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) — The U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan incorrectly reported a decline in Taliban attacks last year, and officials said Tuesday that there was actually no change in the number of attacks on international troops from 2011 to 2012. The corrected numbers — from the original reports of a 7 percent decline to one of no change — could undercut the narrative promoted by the international coalition and the Obama administration of an insurgency in steep decline. A coalition spokesman, Jamie Graybeal, attributed the misco...
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — President Barack Obama is arguing that looming government-wide spending cuts could idle military resources like naval aircraft carriers, while Republicans are criticizing the president for taking his arguments outside Washington instead of staying to work out a plan before Friday’s deadline. The president planned to appear Tuesday at Virginia’s largest industrial employer, Newport News Shipbuilding, which would be affected by cuts to naval spending. Obama warned Monday that if the so-called sequester goes into effec...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and his officials are doing their best to drum up public concern over the shock wave of spending cuts that could strike the government in just days. So it’s a good time to be alert for sky-is-falling hype. Over the last week or so, administration officials have come forward with a grim compendium of jobs to be lost, services to be denied or delayed, military defenses to be let down and important operations to be disrupted. Obama’s new chief of staff, Denis McDonough, spoke of a “devastating list of horr...
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI will be known as “emeritus pope” in his retirement and will continue to wear a white cassock, the Vatican announced Tuesday, again fueling concerns about potential conflicts arising from having both a reigning and a retired pope. The pope’s title and what he would wear have been a major source of speculation ever since Benedict stunned the world and announced he would resign on Thursday, the first pontiff to do so in 600 years. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev...
Centenarian marathon runner Fauja Singh, 101, center, originally from Beas Pind, in Jalandhar, India but who now lives in London, runs in a 10-kilometer race, part of the annual Hong Kong Marathon, in Hong Kong Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013. Singh will retire from public racing after competing in the marathon....
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Maserati driver who died after being peppered with gunfire from someone in a Range Rover SUV, sparking a fiery crash that killed two others, was identified Friday as an aspiring rapper originally from Northern California. The Clark County coroner confirmed that Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr. was killed, although the cause of death was still being investigated. It wasn’t clear Friday if Cherry died of gunshots or the crash. The coroner hasn’t identified the taxi driver and his female passenger who died when the cab exploded early...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and its NATO allies revealed Friday they may keep as many as 12,000 troops in Afghanistan after the combat mission ends next year, largely American forces tasked with hunting down remnants of al-Qaida and helping Afghan forces with their own security. Patience with the 11-year-old war has grown thin in the U.S. and Europe, yet Washington and its allies feel they cannot pick up and leave without risking a repeat of what happened in Afghanistan after Soviet troops withdrew in 1989: Attention turned elsewhere, the T...
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Gusty winds and iced-over roadways made for treacherous Midwest travel Friday as a major winter storm headed east over the Great Lakes. Four deaths have been linked to the storm, including three from traffic accidents. Hundreds of flights in and out of Chicago’s two airports were canceled Friday morning, and the city was clearing about 3 inches of snow from its streets, and the Kansas City and St. Louis, Mo., airports both reopened Friday morning but had numerous can...
LINCOLN (AP) — Police say a 53-year-old man was pronounced dead at a hospital after he was found in a snowy Lincoln parking lot. A worker clearing snow from the business lot a few blocks west of downtown spotted the man around 3:40 a.m. Friday. Efforts to revive the man at the lot and a Lincoln hospital failed. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Lincoln police spokeswoman Katie Flood says there were no signs of physical injuries to the man. It’s unclear whether the man was a victim of weather exposure or of some other medical problem. His...
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Las Vegas Strip became a scene of deadly violence early Thursday when someone in a Range Rover opened fire on a Maserati at a stoplight, sending it crashing into a taxi that went up in flames, leaving three people dead and at least six injured. Police were checking with nearby businesses to see whether a previous altercation prompted the car-to-car attack at Las Vegas and Flamingo boulevards, the site of several major casinos, including Bellagio, Caesars Palace and Bally’s. “This doesn’t happen where we come from, not on...
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. consumer prices were flat in January from December for the second month in a row, the latest sign inflation is in check. That could give the Federal Reserve leeway to continue its efforts to stimulate growth. The consumer price index has risen 1.6 percent in the 12 months ending in January, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s down from a 2.9 percent pace a year ago. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 0.3 percent in January. Core pri...
