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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WASHINGTON (AP) — It would seem a lobbyist’s dream: rounding up votes for a proposal backed by more than 8 in 10 people in polls. Yet gun control supporters are struggling to win over moderate Democrats in their drive to push expanded background checks for firearms purchasers through the Senate next month. Backed by a $12 million TV advertising campaign financed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, gun control groups scheduled rallies around the country Thursday aimed at pressuring senators to back the effort. President Barack Obama was mee...
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — An arsenal of weapons including guns, more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, a bayonet and several swords was found in the home of the gunman who carried out the Newtown school shooting, according to search warrants released Thursday. Adam Lanza killed 26 people inside Sandy Hook Elementary School and took his own life within five minutes of shooting his way into the building, State’s Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky III said in a statement accompanying the release of...
NEW YORK (AP) — However the Supreme Court rules after its landmark hearings on same-sex marriage, the issue seems certain to divide Americans and states for many years to come. In oral arguments Tuesday and Wednesday on two cases involving gay couples’ rights, the justices left open multiple options for rulings that are expected in June. But they signaled there was no prospect of imposing a 50-state solution at this stage. With nine states now allowing same-sex marriages and other states banning them via statutes or constitutional amendments, t...
CHICAGO (AP) — The streak is over. The big prize is still out there. That’s what mattered most to LeBron James and the Miami Heat. The Heat’s bid for NBA history ended Wednesday night when their 27-game winning streak was snapped by the Chicago Bulls 101-97, setting off a raucous celebration inside United Center. Miami finished six shy of the 33-game record held by the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers. With 11 games remaining, there’s no time for Miami to take another shot at the record. A big run...
NEW YORK (AP) — A huge international effort involving more than 100 institutions and genetic tests on 200,000 people has uncovered dozens of signposts in DNA that can help reveal further a person’s risk for breast, ovarian or prostate cancer, scientists reported Wednesday. It’s the latest mega-collaboration to learn more about the intricate mechanisms that lead to cancer. And while the headway seems significant in many ways, the potential payoff for ordinary people is mostly this: Someday there may be genetic tests that help identify women with...
(AP) – Duke assistant Chris Collins has interviewed for the head coach opening at Northwestern, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The person said Collins spoke with Northwestern about the job on Monday. That person spoke on condition of anonymity because Northwestern is not publicly discussing the hiring process. Collins, a native of the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Ill. — roughly 15 miles from the Northwestern campus in Evanston. He’s the son of Phila...
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Tiger Woods never questioned his ability, only his health. Woods returned to No. 1 in the world by winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational, not surprising except if you consider where he was a little more than a year ago. He had not won a PGA Tour in some 21⁄2 years. He missed most of the summer and two majors in 2011 because of injuries to his left leg and Achilles tendon. He walked off the course at Doral a year ago because of tightness in the same tendon. It wasn’t until June that he felt good enough to hit balls on th...
MIAMI (AP) — For the Miami Heat, it has been anything but an ordinary path along the way to this extraordinary 24-game winning streak. There have been blowouts, buzzer-beaters and now a pair of huge second-half rallies. Or, as Dwyane Wade would call it all ... “Fun,” the Heat guard said. These days, everything — even huge deficits — seems like fun for the reigning NBA champions, who haven’t lost a game in nearly two months. And this week has brought perhaps the two most scintillati...
LINCOLN (AP) — A long-shot attempt to repeal state-funded prenatal care services for illegal immigrants drew criticism Thursday from a variety of Nebraska groups. Advocates for children, immigrants and medical clinics convened at the Capitol to oppose a bill by Sen. Charlie Janssen of Fremont. Several people said Janssen, a Republican candidate for governor, was exploiting the issue for political gain. Janssen presented the repeal measure to the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee. Lawmakers restored coverage last year for the...
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Some people may have heard of the school that’s suddenly generating a bit of March Madness buzz. Harvard. Yep, Harvard —the school known for producing U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices and Nobel Prize winners earned its first NCAA tournament victory Thursday night with a 68-62 upset of No. 3 seed New Mexico. Wesley Saunders scored 18 points and Laurent Rivard made five 3-pointers to give 14th-seeded Harvard (20-9) its first tournament victory in only three measl...
MIAMI (AP) — Major League Baseball on Friday sued a now-shuttered South Florida clinic and its operators, accusing them of scheming to provide banned performance-enhancing drugs to players in violation of their contracts. The lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court seeks unspecified damages from Coral Gables anti-aging clinic Biogenesis of America and its operator, Anthony Bosch. Several other Bosch associates are named in the lawsuit. A phone message left for a Bosch representative wasn’t imm...
VATICAN CITY (AP) — One of the Vatican’s main Twitter accounts and the website of its communications office were running stories about Batman on Thursday with the headline “Holy Switcheroo!” — raising concerns they might have been hacked. But two Vatican officials said the site hadn’t been hacked, and that the reason for the unusual posting was an “internal system failure” due to a non-native English speaker posting the story on the website. The story was from the Catholic News Service. It has as its headline: “Holy Switcheroo! Batma...
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian prosecutors have launched wide-ranging checks of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, as part of what activists say is President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to stifle dissent and shield the nation from perceived Western influence. The inspections and searches have targeted up to 2,000 organizations since last month, said Pavel Chikov, a member of the presidential human rights council. The action followed Putin’s speech in February before senior officers of the FSB, the main KGB successor agency, in which he urged them...
