JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Opponents of a gun-rights amendment recently approved by Missouri voters are asking the state Supreme Court to overturn the election results.
A court challenge filed Wednesday contends the summary on the Aug. 5 ballot was insufficient and unfair and thus the results should be invalidated.
Voters approved Constitutional Amendment 5 by 61 percent. The ballot summary presented to voters said the amendment declares “that the right to keep and bear arms is a unalienable right and that the state government is obligated to uphold that right.”
The lawsuit contends voters should also have been told that the amendment subjects gun-control laws to strict legal scrutiny and that it repeals a provision allowing restrictions on concealed guns.
A similar lawsuit was rejected before the election because of time constraints.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt has received an endorsement from one of his predecessors in his bid for a second term.
Republican Bob Stephan served as attorney general from 1979 through 1995. He now chairs the Attorney General’s Senior Consumer Protection Advisory Council.
Schmidt was unopposed in last month’s Republican primary. He faces Democrat and Topeka lawyer A.J. Kotich in November’s general election.
Stephan announced his backing of Schmidt on Wednesday, saying the incumbent has championed new laws to protect consumers against identity theft. Stephan also said Schmidt has acted to toughen penalties against those who commit financial and physical abuse of older Kansans.
FORT LEONARD WOOD (AP) – A military judge has recommended a 20-year prison sentence for a Missouri drill sergeant found guilty of sexually assaulting and harassing several female soldiers.
Army Staff Sgt. Angel M. Sanchez was found guilty of four counts of sexual assault and six counts of abusive sexual contact. The verdict came Wednesday afternoon at a court-martial.
Sanchez was accused of using his supervisory position with the 14th Military Police Brigade at Fort Leonard Wood to isolate his victims and win their trust with favors, including cake and ice cream. One woman testified that failing to cooperate would have jeopardized her military status.
The Philadelphia native and married father of two didn’t testify during the three-day hearing but apologized to his victims, many of whom were in the courtroom, after the verdict.
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ALAN SCHER ZAGIER, Associated Press
FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. (AP) — The military court-martial of a Missouri sergeant accused of sexually assaulting eight female soldiers has resumed.
A verdict is expected Wednesday after a three-day trial for 30-year-old Army Staff Sgt. Angel M. Sanchez, who is accused of using his supervisory position with the 14th Military Police Brigade to threaten some of the women he was tasked with training.
Sanchez pleaded guilty to three charges at the outset of the military judicial hearing. His accusers said the incidents took place in the bathroom of the female barracks as well as in an office shared by drill sergeants.
Most of the allegations involved women at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, but some involved women in Afghanistan and Fort Richardson, Alaska.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The NFL players’ union has hired former federal prosecutor Richard Craig Smith to oversee its investigation into the Ray Rice domestic violence case.
Smith will look at how the league and the Baltimore Ravens handled issues of due process and discipline, as well as look at the conduct of the league office and the Ravens that led to the indefinite suspension Commissioner Roger Goodell gave to Ray Rice.
The Ravens also cut Rice after video of him punching his then-fiancee in a hotel elevator went public. Originally, Goodell had given Rice a two-game suspension.
Rice and the NFL Players Association have appealed his suspension.
A former federal prosecutor, Smith is the head of regulatory and governmental investigation for the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.
The union said in a statement Wednesday it “will request that the NFL and the Baltimore Ravens cooperate in the interest of transparency.”
For weeks, amid the allegations involving several NFL players, domestic violence has been the focus of intense national attention. Does the turmoil reflect a worsening epidemic of domestic violence, or has the U.S. in fact made great strides to curtail it? The answer is complicated.
On one hand, domestic violence committed by intimate partners — current or former spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends — has declined by more than 60 percent since the mid-1990s, according to Justice Department figures.
Yet that dramatic decrease has largely stalled, with the numbers stabilizing at a level that appalls people in the prevention field. The latest federal figures for “serious” intimate partner violence — sexual assault or aggravated physical assault — showed 360,820 such incidents in 2013, or roughly 1,000 per day.
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – A judicial evaluation committee is urging voters to keep all 50 nonpartisan judges up who are up for this year’s retention elections.
The Missouri Bar on Wednesday released positive results from a review of those judges up for election Nov. 4.
But three judges from St. Louis County only received support after appealing poor reviews. Associate circuit judges Judy Draper, Dennis Smith and Patrick Clifford all received among the lowest scores statewide in the evaluation.
Ratings only are done for judges appointed by the governor to the Supreme Court, the state’s three court of appeals and trial courts in the St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield areas. Those judges face retention elections for voters to decide whether they should keep their positions.
Rep. Jenkins and Sen. Moran visit the Topeka VA this spring
By Andy Marso
KHI News Service
TOPEKA — U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins and U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran are leading a congressional effort to delay enforcement of Medicare regulations requiring physician supervision of outpatient treatments like chemotherapy and intravenous infusions.
The rules are intended to improve patient safety. But Jenkins, Moran and several advocacy groups, including the Kansas Hospital Association, said they would burden rural providers without benefiting patients.
“It really has put a lot of burden onto the hospitals for supervision of services we just had historically done and had not had any quality issues,” said Tish Hollingsworth, the hospital association’s senior director of finance and reimbursement.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have enforced the physician supervision rule since Jan. 1. Hospitals that violate the rule risk losing Medicare reimbursement for the services provided.
