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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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A new government survey suggests the number of people seeking emergency treatment after consuming energy drinks has doubled nationwide during the past four years, the same period in which the supercharged drink industry has surged in popularity in convenience stores, bars and on college campuses. From 2007 to 2011, the government estimates the number of emergency room visits involving the neon-labeled beverages shot up from about 10,000 to more than 20,000. Most of those cases involved teens or young adults, according to a...
NEW YORK (AP) — Conrad Bain, a veteran stage and film actor who became a star in middle age as the kindly white adoptive father of two young African-American brothers in the TV sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes,” has died. Bain died Monday of natural causes in his hometown of Livermore, Calif., according to his daughter, Jennifer Bain. He was 89. The show that made him famous debuted on NBC in 1978, an era when television comedies tackled relevant social issues. “Diff’rent Strokes” touched on serious themes but was known better as a family comedy...
SIDNEY (AP) — Cabela’s Inc. is planning to open two new stores to sell outdoor gear and sporting goods in South Carolina and Minnesota in 2014. The Sidney, Neb., company said Tuesday that the Greenville, S.C., store will be its first in that state. The Woodbury, Minn., store will be fourth Minnesota store. The Greenville store will have 100,000 square feet when it opens in spring 2014 near the intersection of Interstates 385 and 85. The Woodbury store will have 85,000 square feet and open in the fall of 2014 in the Tamarack Village sho...
WASHINGTON – Braced for a fight, President Barack Obama on Wednesday unveiled the most sweeping proposals for curbing gun violence in two decades, pressing a reluctant Congress to pass universal background checks and bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting. A month after that horrific massacre, Obama also used his presidential powers to enact 23 measures that don’t require the backing of law...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Lance Armstrong has finally come clean. Armstrong confessed to doping during an interview with Oprah Winfrey taped Monday, just a couple of hours after a wrenching apology to staff at the Livestrong charity he founded and has now been forced to surrender. The day ended with 2 1/2 hours of questions from Winfrey at a downtown Austin hotel, where she said the world’s most famous cyclist was “forthcoming” as she asked him in detail about doping allegations that followe...
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) – John Elway has been down this lonely road before. The quarterback-turned-front office executive has now been a part of two playoff runs that ended not in the confetti-filled celebration expected of the AFC’s No. 1 seed but with a painful introspection about what all went wrong in a stunningly early exit from the postseason party. Elway experienced it as a player in 1996, when the Denver Broncos were upset at home by the Jacksonville Jaguars, 30-27, then bounced back to...
WASHINGTON (AP) — An influential Senate Democrat says he will back President Barack Obama’s choice of Chuck Hagel for the top job at the Pentagon. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said in a statement Tuesday that he met with Hagel for 90 minutes on Monday and the Republican reassured him on issues ranging from Israel to gay rights. Schumer said he found Hagel’s responses to be genuine and not stated to quiet his critics. The Democrat urged his Senate colleagues who also had concerns about Hagel’s nomination to support him. The meeting occurre...
Eugene Patterson ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) – Eugene Patterson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist whose impassioned words helped draw national attention to the civil rights movement as it unfolded across the South, has died at 89. Patterson, who helped fellow whites to understand the problems of racial discrimination, died Saturday evening in Florida after complications from prostate cancer, according to B.J. Phillips, a family spokeswoman. Patterson was editor of the Atlanta C...
LINCOLN – Gov. Dave Heineman called Tuesday for ridding Nebraska of its individual and corporate income taxes and making up the difference by ending as much as $2.4 billion in sales tax breaks for businesses, and all goods and services – except for food – are on the table. The Republican governor unveiled his tax overhaul plan and budget proposal in his annual State of the State address to lawmakers. “Are we going to be satisfied with a mediocre tax system that won’t create the jobs of the future for our sons and daughters?” Heineman as...
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Flu season is hitting its stride and it may be shaping up to be a bad one in Tennessee. Based on data from the Tennessee Department of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are characterizing the flu as “widespread” in the state and list it among 24 states with high levels of influenza-like illnesses. Dr. Kelly Moore, the medical director of the Tennessee Immunization Program, said that it is still too early to draw final conclusions, but right now, this season seems similar to the last really bad one i...
LINCOLN (AP) — Every two weeks, the Park Middle School multipurpose room becomes a courtroom complete with judicial bench and judge, attorneys and defendants — and their parents. Alissa Harrison, an eighth-grader who loves photography but until recently did not love school, showed up like clockwork twice a month last semester — a defendant working to change her ways. She thinks she has, with the help of the mock courtroom and all those who took the time to make it happen: the judge and the a...
RED CLOUD, Neb. (AP) — Red Cloud Postmaster Brad Young has come to treasure the three murals displayed in the post office there. “It’s something so unique,” he said. “I’ve been here going on 25 years. After a while the biggest thing is that I would never want anything to happen to them. Maybe that’s the lucky thing about being in a small town; we really don’t have any problems.” Red Cloud is one of four area towns included in a Depression-era government program that placed murals in post offices. A new book from the Nebraska State Historical So...
COLUMBUS, Neb. (AP) — Platte County residents, like Nebraskans across the state, are spending more money for a chance to match their lucky keno numbers or peel open a top-prize pickle card. The Nebraska Department of Revenue’s annual charitable gaming report shows players spent $247.3 million on keno, pickle cards, bingo and raffles during the fiscal year ended June 30. Total wagers on the games, which must financially benefit nonprofit entities, increased 2.85 percent from the 2010-11 amount of $240.46 million, according to the report rel...
