Wire
Voters give Obama four more years
Obama powers to re-election despite weak economy 
 WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama rolled to re-election Tuesday night, vanquishing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and winning four more years in office despite a weak economy that plagued his first term and put a crimp in the middle class dreams of millions. "This happened because of you. Thank you" Obama tweeted to supporters as he celebrated four more years in the White House. ...
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GOP sweeps Kansas U.S. House seats
TOPEKA (AP) — Kansas Republicans repeated their sweep on Tuesday of the state’s four congressional districts, keeping the U.S. House seats in the party’s hands for the second straight election cycle. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a Topeka Republican, earned a third term in Congress in the 2nd District, while three freshmen easily won re-election to their seats. The races follow a trend in Kansas politics in recent years that has seen Republicans and the ...
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Romney, Obama sharpen closing lines
PATASKALA, Ohio (AP) — Down to a fierce finish, President Barack Obama accused Mitt Romney of scaring voters with lies on Friday, while the Republican challenger warned grimly of political paralysis and another recession if Obama reclaims the White House. Heading into the final weekend, the race’s last big report on the economy showed hiring picking up but millions still out of work. “Four more days!” Romney supporters bellowed at his rally in...
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Groups pour cash into state races
TOPEKA (AP) — Seven groups spent nearly $167,000 over seven days to boost Democratic candidates heading into the final days of campaigns for the Kansas Legislature, but the state’s largest business group also was active in helping conservative Republicans aligned with Gov. Sam Brownback. Finance reports filed through Friday showed political party groups and political action committees pouring money into mailings, phone banks and get-out-the-vo...
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Kobach predicts 68 percent turnout
TOPEKA (AP) — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach predicted Thursday that the state would see a 68 percent voter turnout in Tuesday’s elections. Kobach said during a news conference that if the prediction held true that it would be the smallest percentage of Kansas voters casting ballots in a general election since 2000, when turnout was 67 percent. Both 2000 and 2012 are oddities in Kansas elections in that they are points in the election c...
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GOP suggests it may lose seats
TOPEKA (AP) — Prominent Republicans are suggesting that Tuesday’s elections could cost them a few seats in the Kansas House and reduce the influence of its conservatives just as the GOP right takes control of the Senate. House Majority Leader Arlen Siegfried, a conservative Olathe Republican, said Thursday that he’s predicting that Republicans — who hold a 92-33 majority in his chamber — could lose up to four seats. Gov. Sam Brownback said he ...
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Challenger spends nothing
TOPEKA (AP) — A Republican who wants to oust a Democratic incumbent from the Kansas State Board of Education has raised almost nothing and said Wednesday that he plans to spend no money. GOP challenger Jack Wu’s contest against Democrat Carolyn Campbell previously garnered attention because of Wu’s ties to an anti-gay Topeka church known for picketing military funerals. Wu said he’s always planned to spend nothing campaigning in the 4th board ...
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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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