PARIS (AP) — New results from looking at the split-second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought and provide ancient evidence supporting core concepts about the cosmos — how it began, what it’s made of and where it’s going. The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second. The new observations from the European Space Agency’s $900 million Planck space probe appear to r...
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Tiger Woods has been winning at Bay Hill before he was old enough to drive a car. “It all started there,” Woods said Wednesday on the eve of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he is the defending champion, a seven-time champion and has a chance to return to No. 1 in the world if he can win for an eighth time. He already has won eight times at Bay Hill if the 1991 U.S. Junior Amateur counted. Woods wound up winning against Brad Zwetschke on the first extra hole. He remembered just about all the details, except that his op...
Brad Stevens is amused by all this talk of parity in the NCAA tournament. The coach who guided little Butler to the national championship game two years in a row wonders why everyone seems to be saying all at once: Hey, there’s some pretty good teams beyond the glamour conferences. Stevens remembers his first basketball job, as Butler’s director of basketball operations in 2001, when the Bulldogs easily won their first-round game as a No. 10 seed. They cruised past Wake Forest, an entry from the mighty Atlantic Coast Conference, after leading 4...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment aid barely changed last week, while the average over the past month fell to a fresh five-year low. The decline in layoffs is helping strengthen the job market. Weekly unemployment benefit applications rose just 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 336,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. Over the past four weeks, the average number of applications has dropped by 7,500 to 339,750. That’s the lowest since February 2008, just three months into the recession. Separately, sales of pre...
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Fran Warren, whose 1947 recording of “A Sunday Kind of Love” was one of the classic hits of the big band era, has died. Alan Eichler, a spokesman for the singer-actress, said Tuesday that Warren died March 4 of natural causes at her home in Brookfield, Conn. She was 87. Warren’s career spanned more than 50 years with hits that included the Tony Martin duet “I Said My Pajamas (and Put On My Prayers),” the Lisa Kirk duet “Dearie” and “It’s Anybody’s Heart.” Her films roles included “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kid...
PITTSBURGH (AP) — In an unlikely partnership between longtime adversaries, some of the nation’s biggest energy companies and environmental groups have agreed on a voluntary set of standards for gas and oil fracking in the Northeast that appear to go further than existing state and federal pollution regulations. The program announced Wednesday will work a lot like Underwriters Laboratories, which puts its UL seal of approval on electrical appliances that meet its standards. In this case, drilling and pipeline companies will be encouraged to sub...
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Cyprus’ banks will remain closed Thursday and Friday as officials try to find a new plan to stave off bankruptcy. Aliki Stylianou, the central bank’s spokeswoman, confirmed the additional two-day closure on Wednesday. The cash-strapped lenders have been closed since Saturday to avoid a bank run. The Parliament this week rejected a plan to take a portion of bank deposits. That has left Cypriot officials looking for alternative ways to scrounge up some 5.8 billion euros ($7.51 billion) that the country’s euro area partner...
JERUSALEM (AP) — Renewing U.S. support for the difficult “work of generations,” President Barack Obama assured Israel on Wednesday that his administration would pursue an elusive Mideast peace that would allow residents of the Jewish state to live in peace and free from the threat of terror. “In this work, the state of Israel will have no greater friend than the United States,” the president declared after meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres during his first visit to Israel as president. Peres, in turn, said he welcomed Obama’s c...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gail Goodrich knew Miami would beat Boston the other night. He knew even a 17-point deficit, the largest they had faced in six weeks, wouldn’t stop LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. “Once they got back in the game, there was no doubt in my mind they were going to win,” Goodrich said of the Heat’s 105-103 victory Monday. “They just are better than everybody else.” So were the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers. Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain and Goodrich were a Big Three to rival what Miami has, the core of a team that racked u...
LINCOLN (AP) — A bill to expand Nebraska Medicaid coverage has advanced for debate in the Legislature, and supporters presented their case Tuesday in anticipation that Gov. Dave Heineman will veto the measure. The committee vote sets up a likely confrontation between lawmakers and Heineman, a Republican who remains firmly opposed to the bill. Sen. Kathy Campbell, who led the introduction of the bill, said she’s “very confident” that the measure’s backers have at least 25 votes to push it through the Legislature. But Campbell said supporters wil...
BOSTON (AP) — The longest winning streak in NBA history is still 10 victories away for the Miami Heat. So it will be a while before Dwyane Wade really focuses on matching the 33-game run of the Los Angeles Lakers. “Not ‘til we get to 32,” he said with a smile after one of the greatest challenges to Miami’s run of success. LeBron James hit the go-ahead jumper with 10.5 seconds remaining to cap a 37-point performance and the Heat escaped with a 105-103 win over the Boston Celtics on Monday night for their 23rd straight win, breaking a tie for s...
LINCOLN (AP) — Officials from Lincoln and Lancaster County could allow the health director to access millions of dollars set aside for health emergencies under an ordinance being considered by the city’s leaders. The Community Health Endowment Fund was created with money from the city’s sale of Lincoln General Hospital 15 years ago to Bryan Memorial Hospital. The $37 million from that sale has since grown to more than $60 million, the Lincoln Journal Star reported Monday. City leaders at the time of the sale specified that only interest from th...