LONDON (AP) — The Duchess of Cambridge seems to like her first official portrait, which is lucky for the artist. Many critics don’t. Paul Emsley’s portrait of the former Kate Middleton shows the 31-year-old royal against a dark background, her lips pursed into a wry smile, with an ethereal light against her face and hair. Her pale complexion brings out the fine lines under the eyes, and the light adds a hint of silver to her rich brown hair. Shortly after the portrait was unveiled Friday at the National Portrait Gallery in London, criti...
An American woman coerced into the sex trade. An immigrant housekeeper compelled to work for less than minimum wage. A salon employee forced to work off the price of passage to the U.S. All are considered examples of human trafficking. New Jersey officials on Friday marked “Human Trafficking Awareness Day” with a rally and other events at the Statehouse amid efforts on several fronts to combat the problem. State Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa, who led one of the programs in Trenton, created a new unit this summer to focus on combatting hum...
FOXBORO,Mass. (AP) — Bill Belichick insists the rematch of a December game with the Texans will be different. Not too much different, of course, because he fully expects his Patriots to win the divisional-round playoff game and advance to the AFC title match. As for another 42-14 outcome, New England’s coach is having none of it. “The plays will match up differently and I’m sure there will be new plays that weren’t in that game,” Belichick said. The AFC East champion Patriots (12-4) come off their playoff bye as 91⁄2-point favorites aga...
Retired Nebraska coach Tom Osborne won’t get drawn into an argument over how his 1990s teams that won three national championships in four years would fare against the Alabama teams that just accomplished the same feat. “It doesn’t come off very well when you try to compare a team that played 12, 14, 15 years ago with a team playing today and say this team would beat that team. Nobody knows,” Osborne said Wednesday. “The only way to do it is to play them. No question we had some very good team... Full story
NEW YORK (AP) — No one was elected to the Hall of Fame this year. When voters closed the doors to Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa, they also shut out everybody else. For only the second time in four decades, baseball writers failed to give any player the 75 percent required for induction to Cooperstown, sending a powerful signal that stars of the Steroids Era will be held to a different standard. All the awards and accomplishments collected over long careers by Bonds, Clemens and Sosa could not offset suspicions those feats were b...
DENVER (AP) — After the annual late-summer harvest on his farm in the eastern reaches of Colorado, Greg Brophy has a few friends over, breaks out the handguns and semi-automatic rifles and mows down some rotten watermelons. The Republican state senator’s melon shoot is a fixture on the political calendar in his rural district near the Nebraska border and a window into the culture of gun ownership in a state that cherishes its frontier heritage. One of the worst and most high-profile school massacres in American history — the 1999 Colum...
LINCOLN (AP) – The Nebraska Legislature chose a new speaker, elected new committee leaders and welcomed 10 new lawmakers Wednesday as it began a new session with looming battles over tax cuts and spending. Lawmakers returned to Lincoln with the state facing a projected $194 million budget shortfall, far less than the $1 billion hole they had to fill when they last wrote a budget in 2011. The 90-day session will see 10 new members and mark the return of Sen. Ernie Chambers, of Omaha. All were sworn into office Wednesday morning. Chambers, the l...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert Griffin III had surgery to repair two ligaments in his troublesome right knee Wednesday morning, said a person familiar with the situation. The Washington Redskins quarterback had his knee repaired by orthopedist James Andrews in Florida. The doctor had already diagnosed a torn lateral collateral ligament in his right knee. The person said Andrews also found and repaired damage found in Griffin’s ACL. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the Redskins had not made an ann...
WASHINGTON (AP) – The nation’s tax law is so thick and complicated that businesses and individuals spend more than 6 billion hours a year complying with filing requirements. That’s the equivalent of 3 million people working full-time, year-round. As a result, about 90 percent of filers will either pay a tax preparer or use a computer software service to help with their federal tax returns this spring, according to a report Wednesday by an independent government watchdog. “The existing tax code makes compliance difficult, requiring taxpaye...
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Obama administration says it might leave no troops in Afghanistan after December 2014, an option that defies the Pentagon’s view that thousands of troops may be needed to contain al-Qaida and to strengthen Afghan forces. “We wouldn’t rule out any option,” including zero troops, Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said Tuesday. “The U.S. does not have an inherent objective of ‘X’ number of troops in Afghanistan,” Rhodes said. “We have an objective of making sure there is no safe haven for al-Qaida in...
Fred L. Turner NEW YORK (AP) – A former McDonald’s CEO who helped expand the fast-food chain’s global footprint and spearheaded the creation of “Hamburger University” died Monday night after suffering complications from pneumonia, the company said. He was 80 years old. During Fred L. Turner’s time as CEO from 1974 to 1987, McDonald’s more than tripled its number of locations and set up shop in dozens of new markets, the company said in a statement. The chain, based in Oak Brook, Ill., now has...
LINCOLN (AP) — The Nebraska Legislature began its 2013 session Wednesday with lawmakers expected to focus on the state budget, tax cuts and a proposal to expand Medicaid. Lawmakers returned to Lincoln with the state facing a projected $194 million budget shortfall, far less than the $1 billion hole they had to fill when they last wrote a budget in 2011. The 90-day session will see 10 new members and mark the return of Sen. Ernie Chambers, of Omaha. All were sworn into office Wednesday morning. Chambers, the longest-serving and best-known s...
