Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 246
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas' largest public-school district has scrapped plans to allow its middle and high school students to attend some in-person classes and three counties have imposed new restrictions inspired by the coronavirus pandemic. The moves by local officials come as the state works to expand its overall testing capacity so under a "unified" statewide strategy announced by Gov. Laura Kelly in late September. The strategy calls for regular testing of at-risk populations, including first responders, prison inmates, nursing home r...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas' largest public school district has scrapped plans to allow its middle and high school students to attend some in-person classes and three counties have imposed new restrictions inspired by the coronavirus pandemic. The moves by local officials come as the state works to expand its overall testing capacity so under a "unified" statewide strategy announced by Gov. Laura Kelly in late September. The strategy calls for regular testing of at-risk populations, including first responders, prison inmates, nursing home r...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas on Monday reported another record seven-day spike in coronavirus cases, pushing the state past 100,000 for the pandemic as officials wrestled with getting more residents to wear masks. The state Department of Health and Environment added 5,920 new confirmed and probable cases to the state's tally since Friday, bringing the total to 103,553 since the pandemic began. The state averaged 2,047 new cases a day for the seven days ending Monday, 15% higher than the previous record average of 1,779 for the seven days e...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A federal appeals court ordered the immediate release of a Russian mother whose case garnered international attention after she was convicted of kidnapping for moving her children from the U.S. to Russia amid a divorce. Bogdana Alexandrovna Osipova, who is referred to by her married name of Mobley in court documents, was convicted in Kansas last year of one count of international parental kidnapping and two counts of attempting to extort money. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned t...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Supreme Court issued two decisions Friday with far-reaching implications for same-sex couples, finding that parenting intentions at the moment of a child's birth are critical to establishing parental rights. Both cases involved birth mothers who conceived through artificial insemination and were fighting petitions by their former same-sex partners to establish parentage after their romantic relationships had fallen apart. In both cases, the women had not married and they did not have written or oral c...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Early in-person voting began Wednesday in several Kansas counties, with election officials reporting heavier than usual turnout but relatively short wait times to cast a ballot. Election offices across the state also began on Wednesday sending out the first batches of mail-in ballots to voters who requested them in what election officials anticipate will be record numbers amid the pandemic. The state's most populous counties won't start advance in-person voting for several more days, but a smattering of smaller c...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Kansas voters will have more options this year to cast their ballot, easing the pressure on fewer available in-person polling sites on Election Day amid pandemic concerns that have closed traditional voting locations in many churches and nursing homes, election officials said. Local election officials who have been scrambling to find alternative handicap-accessible sites that are large enough to allow for social distancing on Election Day are counting on more voters using advance ballots that can be mailed in, d...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas expects to receive 870,000 rapid COVID-19 tests from the federal government over the next three months to boost testing in potential hot spots, Gov. Laura Kelly said Monday. Kelly made the announcement as the state saw a record increase in coronavirus-related hospitalizations. She said the new tests are crucial for a new statewide policy of more testing of people without virus symptoms in areas with high infection rates and increasing routine testing in schools, nursing homes and prisons. The state already has r...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy after refusing to pull over was unarmed and posed no danger to him or the public, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday. The court filing paints a different picture to that recounted by authorities following the fatal shooting in Wichita of 51-year-old Debra Arbuckle of Andover by Sedgwick County Deputy Kaleb Dailey in the early morning hours of Dec. 30, 2019. Authorities said at the time that the deputy fired several rounds after Arbuckle put her c...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — More than 1,500 Kansans did not have their votes counted in the August primary because their mail ballots arrived too late, but many of them were uncounted because voters didn't mail them on time, election data shows. A 2017 state law that aims to mitigate the impact of mail delays allows ballots postmarked on Election Day to be counted as long as they are received in local election offices within three days. That means that ballots postmarked on or before Aug. 4 would have been counted had they arrived by Aug. 7. U...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Supreme Court seemed worried Wednesday about the proper roles of the Legislature and courts as it wrestled with whether a state statute that prohibits lawsuits based on "wrongful birth" claims is constitutional. Justices heard oral arguments via Zoom on whether the parents of a disabled child have a right to a trial on their malpractice claims. A lower appeals court had earlier held that the statute — signed into law by then-Gov. Sam Brownback in 2013— protects physicians from malpractice suits if they...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas on Monday dropped its lawsuit that accused a former lawyer for the state utilities regulating agency of filing a baseless, retaliatory complaint against two environmental activists. Last month, U.S. District Judge Holly Teeter gutted most of ACLU's lawsuit by finding that the members of the Kansas Corporation Commission are immune from liability. That left former general counselor Dustin Kirk as the sole remaining defendant. A joint stipulation of dismissal was filed M...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A former Army infantry soldier described by prosecutors as a Satanist who hoped to overthrow the U.S. government endured a lifetime of victimization, isolation and trauma that led him to become involved with online extremist groups, his defense attorney argued Thursday in a motion seeking lenient punishment. Jarrett William Smith, a private first class stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, and previously at Fort Bliss, Texas, was discharged from the military after the 24-year-old admitted in February that he provided i...