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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CLEVELAND (AP) — Denying he ran an Amish cult, the 67-year-old ringleader of hair- and beard-cutting attacks on fellow members of his faith in Ohio was sentenced Friday to 15 years in prison, while family members convicted of carrying out his orders got one to seven years. The judge said the defendants had violated the constitutional rights protecting religious practice that had also benefited them as Amish. Authorities had prosecuted the attacks as a hate crime. Before his sentencing, Samuel Mullet Sr. told the judge he had been accused of r...
WASHINGTON (AP) — You can call it a snowstorm of historic proportions. You can call it the return of New England’s blizzard of 1978. You can call it simply dangerous. And you can even call it Nemo. But don’t call it hype. The new director of the National Weather Service says some may be getting carried away in describing the winter storm bearing down on the Northeast. But he says the science is simple and chilling. Louis Uccellini is an expert on snowstorms. He says meteorologists are telling people that this is a dangerous storm because it is....
BOSTON (AP) — Snow was falling around the Northeast on Friday, ushering in what’s predicted to be a massive, possibly historic blizzard, and sending residents scurrying to stock up on food and gas up their cars ahead of the storm poised to dump up to 3 feet of snow from New York City to Boston and beyond. Even before the first snowflake had fallen, Boston, Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., and other towns and cities in New England and upstate New York towns canceled school Friday, and airlines scratched more than 3,700 flights through Sat...
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An electrical device that had been installed expressly to prevent a power outage caused the Super Bowl blackout, the stadium’s power company said Friday as it took the blame for the outage that brought the game to a halt for more than a half-hour. Officials of Entergy New Orleans, a subsidiary of New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., said the device, called a relay, had been installed in switching gear to protect the Superdome from a cable failure between the company’s incoming power line and lines that run into the stadi...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) – A man who held a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker for nearly a week before dying in a shootout with the FBI received “multiple gunshot wounds” to his body, a county coroner said Thursday. Dale County Coroner Woodrow Hilboldt said he was allowed into the bunker in the southeastern Alabama community of Midland City on Wednesday evening. He pronounced 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes dead at 8:58 p.m. “He had multiple gunshot wounds,” Hilboldt told The Associated Press. The coroner declined to say how many times D...
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – American proposals for direct talks with Iran are pointless while Washington is “holding a gun” to the country through sanctions, Iran’s supreme leader said Thursday, quashing a possible breakthrough in contacts with the West over the nuclear standoff. The message from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in all major decisions in Iran, was reiterated by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a news conference in Cairo later in the day. Their dismissal of one-on-one dialogue raises the stakes when wider n...
PAWTUCKET, R.I. (AP) — Scottie dog has a new nemesis in Monopoly after fans voted in an online contest to add a cat token to the property trading game, replacing the iron, toy maker Hasbro Inc. announced Wednesday. The results were announced after the shoe, wheelbarrow and iron were neck and neck for elimination in the final hours of voting that sparked passionate efforts by fans to save their favorite tokens, and by businesses eager to capitalize on publicity surrounding pieces that r...
WASHINGTON (AP) – The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service said Wednesday it will stop delivering mail on Saturdays but continue to disburse packages six days a week, an apparent end-run around an unaccommodating Congress. The service expects the Saturday mail cutback to begin the week of Aug. 5 and to save about $2 billion annually, said Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe. “Our financial condition is urgent,” Donahoe told a press conference. The move accentuates one of the agency’s strong points – package delivery has incre...
SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — Hezbollah is behind an attack on a bus filled with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria last year, investigators said Tuesday, describing a sophisticated bombing carried out by a terrorist cell that included Canadian and Australian citizens. In the first major announcement in the investigation into the July 18 bombing that killed five Israelis and their Bulgarian driver, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said one of the suspects entered the country with a Canadian passport, and another with one from Australia. “We have wel...
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — For the second time in less than two weeks, the Greek government invoked rarely used emergency laws to order strikers back to work Tuesday — in a move designed to end a seamen’s walkout that has left islands without ferry services and supplies for six days. The decision by conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to declare ferry crews under civil mobilization came after their unions voted to extend the strike until early Friday. Seamen who refuse to comply risk arrest and jail time of up to five years — althoug...
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The tenacious wolverine, a snow-loving carnivore sometimes called the “mountain devil,” could soon join the list of species threatened by climate change — a dubious distinction putting it in the ranks of the polar bear and several other animals the government says will lose crucial habitat as temperatures rise. Federal wildlife officials Friday proposed Endangered Species Act protections for the wolverine in the Lower 48 states. That’s a step twice denied under the Bush administration, then delayed in 2010 when the Obama...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Goodbye candy bars and sugary cookies. Hello baked chips and diet sodas. The government for the first time is proposing broad new standards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more healthful, a change that would ban the sale of almost all candy, high-calorie sports drinks and greasy foods on campus. Under new rules the Department of Agriculture proposed Friday, school vending machines would start selling water, lower-calorie sports drinks, diet sodas and baked chips instead. Lunchrooms that now sell fatty “a la car...
