Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
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Senator: NASA to lasso asteroid, bring it closer WASHINGTON (AP) — A top senator says President Barack Obama and NASA are planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon. Then astronauts would explore it in 2021. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said the plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth. Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate Science and Space Subcommittee, said Friday that Obama is putting $100 million for the a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The closings of control towers at 149 small airports, due to begin this weekend because of government-wide spending cuts, are being delayed until mid-June, federal regulators announced Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration said it needs more time to deal with legal challenges to the closures. Also, about 50 airport authorities and other “stakeholders” have indicated they want to fund the operations of the towers themselves rather than see them shut down, and more time will be needed to work out those plans, the agenc...
CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — New questions confronted the University of Colorado, Denver on Friday amid disclosures that a psychiatrist who treated theater shooting suspect James Holmes had warned campus police a month before the deadly assault that Holmes was dangerous and had homicidal thoughts. Court documents made public Thursday revealed Dr. Lynne Fenton also told a campus police officer in June that the shooting suspect had threatened and intimidated her. Fenton’s blunt warning came more than a month before the July 20 attack at a movie theat...
ATLANTA (AP) — Louisville already had the bigger names, the better team and some unfinished business after coming up short in last year’s Final Four. All Wichita State had was the cute-and-cuddly underdog angle. Now the Shockers don’t even have that. Kevin Ware is everybody’s favorite player since he broke his leg in gruesome fashion last weekend yet summoned the strength to encourage his teammates, and having him at the Final Four has given the top-seeded Cardinals (33-5) added motivation to claim the title that eluded them last year. “We rea...
COLUMBUS (AP) — Gene Mohrmann had been looking for the right opportunity to retire for a few years. He was ready to leave Mohrmann Tool Inc. in the right hands, if he could only find those right hands first. Then, last March, Joe Eckert came through the door. The Columbus Telegram reports Eckert walked in wanting to start a machining shop near his hometown of Tilden and just wanted to get a sense of what owning that shop would entail. During that first visit, the conversation quickly turned to owning that particular shop. “Within about 20 min...
NYC ‘zombie’ finds Long Island cat in Times Square NEW YORK (AP) — It took a zombie to find Disaster at the Crossroads of the World. Two years after he disappeared from his Long Island home, Disaster the cat was found this week in the heart of Manhattan — by a Times Square haunted house promoter dressed up as a zombie. Jeremy Zelkowitz, who sells tickets for the Times Scare haunted house, spotted Disaster early Saturday morning crossing 42nd Street. He snatched up Disaster, a black and white cat who appeared to be well-kept and neat, and bro...
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Outsiders might hear the opening notes of a war in the deluge of threats and provocations from North Korea, but to South Koreans it is a familiar drumbeat. Separated from the North by a heavily fortified border for decades, they have for the most part lived with tough talk from Pyongyang all their lives. In annual defense drills, war alarms ring in their ears. Foreigners unused to North Korean rumblings have canceled trips to the Korean Peninsula. But to get South Koreans’ attention, Pyongyang must compete with the...
BEIJING (AP) — China announced a sixth death from a new bird flu strain Friday, while authorities in Shanghai halted the sale of live fowl and slaughtered all poultry at a market where the virus was detected in pigeons being sold for meat. The mass bird killing is the first so far as the Chinese government responds to the H7N9 strain of bird flu, which has sickened 16 people, many critically, along the eastern seaboard in its first known infections of people. The first cases were announced Sunday, while two more were reported Friday, both r...
BEIRUT (AP) — A barrage of rockets slammed into a contested district on the northeastern edge of Damascus, killing at least five people and trapping others under the rubble, while violence raged around suburbs of the capital, activists said Friday. The attack on Barzeh, where rebels aiming to topple President Bashar Assad are known to operate, follows days of heavy fighting between the rebels and the military in the area. Rebels have established footholds in districts on the edge of Damascus and in suburbs in the northeast and south, from w...
ATLANTA (AP) — Christian Laettner will occasionally see a replay of his famous buzzer beater against Kentucky — and he tries not to look too excited about it. “If I’m in a bar or restaurant and there’s people around kind of seeing how I react to it, I’ll purposely not look at it, so they don’t run around saying, ‘Laettner loved to watch himself on TV,’” Laettner said. “But if I’m in the privacy of my home with my family, I know it’s coming on, I’ll definitely take a peek at it.” Laettner’s sho...
CHICAGO (AP) – Roger Ebert had the most-watched thumb in Hollywood. With a twist of his wrist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic rendered decisions that influenced a nation of moviegoers and could sometimes make or break a film. The heavy-set writer in the horn-rimmed glasses teamed up on television with Gene Siskel to create a format for criticism that proved enormously appealing in its simplicity: uncomplicated reviews that were both intelligent and accessible and didn’t talk down to ord...
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s proposed budget will call for reductions in the growth of Social Security and other benefit programs while still insisting on more taxes from the wealthy in a renewed attempt to strike a broad deficit-cutting deal with Republicans. The proposal aims for a compromise on the fiscal 2014 budget by combining the president’s demand for higher taxes with GOP insistence on reductions in entitlement programs. But the plan was already encountering negative reviews from top Republicans for its insistence on reven...
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea has moved a missile with “considerable range” to its east coast, South Korea’s defense minister said Thursday, but he added that there are no signs that the North is preparing for a full-scale conflict. The report came hours after North Korea’s military warned that it has been authorized to attack the U.S. using “smaller, lighter and diversified” nuclear weapons. It was the North’s latest war cry against America in recent weeks. The reference to smaller weapons could be a claim that North Korea has impro...
