Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 50
FORT SMITH, Ark. (AP) — It would be hard to tell it today, but a little brick house on North 36th Street in Fort Smith served as the home for infamous bank robber "Pretty Boy" Charles Floyd and his family for the fall of 1931 and spring of 1932. Adjacent to Tilles Park, it was a good find for the Depression-era Robin Hood. If the police came knocking, the park may have offered some cover for a back-door escape. Having made a brazen escape from a train on its way to the Ohio State Prison on Dec. 10, 1930, Floyd had been on the run for nine m...
NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — Racist, anti-gay and anti-Semitic remarks were found spray-painted Wednesday on a Democratic Party office in Oklahoma for the second time in as many weeks, and authorities said vandals left similar graffiti at a nearby school and arts center. The vandalism was discovered on the windows and sidewalk outside the Cleveland County Democratic Party headquarters as well as the Firehouse Art Center and McKinley Elementary School in Norman, about 17 miles (27 kilometers) south of Oklahoma City. Similar epithets were discovered s...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Investigators say a Texas man was strangled before he was buried in Oklahoma alongside the body of a woman whose MMA fighter ex-boyfriend is suspected in the deaths. Oklahoma's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released an autopsy report Wednesday saying 32-year-old Michael Swearingin's death was a homicide. Swearingin was found dead Jan. 15 in a shallow grave beside the body of 28-year-old Jenna Scott in Clearview, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) east of Oklahoma City. The Temple, Texas residents were reported m...
LIBERAL, Kan. (AP) — Authorities in Kansas and Oklahoma are investigating the deaths of two men from southwest Kansas. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation says a farmer reported on Tuesday that he found the body of 25-year-old Timothy Martin, of Liberal, Kansas, in a ditch on his property in Texas County, Oklahoma. Because the property is near the Kansas-Oklahoma state line, authorities from both states began investigating. The KBI says while investigators were working on that case Tuesday evening, the Seward County, Kansas, Sheriff's office r...
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Route 66 will be the focus of promotions in Oklahoma as officials work to boost the state's tourism industry, officials said. Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell toured the historic highway Tuesday, The Tulsa World reported. The state's new administration hopes to increase tourism by promoting Oklahoma's scenic beauty and international interest in the Mother Road, he said. "We're going to own it. We're going all in," Pinnell said. "And we're going to make a lot of money on it." Tourism has potential for growth as the state's third l...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Gov. Kevin Stitt has appointed a former Supreme Court justice who presided over the state's only trial involving the Oklahoma City bombing to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. The Republican governor said Wednesday he has appointed Steven W. Taylor to the board that oversees the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education and its 25 colleges and universities. Taylor will serve a nine-year term, effective May 17. The 69-year-old Taylor served on the state's highest court from 2004 to 2016 and was chief j...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A $270 million settlement between the state of Oklahoma and the maker of OxyContin praised last week as an innovative way to help combat opioid addiction is facing bipartisan criticism from Oklahoma lawmakers who say the state's attorney general overstepped his authority. Attorney General Mike Hunter spent time this week in damage control with lawmakers who say money from the first-of-its-kind settlement should have gone to the state treasury, where legislators would have determined how it was spent. They also grumbled t...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas legislators are moving closer to passing Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's plan for increasing funding for public schools. House Republicans gave up Wednesday night on trying to find an alternative to Kelly's proposal to increase spending on public schools by roughly $90 million a year. The Senate approved Kelly's plan last month with bipartisan support. The House has yet to pass a funding proposal but did narrowly pass a bill making changes in education policies. That was enough for the House and Senate to begin n...
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) — Three Midwestern Republican governors of states ravaged by recent flooding on Wednesday demanded more authority over management of the Missouri River system. Following a meeting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson criticized the federal body that manages the river, saying it puts too much emphasis on fish and wildlife habitat and not enough on flood control. "One thing is clear: Something needs to change," said Parson, who pointed t...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Top Republican lawmakers in Kansas struggled Wednesday to find enough GOP votes to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's veto of a tax relief bill despite a strong push to save the measure from the state Republican Party. The measure Kelly vetoed last week was designed to prevent individuals and businesses from paying more in state income taxes because of changes in federal tax laws at the end of 2017. Republican leaders made it their top priority this year and argue that failing to return the revenue "windfall" r...
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — An Ohio gamer upset over a $1.50 bet in an online game pleaded guilty Wednesday to asking a prankster to make a bogus emergency call, then trying to hide his involvement when he realized the antic had gotten a Kansas man killed by police. Casey Viner, 19, of North College Hill, Ohio, changed his plea to guilty on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. He initially pleaded not guilty. The plea deal jointly recommends two years of probation, although the judge is not bound by that sentencing recommendation. The d...
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a 16-year-old girl has been charged with murder in the killing of another teenage boy in a suburban Kansas City community. The Kansas City Star reports Wednesday that the Olathe girl was charged in Johnson County Juvenile court with first-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Rowan Padgett of Overland Park. The girl was also charged with felony obstruction of justice for allegedly giving false information to investigators. The charges allege Friday's killing in a suburban cul-de-sac occurred during a d...