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — Landing in Nigeria’s largest city, one of the first thing visitors see as they peer out of their airplane’s windows is the moss-covered metal carcasses of what used to fly in Africa’s most populous nation. Workers at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos call it “the graveyard,” an overgrown field filled with about a dozen cargo and passenger airplanes long since abandoned and left to rot by insolvent airlines. At least 65 abandoned airplanes, ranging from small commuter jets to one massive Boeing 747, sit at air...
LONDON (AP) — A Pakistani girl whose defiance of the Taliban turned her into an international icon is headed toward a full recovery once she undergoes a final surgery to reconstruct her skull, doctors said Wednesday. Dr. Dave Rosser of Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital said that 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai needs the operation to replace the bone shattered when a Taliban gunman, angered at her objection to the group’s restrictions on girls’ education, sent a bullet through her skull. Rosser said that Malala had made a “remarkable recovery....
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — French-led forces have wrested control of three key cities in northern Mali from al-Qaida-linked militants, but the fighters have escaped with their weapons into a desert region the size of Texas and are poised to mount counterattacks. New military strategies will be needed to rout the jihadists from their desert hideouts. When the French leave their former colony, armed extremists are still likely to remain. No one has yet publicly announced a campaign to hunt them down in the Sahara and in Mali’s villages, where they are...
SANTA MARIA, Brazil (AP) — The owner of a nightclub in southern Brazil where more than 230 people died in a fire last weekend deflected blame to “the whole country,” as well as to architects and inspectors charged with making sure the building was safe, his lawyer said Wednesday. Attorney Jader Marques said his client, Elissandro Spohr, “regretted having ever been born” because of his grief over the fire, but still blamed Sunday’s tragedy on “a succession of errors made by the whole country.” Police investigating the blaze have said it likely...
NEW YORK (AP) — Passing another milestone on the nation’s long journey back from the Great Recession, the Standard and Poor’s 500 index closed above 1,500 for the first time in more than five years Friday after a wave of good earnings reports. It took scores of incremental gains, several stalled rallies and a few sickening falls, but the widely watched S&P, one of the broadest measures of the American stock market, finished at 1,502.96, up 8.14 points. The index had not closed above 1,500 since December 2007, the start of the worst econo...
A sheriff who released a radio ad urging Milwaukee-area residents to learn to handle firearms so they can defend themselves while waiting for police said Friday that law enforcement cutbacks have changed the way police can respond to crime. In the 30-second commercial, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. says personal safety is no longer a spectator sport. “I need you in the game,” he says. “With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option,” he adds. “You can beg for mercy from a violent...
From France’s Joan of Arc to female resistance fighters in World War II and the black-clad women warriors of the Viet Cong, history is filled with stories of women fighting alongside men. In many modern armies, however, ground infantry combat is still largely a male preserve — either by regulation, practical issues such as physical requirements of living space or personal preference in volunteer forces. But change is afoot. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where supply troops, clerks and military police have ended up in battle regardless of gen...
LONDON (AP) — The British government published a bill to legalize same-sex marriage Friday, and said lawmakers will get their first vote on it in Parliament next month. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill extends marriage to gay couples but excludes clergy in the Church of England — the country’s official faith — from having to carry out the ceremonies. That is intended to placate religious opponents of same-sex unions — though it has not stopped criticism of the bill from religious leaders. “We feel that marriage is a good thing and we shou...
NORFOLK (AP) — Some northeast Nebraska farmers are facing new irrigation rules. The rules were adopted Thursday night by the Lower Elkhorn Natural Resources District Board at its meeting in Norfolk. The district includes parts of Madison, Pierce and Wayne counties. The rules bar expansion of irrigation to new areas as well as bar offseason irrigation. There are irrigation educational requirements, and irrigators must install groundwater water monitors. Some of the irrigators will have annual limits on how much water they can pump. The board h...
ALLIANCE (AP) — A 40-year-old man accused of setting his western Nebraska home on fire has pleaded not guilty to an arson charge. Authorities say Isaac Gonzalez ignited a fire Dec. 13 in the basement of a house he rented in Alliance. Alliance officers pulled Gonzalez to safety through a window. He was hospitalized in Scottsbluff. After his release he surrendered to police on Jan. 8. He’s free on bond. The Class 3 charge carries a maximum prison term of 20 years. Gonzalez is due back in court on April 1. Damage of $100,000 to the house and its...
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — When fire ravaged a Bangladeshi garment factory, killing 112 workers, dozens of their families did not even have a body to bury because their loved ones’ remains were burned beyond recognition. Two months later, the same families have yet to receive any of the compensation they were promised — not even their relatives’ last paychecks. An official with the country’s powerful garment industry said DNA tests must first be conducted to confirm the losses of more than 50 families. He would not say why the families have not...
NEW YORK (AP) — Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over. And the situation is even worse than it appears. Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What’s more, these jobs aren’t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren’t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to...
OMAHA (AP) — Berkshire Hathaway shareholders will now be able to work off all the See’s Candy and Dairy Queen treats they enjoy at the company’s annual meeting with a 5k run. Berkshire’s Brooks Running subsidiary announced plans for the fun run on Tuesday. The race will be held in Omaha on May 5 — one day after the annual meeting that routinely attracts more than 30,000 people. Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett says he is challenging the managers of all of the conglomerate’s 80-odd businesses to participate. The 82-year-old Buffett will fire the st...
