YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) — Happy birthday to the National Park Service.
It turns 100 today.
Popular tourist areas in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks will be open for the anniversary. But a wildfire is forcing some visitors to drive a little farther than they expected to get to the celebration.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Iowa prosecutor looking further into how a former lottery computer security administrator in Iowa fixed lottery games in several states is asking a judge for subpoenas to search telephone and bank records of two Texas attorneys.
Assistant Iowa Attorney General Rob Sand filed documents Tuesday in the cases of Eddie Tipton and his brother Tommy Tipton. They’re charged with conspiring to rig and collect winnings from lottery games in Colorado, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas worth about $2 million.
Sand seeks subpoenas for J. Thad Whisenant, a Houston lawyer and Luis Vallejo, a criminal defense attorney in La Grange, Texas.
Whisenant and Vallejo aren’t charged with any crime. They didn’t immediately respond to messages.
Sand cites phone calls and financial dealings related to Tommy Tipton as justification for the subpoenas.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A Des Moines hospital is alerting about 2,600 people who had open-heart surgery there from 2012 to 2015 that they might have been exposed to a bacterial infection.
The Des Moines Register reports that two of the former Mercy Medical Center patients have been diagnosed with an infection with the germs, called nontuberculous mycobacteria.
Iowa Department of Public Health medical director Patricia Quinlisk described the germ as “a cousin to tuberculosis, but it’s much less potent and much more slow-growing.”
She says University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics issued a similar warning earlier this year. Quinlisk says people who undergo the heart procedures tend to have weak immune systems.
Mercy Medical Center says the bacteria could have spread from a heart-lung bypass machine used in heart surgery.
Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman Dawn-Renee Smith told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday night that all nine were taken to hospitals after the attack and have been treated and released.
The prison has been placed on lockdown. It’s not clear how many inmates were involved in the Wednesday evening attack or whether any were hurt.
The Lincoln Correctional Center is a medium-maximum security prison for adult males.
AMATRICE, Italy (AP) — Rescue crews are racing against time, looking for survivors from Wednesday’s pre-dawn earthquake that leveled three towns in central Italy.
The death toll is at 247, but a firefighters’ spokesman in the city of Amatrice says, “We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive.”
Searchers continue to go through piles of rock and sand that were once buildings.
Three towns were hard hit, including one where travelers had come for a pasta festival.
Crews have been using bulldozers and even their hands to go through debris.
AMATRICE, Italy (AP) — The mayor of the central-Italian city of Amatrice says rescue teams are trying to reach all of the city’s 69 hamlets following this morning’s powerful earthquake and numerous aftershocks.
There are reports of as many as 50 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Crews are trying to dig out survivors.
Italy’s forestry police say they’ve rescued dozens of people from rubble in the town of Pescara del Tronto.
A geologist in Poland says that the magnitude 6 earthquake in central Italy was caused by the slow but constant under-surface movement of the African Plate toward Europe.
Jerzy Zaba of the Silesian University in Katowice, in southern Poland, said Wednesday that a wedge-shaped front of the African Plate is pressing into the Eurasian Plate in the Adriatic Sea region and pushes into the neighboring regions, like Italy’s Apennine Mountains. The tension that accumulates leads to a sudden release in the form of under-surface rock movement that causes earth tremors.
Zaba told Polish PAP agency that the African Plate is moving northwards at the speed of up to 2 inches a year.
Alexander Blair has told the judge he made a big mistake and blames a genetic disorder for allowing others to take advantage of him. U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree will weigh such factors Wednesday as he calculates how much prison time, if any, the 29-year-old Blair should serve.
Blair pleaded guilty in May to a conspiracy count that carries up to five years’ imprisonment. He admitted loaning John T. Booker $100, knowing it would be used to pay for storage of a bomb Booker planned to detonate in April 2015 at Fort Riley.
Alan LaPolice of Clyde announced Tuesday that he has officially been placed on the Nov. 8 ballot for the 1st District race. He will face Republican physician Roger Marshall, who beat the tea party-backed incumbent in the GOP primary, and Libertarian Kerry Burt.
LaPolice says as an independent candidate he doesn’t have the baggage attached to candidates for the two major parties and is the only one in the race who can hope to accomplish anything in Washington.
LaPolice waged a surprisingly close primary race in 2014 against Huelskamp, pulling in more than 45 percent of the vote.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas and four other states are again suing the Obama administration over its efforts to strengthen discrimination protections for transgender people.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in a North Texas federal court seeks to block parts of a nondiscrimination mandate of President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Republican state officials say the rules could force doctors to help with gender transition against their medical judgment or religious convictions. Transgender rights advocates called that a far-fetched hypothetical and say the rules simply require doctors to make decisions without bias.
The lawsuit was filed a day after a federal judge in Texas blocked a directive that would have required U.S. public schools to let transgender students use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.
Wisconsin, Kentucky, Nebraska and Kansas also joined the latest lawsuit.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A federal appeals court says law enforcement officials in Kansas cannot stop and search motorists for having nothing more than out-of-state license plates from states that have legalized marijuana.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday says the officer’s reasoning would justify the search of citizens from more than half of the states in the country.
The court reinstated the lawsuit filed by a Colorado motorist against two Kansas Highway Patrol officers who stopped and searched his vehicle while he was driving alone at night on I-70 in Kansas.
It found the officers violated Peter Vasquez’s Fourth Amendment rights in searching his car.
Twenty-five states permit marijuana use for medicinal purposes, with Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, and Washington, D.C. permitting some recreational use under state law.
