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KU museum to honor explorer, conservationist
LAWRENCE (AP) — He was an arctic explorer, a pioneering conservationist and a famed storyteller. His name was Lewis Lindsay Dyche, and he was an iconic Kansan, Kris Krishtalka says. “He brought Kansas to the world, and then brought the world back to Kansas,” said Krishtalka, the director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum as well as its Biodiversity Institute. The museum is honoring and remembering Dyche, a former KU faculty membe...
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Money flows into state contests
TOPEKA (AP) — Democrats in key Kansas Senate races outspent their Republican opponents over the past three months as embattled incumbents and their allies tried to offset the influence of the state’s largest business group in a GOP-leaning state, according to campaign finance records. The Kansas Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee filed a report this week with the secretary of state’s office showing it has committed to spending at...
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Court hears appeal in capital case
TOPEKA (AP) — A man sentenced to die over the killings of a central Kansas couple should receive a new trial because a cousin involved in the crime reneged on a plea agreement that allowed him to avoid the death penalty, an attorney told the state’s highest court Friday. The Kansas Supreme Court heard the appeal of Sidney Gleason, convicted of capital murder and other crimes in the deaths of Miki Martinez and boyfriend Darren Wornkey in Februa...
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City wants to test excavations at hotel
LAWRENCE (AP) — Lawrence will likely ask the developer behind a proposed downtown hotel to conduct exploratory excavation at the site to determine whether black Union soldiers killed in an 1863 raid are buried there, the city’s director of planning said. Rebel guerrilla William Quantrill’s raiders killed more than 100 men and burned much of Lawrence to the ground in the raid, which was one of many clashes between slave state Missouri and free ...
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East Coast braces for super storm
DUCK, N.C. (AP) — A year after being walloped by Hurricane Irene, residents rushed to put away boats, harvest crops and sandbag boardwalks Friday as the Eastern Seaboard braced for a rare megastorm that experts said would cause much greater havoc. Hurricane Sandy, moving north from the Caribbean, was expected to make landfall Monday night near the Delaware coast, then hit two winter weather systems as it moves inland, creating a hybrid monster...
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Recycling program to start at KU game
LAWRENCE (AP) — As Blaine Bengtson walked around outside Memorial Stadium following the Kansas University football game against Rice last month, he didn’t like what he saw in the trash cans. “So many just plastic bottles and things that were totally recyclable were being thrown away,” Bengtson said. For Bengtson, a KU junior from Salina, it was an assessment that confirmed the need for a project on which he was already hard at work: a new KU f...
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Suit alleges fraud in mortgage lending
NEW YORK (AP) — The latest federal lawsuit over alleged mortgage fraud paints an unflattering picture of a doomed lender: Executives at Countrywide Financial urged workers to churn out loans, accepted fudged applications and tried to hide ballooning defaults. The suit, filed Wednesday by the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also underscored how Bank of America's purchase of Countrywide in July 2008, just before the financial crisis, backfi...
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Study finds aspirin may help treat colon cancer
NEW YORK (AP) — Aspirin, one of the world’s oldest and cheapest drugs, has shown remarkable promise in treating colon cancer in people with mutations in a gene that’s thought to play a role in the disease. Among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer than those who didn’t, a major study found. Five years after their cancers were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive versus 74 percent of...
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Syria exposes Lebanon’s lack of stability
BEIRUT (AP) — Potentially the most unstable country in the Middle East, Lebanon for the most part has stayed on the sidelines of the Arab Spring, keeping up appearances as an oasis of relative modernity, commerce and good times. But the spillover effects of the Syrian war are ripping off that thin veneer. Beneath the surface lurk the same forces that devastated the country during its years of civil war, with simmering hatreds still dividing Mu...
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Detective works for healing after fatal car accident
LAWRENCE (AP) — Something about the case struck a nerve in Douglas County Sheriff’s Detective Jay Armbrister, a 14-year veteran law enforcement officer, as he arrived on the scene of a drunken driving fatality accident on Nov. 23, 2010. In one of the cars, four friends had been traveling back to Lincoln, Neb., about 3:30 a.m. after seeing a Lawrence concert. They’d made the right choices that night, with a designated driver behind the wheel of...