Hollingsworth said her group was not aware of any hospitals being penalized yet.
“I have not heard that hospitals have had claims withheld or claims denied, because it is not the focus of any kind of audit right now,” Hollingsworth said. “But whenever there’s a regulation in place like that, we don’t know when it could become an issue.”
The U.S. House earlier this month passed H.R. 4067, co-sponsored by Jenkins, which would delay enforcement of the regulations until next year. Jenkins introduced the bill in February, but it moved slowly through the legislative process.
“Medicare policy change is not taken lightly by Congress, and bills like H.R. 4067 are a laborious process,” Tom Brandt, a spokesman for Jenkins’ office, said via email. “This bill was also in the jurisdiction of two separate House Committees – Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce. This made the process more complicated.”
The bill awaits action in the Senate, which passed similar legislation promoted by Moran earlier in the year.
Chad Austin, senior vice president of government relations for the hospital association, said those companion bills to delay the Medicare regulations are part of a “two-pronged approach” that also includes clarifying the regulations long-term.
The long-term fix, Austin said, is contained in Senate Bill 1143, which Moran introduced. It would, in part, clarify that the physician supervision required in the new regulations is consistent with other Medicare regulations that require critical access hospitals to have a physician able to respond within 30 minutes.
“While CMS believes they’re providing some guidance, there’s still some clarification from our perspective that needs to be resolved,” Austin said.
Specifically, Austin said, hospitals are unsure what level of physician supervision has to be provided to comply with the regulations.
Julie Brookhart, a CMS regional spokeswoman, said via email that for most of the outpatient therapies affected, the standard is “direct supervision,” in which “the physician or non-physician practitioner must be immediately available to furnish assistance and direction throughout the performance of the procedure.”
But some procedures call for modified levels of supervision, like “general supervision,” in which the “procedure is furnished under the physician’s overall direction and control but the physician’s presence is not required during the performance of the procedure” or “personal supervision,” in which the physician must be physically present in the room for the duration of the procedure.
CMS announced the rule in 2009 but exempted rural critical access hospitals until this year and made changes at those hospitals’ suggestion in the interim.
“We issued non-enforcement instructions of these requirements in critical access hospitals and small rural hospitals for a few years to allow them time to meet the requirements,” Brookhart said. “These non-enforcement instructions ended at the end of 2013. We are currently enforcing these requirements in these hospitals.”
Austin said because hospitals remain unsure what it means to have a physician “immediately available” under the direct supervision guidelines, Kansas’ 84 critical access hospitals should be protected from any attempts to recoup Medicare reimbursements related to such procedures until the rules are revised.
His group joined the American Hospital Association, National Rural Health Association and Anderson County Hospital in writing letters supporting the delay in the bill Jenkins co-sponsored.
Anderson County’s letter said that by applying the supervision rules even to hospital-employed practitioners in rural health clinics, CMS made it nearly impossible to comply.
Dennis Hachenberg, the hospital’s CEO, wrote that the CMS rule presented a “significant hardship and expense to rural hospitals.”
“It will limit the ability to provide our outpatients with basic therapeutic services such as IV infusions, initial antibiotic therapy, emergency cardiac drugs and blood transfusions,” Hachenberg wrote. “These are services that have been provided in rural communities safely through the years and will ultimately impact access to important services for the patients and communities we serve.”
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri lawyer accused of killing her father and his girlfriend has been ordered to remain in jail until she repays part of her father’s estate.
Susan Elizabeth Van Note, of Lee’s Summit, faces two counts of first-degree murder in the October 2010 shooting deaths of 67-year-old William Van Note and 59-year-old Sharon Dickson. William Van Note was hospitalized after the shooting and prosecutors allege his daughter forged durable power of attorney documents to persuade doctors to take him off life support.
The Jefferson City News-Tribune reports a Missouri appeals court said Tuesday that Susan Van Note sold several pieces of her father’s property as the representative of his estate. The court said she should remain jailed until she returns at least part of the estate.
Railroad regulators say some federal workplace safety standards should be extended to workers on and near the tracks.
The National Transportation Safety Board is issuing a draft report after investigating 15 deaths of railroad “roadway” employees in 2013. The number was up from eight in 2012 and five in 2011.
Among the report’s findings is that differences between regulations of the Federal Railroad Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration can be confusing.
It recommends that the railroad administration include OSHA standards during job briefings for roadway workers.
It said causes of deaths included workers hit by trains, falls from bridges, electrocution and a mudslide.
Accidents such as train crashes and derailments were not part of the study.
COLUMBIA (AP) – The University of Missouri System could soon change how it investigates sexual discrimination, assault and harassment.
The Columbia Daily Tribune reported the Board of Curators plans to vote during its Oct. 2 and 3 meeting on new rules proposed this week by system President Tim Wolfe.
Pending changes would set a tentative period of 60 days for the school to investigate cases of sexual harassment or discrimination.
Sexual assault, stalking and dating violence are federally prohibited under Title IX.
An executive order signed by Wolfe in April makes almost every employee a mandated reporter of any violations.
The most recent proposed changes would require that those employees promptly report any potential abuse.
Violators could face penalties ranging from a reprimand to expulsion if they’re found guilty during an investigation.