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Authorities are investigating an apparent murder-suicide in northeast Sedgwick County. Sedgwick County Lt. Tim Myers said deputies responding to a residential alarm a home early Tuesday found a man and woman in bed suffering from gunshots. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. KWCH reports Myers said investigators determined 54-year-old Johnna Raymond shot her husband, 70-year-old Robert Raymond, and then shot herself. The investigation is continuing. ___ Information from: KWCH-TV, http://www.kwch.com/...
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine customs officials were astonished when they opened nicely gift-wrapped boxes of cookies and oatmeal flown in all the way from Poland and found a hair-raising contraband: hundreds of live tarantulas. Bureau of Customs personnel seized the 757 tarantulas at a mail exchange center near Manila's international airport Monday and later arrested a Filipino man who tried to claim the long-legged and venomous spiders, which were declared as "collection items." Many of the baby tarantulas were concealed in small p...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee chairman on Wednesday formally asked the IRS to provide six years of President Donald Trump's personal tax returns and the returns for some of his businesses as Democrats try to shed light on his complex financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest. The request by Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, who heads the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, is the first such demand for a sitting president's tax information in 45 years. The move is likely to set off a huge legal battle between D...
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — An autopsy report confirmed Wednesday that an 8-year-old Guatemalan boy who died while in custody of the U.S. Border Patrol on Christmas Eve succumbed to a flu infection — one of two deaths of Central American children in December that drew attention to the plight of migrant families at the southern border. The New Mexico Office of the Medical Examiner released its autopsy findings for Felipe Gomez Alonzo two days after Guatemalan authorities said they had received a copy of the report disclosing the boy had a rapid, pr...
BOSTON (AP) — A packaged-food entrepreneur from California became the first of the 33 parents charged in the college bribery scandal to agree to plead guilty, disclosing the deal Wednesday as Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin appeared in court along with some of the other defendants. Peter Jan Sartorio, 53, was accused of paying $15,000 in cash to have someone correct his daughter's answers on the ACT college entrance exam. The exact charges to which he planned to plead were not immediately clear. The two actresses and L...
NEW YORK (AP) — It's simply a "human touch." He's a "warm, affectionate person." ''He hugs everybody." In the days since allegations surfaced of uninvited touching on the part of Joe Biden, several women in politics and beyond have been coming to his defense, vouching for his character and saying it was merely his old-fashioned tactile style at issue — nothing intentional, and certainly nothing sexual. But the nature of the defense, coming frequently but not exclusively from older women, as well as Biden's own assertion that he never felt he...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Security researchers have uncovered more instances of Facebook user data being publicly exposed on the internet, further underscoring its struggles as it deals with a slew of privacy and other problems. The researchers from the firm UpGuard said in a blog post Wednesday that the data, which included user names and passwords, came from two different Facebook apps that stored their data publicly on Amazon's cloud services. Facebook said the databases have been taken down. But the episode illustrates Facebook's issues with con...
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama has the nation's deadliest prisons, where violence is "too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive" the Department of Justice found Wednesday in a scathing report that said male inmates are housed in unconstitutional conditions. During a single week in Alabama's prison system, one inmate bled to death after being stabbed repeatedly as two others stood guard at a dormitory's doors. Another stabbed inmate had to be evacuated by helicopter. A prisoner in a dorm reserved for those with good behavior was a...
A 14-year-old boy who said he escaped from two kidnappers in Ohio told authorities he is from Illinois, where he went missing nearly eight years ago when his mother apparently took her own life. Police in suburban Cincinnati's Sharonville wrote in a short incident report that the teen said Wednesday morning that he had "just escaped from two kidnappers" he described as white men with body builder-type physiques. They were in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin license plates and had been staying at a Red Roof Inn. The boy, who identified himself as...
DALLAS (AP) — Texas prisons will no longer allow clergy in the death chamber after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the scheduled execution of a man who argued his religious freedom would be violated if his Buddhist spiritual adviser couldn't accompany him. Effective immediately, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will only permit prison security staff into the death chamber, a spokesman said Wednesday. The policy change comes in response to the high court's ruling staying the execution of Patrick Murphy , a member of the "Texas 7" gang of...
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A previously little-known Venezuelan congressman, Juan Guaidó, leaped to the front stage of Venezuela's political conflict early this year by declaring himself interim president in a bid to force the removal of President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro loyalists so far have stopped short of arresting Guaidó, but that may not last long. A pro-government assembly voted this week to strip Guaidó of the immunity enjoyed by congressmen, paving the way for him to be prosecuted and potentially jailed for allegedly violating the cons...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Doctors can safely transplant hepatitis C-infected lungs and hearts into people desperate for a new organ, say researchers who may have found a way to protect those patients from getting the risky virus. The experiment, reported Wednesday, is the latest attempt to put a dent in the nation's long transplant waiting list by using organs that otherwise would be wasted, often ones from victims of the opioid epidemic. The new twist: Instead of trying to cure hepatitis C after it took hold in transplant recipients, researchers at B...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and China opened a ninth round of talks Wednesday, aiming to further narrow differences in an ongoing trade war that has deepened uncertainty for businesses and investors and cast a pall over the outlook for the global economy. The latest negotiating session on American soil follows a similar set of talks held last week in Beijing. Larry Kudlow, a top White House economic adviser, said "good headway" was made when U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin met in the Chinese c...