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Court convicts seven for no quake warning
L’AQUILA, Italy (AP) — Defying assertions that earthquakes cannot be predicted, an Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter Monday for failing to adequately warn residents before a temblor struck central Italy in 2009 and killed more than 300 people. The court in L’Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years each in prison. All are members of the national Great Risks Commission, and several are prominent scien...
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Appeals court revives school funding case
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A northeast Kansas lawsuit challenging the state’s cap on how much money residents in a school district can raise through taxes has gotten new life after a federal appeals court reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the case. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled Thursday that the plaintiffs, who are all parents in the Shawnee Mission School District, have legal standing to pursue the lawsuit. The lawsu...
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Doctors say Pakistani girl who was shot is improving
LONDON (AP) — The British hospital treating a 15-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by the Taliban raised hopes for her recovery Friday when doctors said she was able to stand with some help and to write. Malala Yousufzai appeared with her eyes open and alert as she lay in a hospital bed, in the first photographs released by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham since she arrived from Pakistan on Monday. It was a series of positive ...
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Austria probes fate of Nazi-era disabled
HALL, Austria (AP) — Forensic crews scraping away dirt from the remains of the Nazi-era psychiatric patients were puzzled: The skeletal fingers were entwined in rosary beads. Why, the experts wondered, would the Nazis — who considered these people less than human — respect them enough to let them take their religious symbols to their graves? It turns out they didn’t. A year after the first of 221 sets of remains were exhumed at a former Austri...
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Newsweek to stop its print edition
NEW YORK (AP) — There was a time when the newsweeklies set the agenda for the nation’s conversation — when Time and Newsweek would digest the events of the week and Americans would wait by their mailboxes to see what was on the covers. Those days have passed, and come the end of the year, the print edition of Newsweek will pass, too. Cause of death: The march of time. “The tempo of the news and the Web have completely overtaken the news magazi...
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Skydiver's feat could influence spacesuit design
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Now that the dust has settled in the New Mexico desert where supersonic skydiver “Fearless Felix” Baumgartner landed safely on his feet, researchers are exhilarated over the possibility his exploit could someday help save the lives of pilots and space travelers in a disaster. Baumgartner’s death-defying jump Sunday from a balloon 24 miles above Earth yielded a wealth of information about the punishing effects of ext...
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Study finds vitamins may lower cancer risk
By The Associated Press America’s favorite dietary supplements, multivitamins, modestly lowered the risk for cancer in healthy male doctors who took them for more than a decade, the first large study to test these pills has found. The result is a surprise because many studies of individual vitamins have found they don’t help prevent chronic diseases and some even seemed to raise the risk of cancer. In the new study, multivitamins cut the chan...
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Obama, Romney seek support from women after debate
MOUNT VERNON, Iowa (AP) — One day after their contentious, finger-pointing debate, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney vied aggressively for the support of women voters Wednesday, as they and their running mates charged across nearly a half-dozen battleground states in the close race for the White House with 20 days to run. Not even Republicans disputed that Obama’s debate performance was much stronger than the listless showing t...
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Defendants return to Guantanamo to be tried by military
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Five Guantanamo prisoners charged in the Sept. 11 attacks returned before a military tribunal Monday, forgoing the protests that turned their last appearance into an unruly 13-hour spectacle. But the apparent cooperation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has said he masterminded the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, and four codefendants did little to speed up proceedings that have stuck in a legal and polit...
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Romney crowds begin to surge
SIDNEY, Ohio (AP) — The crowds tell the story. As Election Day nears, Mitt Romney is drawing large and excited throngs. Look to dusty Iowa cornfields, rain-soaked Virginia parks, the muddy fields of the Shelby County Fairgrounds, where a crowd of 9,500 — almost half of this western Ohio town — gathered among the barns and stables on a frigid October evening this week to glimpse the Republican presidential contender. “Where else would we want t...
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