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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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Senior U.S. District Judge Anita Brody has a billion-dollar problem on her hands. Brody, of Philadelphia, heard arguments Tuesday on whether lawsuits that accuse the NFL of glorifying violence and hiding known concussion risks belong in court or in arbitration. Brody could side with the 4,200 players and let them pursue lawsuits, or she could rule for the league and find that head injuries are covered under health provisions of the collective bargaining agreement. Or she could issue a split decision, letting some of the f...
LINCOLN (AP) — Jack Hoffman just might go down as the biggest star of the Nebraska spring game. And he’s only 7 years old. Hoffman, of Atkinson, Neb., has won the hearts of fans and everyone in the football program for his courageous bout with brain cancer. Star running back Rex Burkhead befriended Jack last year and is the captain of the support network known as “Team Jack.” Wearing a miniature Burkhead uniform complete with a No. 22 jersey, Jack ran onto the field late in Saturday’s scrimmage... Full story
BEIJING (AP) — A 4-year-old boy has recovered from a new strain of bird flu that has killed nine people in China, a doctor said Wednesday, as the country’s premier said the outbreak was under control. The child from Shanghai is among 33 people confirmed to have been infected with the H7N9 virus. The official Xinhua News Agency said he was the first to completely recover and be discharged from a hospital. A doctor at the Infectious Disease Department of the Pediatric Hospital affiliated with Shanghai’s Fudan University confirmed the boy had reco...
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Rutgers University is pledging to get to the bottom of how a basketball coach who kicked and shoved players and used gay slurs as he yelled at them was allowed to stay on the job — and to make sure the same thing isn’t happening in other sports. The university said Monday that the school’s Board of Governors would meet Thursday to discuss hiring an adviser to report on what went wrong with Mike Rice. University President Robert Barchi said that employees are going through video of practice sessions from other sports to see i...
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Fans poured into the streets to celebrate the Cardinals’ NCAA championship win over Michigan, throwing all-night parties that at one point became so raucous police in riot gear used pepper spray to break them up. Gatherings were mostly peaceful Monday night following Louisville’s 82-76 victory — the school’s third title, and first title since 1986. Louisville police said most of the 23 arrests were due to drunken or disorderly conduct. Hundreds streamed onto Cardinal Boulevard after Louisville’s win, screaming,...
ATLANTA (AP) — Rick Pitino held court in a tunnel beneath the Georgia Dome, going on and on about the grittiest bunch of guys he’s ever coached. One of them sat in the corner of the locker room, a net around his neck, grinning away. The Louisville Cardinals vowed to finish the job for Kevin Ware. Boy, did they ever. With their injured teammate cheering them on from the bench, Louisville capped its run through the NCAA tournament, coming back again from a 12-point deficit to beat Michigan 82-... Full story
LONDON (AP) — Love her or loathe her, one thing’s beyond dispute: Margaret Thatcher transformed Britain. The Iron Lady, who ruled for 11 remarkable years, imposed her will on a fractious, rundown nation — breaking the unions, triumphing in a far-off war, and selling off state industries at a record pace. She left behind a leaner government and more prosperous nation by the time a political mutiny ousted her from No. 10 Downing Street. Thatcher’s spokesman, Tim Bell, said the former prime minister died from a stroke Monday morning at the Rit...
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A large spring snowstorm delivering everything from heavy snow and high winds to freezing rain and possible tornadoes was causing travel problems from Wyoming to Chicago on Tuesday. In Wyoming, a 100-mile stretch of Interstate 25 between Cheyenne and Douglas was closed as well as a 125-mile section of I-80 between Laramie and Rawlins. Many smaller highways in a majority of the state also were closed, slick or had no travel advisories. More than a foot of snow had fallen as of m...
LINCOLN (AP) — Nebraska coach Bo Pelini calls the spring game a show for the fans. Thing is, Pelini doesn’t plan to show them much Saturday in the Red-White scrimmage. Quarterback Taylor Martinez probably will play only a couple series and other starters won’t play at all. With BTN televising the event, the Cornhuskers will show next to nothing on offense and defense so this fall’s opponents gain no scouting advantage. Young players will benefit most. For many it will be their first opportu... Full story
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...