Conn. governor set to sign gun control law HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who four months ago broke the news to shocked parents that their children had been slaughtered in a Connecticut elementary school, was expected to sign into law Thursday sweeping new restrictions on weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines similar to the ones used by the gunman. Malloy’s office said he would sign the bill at a state Capitol ceremony at noon, only hours after the General Assembly approved the measure early Thursday morning to give the...
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — They’re sort of polar opposites in a way — one a coaching nomad for over three decades, the other parked pretty much in the same place for most of the last half century. And yet the careers of Michigan’s John Beilein and longtime Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim are so intertwined that Saturday’s national semifinal between Beilein’s Wolverines (30-7) and Boeheim’s Orange (30-9) likely will be bittersweet, no matter the outcome. After all, the two upstate New Yorkers have ties that bind. Born and raised in western New York, Beile...
MIAMI (AP) — While Miami Heat star Chris Bosh was out celebrating his birthday at a Morocco-themed party complete with live camels, police said Thursday that thieves made off with about $340,000 in jewelry from the player’s nearby home. Miami Beach police spokesman Bobby Hernandez said the department received a call about 12:30 a.m. after Bosh and his wife, Adrienne, returned from the party at a bayside Miami nightspot. Hernandez said the couple noticed a jewelry drawer was open and numerous watches, rings and purses were missing. There was...
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gun enthusiasts fearful of new weapon controls and alarmed by rumors of government hoarding are buying bullets practically by the bushel, making it hard for stores nationwide to keep shelves stocked and even putting a pinch on some local law enforcement departments. At a 24-hour Walmart in suburban Albany, the ammunition cabinet was three-fourths empty this week; sales clerks said customers must arrive before 9 the morning after a delivery to get what they want. A few miles away, Dick’s Sporting Goods puts up a red rope aft...
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Injured Louisville guard Kevin Ware will travel to the Final Four on his crutches and expects to be a big presence for the Cardinals. Cleared by doctors Wednesday to accompany Louisville to Atlanta, the sophomore tells The Associated Press he plans to be a full participant in the team’s preparation for Saturday’s game against Wichita State. Ware says the overwhelming support he has received has helped him maintain his spirits and strengthened his confidence of a full recovery. He hopes by next season to be helping the C...
HOUSTON (AP) — Yu Darvish literally came within inches of perfection. Darvish was one out from a perfect game when Marwin Gonzalez grounded a clean single through the pitcher’s legs, and Texas beat the Houston Astros 7-0 on Tuesday night. A screen shot of the play showed the ball sail what looked to be less than a foot below the pitcher’s glove and into the outfield. “That was impossible to catch,” Darvish said through a translator. The celebrated right-hander from Japan struck out a career-high...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate gun control debate on the near horizon, a National Rifle Association-sponsored report on Tuesday proposed a program for schools to train selected staffers as armed security officers. The former Republican congressman who headed the study suggested at least one protector with firearms for every school, saying it would speed responses to attacks. The report’s release served as the gun-rights group’s answer to improving school safety after the gruesome December slayings of 20 first-graders and six adults at a Newto...
CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — Lawyers for Colorado theater shooting suspect James Holmes are objecting to a request by news organizations to make public some investigative documents in the case. Prosecutors say they don’t object to the release as long as the names of victims and witnesses are redacted. Both sides disclosed their positions in court documents filed Tuesday. The Associated Press and 18 other news organizations want the judge to release documents including affidavits that law-enforcement officers submitted to explain why they wan...
DENVER (AP) — Evan Spencer Ebel ran up a long list of felony convictions before turning 21, joined a white supremacist gang behind bars, assaulted one prison guard and wrote that he fantasized about killing others. Along the way, he benefited from a series of errors in the criminal justice system before he became a suspect in the slaying of Colorado’s prisons chief and a pizza deliveryman. He got out of prison four years early because of a clerical error in a rural courthouse. He slipped his...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new global plan aims to end most cases of polio by late next year, and essentially eradicate the paralyzing disease by 2018 — if authorities can raise the $5.5 billion needed to do the work, health officials said Tuesday. Part of the challenge will be increasing security for vaccine workers who have come under attack in two of the hardest-hit countries. And the plan calls for changing how much of the world protects against polio, phasing out the long-used oral vaccine in favor of a pricier but safer shot version. Intense vac...
LINCOLN — A Nebraska irrigation district official worries that his area’s next corn crop has been jeopardized by a state order to tap reservoirs so Nebraska can send enough water downriver to Kansas. Nebraska is trying to comply with the 1943 Republican River Compact, which dictates that Nebraska gets 49 percent of the Republican River’s water, Kansas gets 40 percent and Colorado gets 11 percent. Frenchman-Cambridge Irrigation District general manager Brad Edgerton wasn’t happy with the state ordering extra releases from four federal reservo...
LINCOLN — A former executive at a western Nebraska bank has pleaded guilty to stealing almost $1.4 million from the branch he ran. Matthew Monheiser pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to stealing $1,364,953.66 from the former First National Bank in Sidney. The 38-year-old says he has already repaid $500,000 to the bank and made arrangements to pay another $1 million in restitution. Prosecutors say Monheiser took the money between 2003 and 2012. Most of the money was obtained by creating loans or issuing cashier’s checks in customers’ names...
