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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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... Full story
The word of the season: Parity. The team of the moment: Louisville. For a college basketball season in which it seemed anybody could beat anybody, and the No. 1 ranking was never secure, Rick Pitino’s Cardinals have certainly cemented themselves as a prohibitive front-runner now that there are only four teams left. They head to Atlanta listed as 3-5 favorites in Las Vegas, after dispatching everyone from Duke to North Carolina A&T with equal ease on their way to the Final Four. Trying to stop t...
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez each hit a big home run, and the Colorado Rockies were in position to give rookie manager Walt Weiss his first victory. Then it all fell apart in a hurry. Colorado wasted a terrific start by Jhoulys Chacin when Milwaukee scored three times in the eighth inning, and the Brewers went on to a 5-4 victory in 10 innings on Monday. “We battled the whole game,” Gonzalez said. “That happens sometimes. There has to be a loser. But if we play that way f...
HUMBLE, Texas (AP) — A late birdie might just be enough to give Rory McIlroy two more rounds before the Masters. Steve Wheatcroft, a Monday qualifier for the Houston Open, had another 67 to take the lead among early starters Friday at Redstone Golf Club. Far down the leaderboard was McIlroy, struggling to make the cut for the first time this year against a full field. Wheatcroft was at 10-under 134 and had a three-shot lead....
DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — For the upperclassmen on Duke’s roster, every season has ended the same way: get one step from the women’s Final Four, then lose. The Blue Devils have lost three straight regional finals and are determined to not make it four in a row. Second-seeded Duke (32-2) plays sixth-seeded Nebraska (25-8) on Sunday in the Norfolk Regional semifinals. And if the Blue Devils beat the Cornhuskers, they’ll face either top-seeded Notre Dame or 12th-seeded Kansas for a spot in New Orleans — and a chance to reverse recent history. Duke hasn...
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska’s Imani Cross was one of the Big Ten’s most dependable short-yardage backs last season. This spring, he’s out to show he’s capable of being so much more. “Oh, yes, yes,” he said. “I want to be a pass-catching back, I want to be a blocking back, I want to be an inside-zone back, an outside-zone back, a sweep back. Whatever type of back you name, I want to train to be that one day. It’s hard to do, but that’s what dreams are for, to try to go get them.” Cross last b...
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq says it will stop more aircraft moving through its airspace and vehicles traveling overland to search for weapons being sent to the Syrian civil war, a senior Iraqi official said Friday. Government spokesman Ali al-Moussawi said Iraq would conduct more random searches to check for weapons heading for the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad or rebels seeking to topple his regime. In a telephone call to The Associated Press, al-Moussawi said Iraq refuses to be a “conduit for weapons for either side of the conflict.” “The g...
ATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has won over many hearts and minds with his simple style and focus on serving the world’s poorest, but he has devastated traditionalist Catholics who adored his predecessor, Benedict XVI, for restoring much of the traditional pomp to the papacy. Francis’ decision to disregard church law and wash the feet of two girls — a Serbian Muslim and an Italian Catholic — during a Holy Thursday ritual has become something of the final straw, evidence that Francis has little or no interest in one of the key prioritie...
BEATRICE (AP) — For 50 years beginning in 1937, residents and visitors of Beatrice had to go no further than Fifth and Court streets for a bag of fresh popcorn. That’s where you could find the Traubel’s Popcorn Stand, where it operated until 1987. The Beatrice Daily Sun reports (http://bit.ly/YUdXLP ) that today, you can find the retired five-by-eight-foot stand tucked away in a storage facility at the Gage County Historical Society, as it’s too large to fit through the main building’s doors. It’s been more than 25 years since popcorn was...
LINCOLN (AP) — There is no pomp and circumstance at the end of life for the very poor in Lancaster County. And a pauper’s burial is getting more meager — cremation and a plastic box. The Lincoln Journal Star reports advocates for the poor and some local funeral homes think the new rules, which eliminate a simple service, have gone too far. Indigent burials by the county always have been frugal affairs: No flowers, no organ music, no cards, no headstones. Nine years ago, the county stopped paying for burials, leaving cremation the only optio...
LINCOLN — Nebraska’s preliminary unemployment rate for February was unchanged at 3.8 percent, matching the revised rates for January and December, the state Labor Department said in a report released Friday. The rate was two-tenths of a point lower than in February 2012 and less than half this year’s national February rate of 7.7 percent. The 3.8 percent state rate is the second-lowest figure in the country, trailing only North Dakota’s 3.3 percent. Nonfarm employment rose by nearly 3,000 jobs since January and by 7,450 jobs since Februar...
SEOUL, South Korea — Across North Korea, soldiers are gearing up for battle and shrouding their jeeps and vans with camouflage netting. Newly painted signboards and posters call for “death to the U.S. imperialists” and urge the people to fight with “arms, not words.” But even as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is issuing midnight battle cries to his generals to ready their rockets, he and his million-man army know full well that a successful missile strike on U.S. targets would be suicide for the outnumbered, out-powered North Korean regime. D...
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The crisp, stucco exterior of an Oklahoma dental clinic concealed what health inspectors say they found inside: rusty instruments used on patients with infectious diseases and a pattern of unsanitary practices that put thousands of people at risk for hepatitis and the virus that causes AIDS. State and local health officials planned to mail notices urging 7,000 patients of Dr. W. Scott Harrington to seek medical screenings for hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV. Inspectors allege workers at his two clinics used dirty e...
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Transit police in Philadelphia are calling a local man a hero for jumping onto subway tracks to help a man who fell off a platform. Christopher Knafelc, 32, was waiting for a train in north Philadelphia on Thursday afternoon when he saw a man walk off the platform and fall on the tracks. He jumped down to help the man, knowing that a train would be arriving in a few minutes. “I had a plan if a train came I was going to roll him underneath,” Knafelc told WPVI-TV, “or if I couldn’t, I was going to ask someone to jump down...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When LaQuinton Ross found out Ohio State was using the Los Angeles Lakers’ dressing room this weekend, he immediately called dibs on Kobe Bryant’s locker for the first NCAA tournament game ever played at Staples Center. And with a dramatic flair that would make No. 24 proud, Ross sent the Buckeyes to the brink of another Final Four. Ross hit the tiebreaking 3-pointer on a pass from Aaron Craft with 2 seconds to play, and Ohio State advanced to the West Regional final with...
WASHINGTON — No list of great NCAA championship game moments is complete unless Keith Smart’s jumper for Indiana in 1987 is on it. Known by Hoosiers fans to this day as “The Shot,” and known in much less complimentary terms by Syracuse faithful, that 16-foot jumper from the left side with 5 seconds to play is a film clip staple throughout March. The memory of “The Shot,” which gave Indiana a 74-73 victory, is still with Smart, now the coach of the Sacramento Kings, while Jim Boeheim, still the coach at Syracuse, revisited it every day for 16...
NEW YORK (AP) — Government health officials launched the second round of a graphic ad campaign Thursday that is designed to get smokers off tobacco, saying they believe the last effort convinced tens of thousands to quit. The ads feature sad, real-life stories: There is Terrie, a North Carolina woman who lost her voice box. Bill, a diabetic smoker from Michigan who lost his leg. And Aden, a 7-year-old boy from New York, who has asthma attacks from secondhand smoke. “Most smokers want to quit. These ads encourage them to try,” said Dr. Tom F...