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Blinding snow, at times accompanied by thunder and lightning, bombarded much of the nation’s midsection Thursday, causing whiteout conditions, making major roadways all but impassable and shutting down schools and state legislatures. Kansas was the epicenter of the winter storm, with parts of Wichita buried under 13 inches of still-falling snow, but winter storm warnings stretched eastern Colorado through Illinois. Freezing rain and sleet were forecast for southern Missouri, southern Illinois and Arkansas. St. Louis was expecte...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Tuesday he accepted Marine Gen. John Allen’s request to retire rather than proceed with the White House’s previous plan to make him commander of NATO forces in Europe. Allen, who earlier this month completed a 19-month stint as the top commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, requested retirement “so that he can address health issues within his family,” Obama said in a brief written statement. The president did not elaborate on the health...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Staking out his ground ahead of a fiscal deadline, President Barack Obama lashed out against Republicans, saying they are unwilling to raise taxes to reduce deficits and warning that the jobs of essential government workers, from teachers to emergency responders, are on the line. Obama spoke as a March 1 deadline for automatic across-the-board spending cuts approached and with Republicans and Democrats in an apparent stalemate over how to avoid them. Obama cautioned that if the $85 billion in immediate cuts — known as the sequ...
SULLIVAN, Ind. (AP) — A quiet Indiana community known for its parks and corn festival has become the latest setting for the debate over gay rights and bullying after several area residents, including some high schoolers, proposed holding a non-school sanctioned “traditional” prom that would ban gay students. School officials and many residents of Sullivan, a city of about 4,200 near the Illinois border, have scrambled to distance themselves from the controversy caused by the group’s plans and some strong, anti-gay remarks made by one of its...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. was charged Friday with scheming to spend $750,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses. His wife was charged with filing false income tax forms. Federal prosecutors filed a charge of conspiracy against the former congressman and charged his wife, Sandra, with one count of filing false joint federal income tax returns for the years 2006 through 2011. Both agreed to plead guilty in plea deals with federal prosecutors. The charges represent a dramatic fall from political prominence for the c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The weeklong Senate recess gives outside interest groups opposed to Chuck Hagel’s nomination to become defense secretary more time to sharpen their attack against President Barack Obama’s choice. And they’re not wasting any of it, promising to redouble their efforts to scour Hagel’s record and to pressure senators to vote against him. While Senate Republicans have succeeded in delaying a confirmation vote on Hagel’s nomination, they signaled that they would eventually...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is wrapping up his post-State of the Union tour by talking about how government can build “ladders of opportunity” into the middle class. During remarks Friday at Hyde Park Academy in Chicago, his hometown, Obama takes up proposals to raise the federal minimum wage and pair businesses with recession-battered communities to help them rebuild and provide job training. He also was to talk about creating jobs for young people from poor families, and encouraging fatherhood and low-income couples to marry...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A 150-foot asteroid hurtled toward Earth’s backyard, destined Friday to make the closest known flyby for a rock of its size. In a chilling coincidence, a meteor exploded above Russia’s Ural Mountains just hours before the asteroid was due to zoom past the planet. Scientists the world over, along with NASA, insisted the meteor had nothing to do with the incoming asteroid since they appeared to traveling in opposite directions. The asteroid is much more immense object that was expected to miss Earth by 17,150 miles, av...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The fight in Congress over confirming Leon Panetta’s successor as defense secretary is getting on his nerves. After two formal Pentagon farewell ceremonies and weeks of preparing Chuck Hagel to take over, Panetta let fly Thursday with a few choice words for the partisan struggle on Capitol Hill over a Hagel confirmation vote. Panetta, who will retire to his home in California to resume running a public policy institute with his wife, Sylvia, told a Pentagon award ceremony for former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Cli...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate’s top Democrat attacked Republican senators Thursday for blocking Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be President Barack Obama’s next secretary of defense, saying it was “shocking” and “tragic” that the GOP would attempt such a move at a time when the U.S. military is engaged in so many places around the world. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Republicans are filibustering Hagel’s confirmation and that such a move is unprecedented. “Not a single nominee for secretary of defense ever in the history of our coun...
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, fellow citizens: Fifty-one years ago, John F. Kennedy declared to this chamber that “the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress. ... It is my task,” he said, “to report the state of the Union - to improve it is the task of us all.” Tonight, thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, there is much progress to report. After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming... Full story
WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to focus on nation-building at home, President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address to call for more spending on infrastructure and manufacturing, while also announcing the withdrawal of 34,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan within a year. The highly-anticipated announcement on the next phase of the troop withdrawal will cut the size of the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan in half by next February. The drawdown puts the U.S. on pace to formally finish the protracted war by the end of 2014. A senior admi...
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The original Emancipation Proclamation, a document that changed the lives of countless African-Americans during the Civil War, is on display in Nashville as the fragile historical document makes its only stop in the Southeast on a 150th anniversary tour. The exhibit opened Tuesday — fittingly on the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday — at the Tennessee State Museum and runs through Monday. It’s a rare visit outside the nation’s capital for the original document Lincoln signed in 1863 declaring “forever f...
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Some snow-weary Northeasterners struggled to get back to their weekly routines Tuesday as roads remained slick from the weekend storm and many schools were closed again, and some communities were asking for volunteers to help shovel out the elderly and disabled. Many local roads in Connecticut remained partially blocked by snow, especially in the cities. Snow piles have reduced driving lanes, made parking spaces scarce and decreased drivers’ sight lines. Schools in Con...
