50s-set crime thriller Shutter Island.

The film follows the pair’s previous collaborations on Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed.

Based on a novel by Denis Lehane, the movie will see the Titanic star play a federal agent investigating the disappearance of a female killer from a prison-hospital set on an island off the coast of Boston. As DiCaprio’s character uncovers the strange going-ons at the jail, he begins to fear for his life, as a hurricane hits the island, inciting a riot among inmates.

A production team has already begun scouting for locations. Filming is expected to take place early next year in the US states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.

According to Variety, Scorsese and DiCaprio have been looking for a project to work on together for the past few months. They previously considered working on an adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street, the autobiography of a US stockbroker who spent 20 months in prison in the 1990s after refusing to cooperate with a massive securities fraud investigation into Wall Street corruption. However, Variety says the Shutter Island script “quickly drew [in] both director and star”, adding that “a deal is expected to fall into place quickly”.

Scorsese recently completed his documentary on the Rolling Stones, while DiCaprio is currently shooting Body of Lies with Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, the story of how the CIA hires a journalist formerly based in Iraq to track down an Al-Qaida leader in Jordan.

Shutter Island author Lehane is currently in vogue with Hollywood film-makers. His novel Mystic River was turned into an Oscar-winning crime drama by Clint Eastwood in 2003, while Gone Baby Gone, about two detectives investigating the disappearance of a little girl in Boston, is currently garnering critical plaudits for director Ben Affleck.