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The prosecution of a Kansas researcher ensnared in a U.S. government crackdown on Chinese economic espionage and trade secret theft opens the door to criminalizing workplace disagreements, his attorneys argued Friday in a motion asking a court to throw out the charges. Feng "Franklin" Tao is charged with not disclosing on conflict-of-interest forms work he was allegedly doing for China while employed at the University of Kansas — something federal prosecutors have portrayed as a scheme to defraud the university, the...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Kansas counties that have mask mandates in place have seen a rapid drop in cases, while counties that only recommend their use have seen no decrease in cases, the state's top health official said Wednesday. Dr. Lee Norman, the state health department's top administrator, said Wednesday that overall statewide the numbers of new cases is favorable, but that the reduction of new cases is entirely in the counties that require masks be worn in public spaces. After Gov. Laura Kelly put a mask mandate in place last month, 15... Full story
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas child welfare agency determined Friday that a 3-year-old girl whose battered body was found this month died as the result of child abuse, a belated finding that comes months after the agency first received reports of abuse. Laura Howard, Secretary for the Kansas Department for Children and Families, said in an phone interview that she doesn't see anything at this time that leads her to question her staff's actions or suggests "any missteps" by her agency. "What is really important to me in circumstances like t...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Kansas' child welfare agency balked at releasing records about a 3-year-old girl whose battered body was found this month, despite a 2018 law that aimed to make such documents more transparent. That law says Kansas Department for Children and Families' documents are public records in the event child abuse or neglect results in a child fatality or near fatality. However, the agency declined to release to The Associated Press records pertaining to Olivia Ann Jansen, saying it is still investigating whether Olivia's d...
LIBERTY, Mo. (AP) — A massive federal operation underway in Kansas City, Missouri, that targets violent crime has been largely welcomed by local and state officials, while some civil rights organizations are strongly opposed to having federal agents involved in solving local crimes. Under the federal effort — dubbed Operation Legend after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was fatally shot while sleeping in his bed in Kansas City — 225 federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Burea...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A judge on Friday ruled that a lawsuit can move forward against a Wichita police officer who fatally shot an innocent man in 2017 while responding to a hoax emergency call stemming from a dispute between two online gamers. The death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch drew national attention to "swatting," a form of retaliation in which someone reports a false emergency to get authorities to descend on an address. The address the gamers used was old, leading police to Finch, who was not involved in the dispute or video g...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — More than a century after the arrival of the railroads to the Flint Hills of Kansas, a large-scale track expansion is tearing up a scenic stretch in some of the last remaining tallgrass prairie left in the nation. The multiyear project by BNSF Railway to build a second main line of track in Kansas got little public attention until construction this year on a nearly 42-mile (68-kilometer) stretch of track that the railroad is laying from Ellinor to El Dorado. Located south of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, t...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Farmers across the nation leaned more heavily upon the federal government last year to finance their agricultural operations amid low commodity prices and trade disputes, and more of the money they borrowed is now delinquent. Although the U.S. Agriculture Department said it has not seen a significant change in loan delinquency rates because of the coronavirus pandemic, it expects an impact if the economic fallout continues. Farm foreclosures have not increased, and the department has taken a number of measures to fores...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The attorneys general for 11 Midwestern states urged the Justice Department on Tuesday to pursue a federal investigation into market concentration and potential price fixing by meatpackers in the cattle industry during the coronavirus pandemic. In a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, the state attorneys general noted that the domestic beef processing market is highly concentrated, with the four largest beef processors controlling 80 percent of the industry. "Given the concentrated market structure of the b...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Kansas law enforcement agencies seized more than $3.35 million in property during a six-month period last year, disproportionately from young black and Hispanic male drivers. Counties reporting significant currency seizures are located along Interstate 70 or Interstate 35 and have officers assigned to look for drugs. The overwhelming amount of currency seized was uncontested in forfeiture actions. Those are some of the first findings stemming from a Kansas law that took effect July 1 and requiring that law e...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday that Kansas can't require voters to show proof of citizenship when they register, dealing a blow to efforts by Republicans in several states who have pursued restrictive voting laws as a way of combating voter fraud. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Salt Lake City upheld a federal judge's injunction nearly two years ago that prohibited Kansas from enforcing the requirement, which took effect in 2013. The appeals court, in a ruling that consolidated two appeals, f...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said she has reached a deal that could resolve a lawsuit brought by two churches challenging her order banning religious gatherings of more than 10 people to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. Under the deal, the two churches and the Democratic governor agreed to the extension of a temporary restraining order that allows the churches to disregard the 10-person limit. The court's initial order let the two churches to gather in-person until May 2 as long as they complied with s...
