SPRINGFIELD (AP) – A Springfield man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing money, vehicles and other belongings of Greene County residents and businesses.
Twenty-eight-year-old Zachary Allen Neal pleaded guilty Feb. 19 to identity theft, trafficking in stolen identities, first-degree burglary, stealing a motor vehicle, tampering with a motor vehicle and forgery.
Prosecutors said Neal burglarized home garages and stole vehicles, along with credit cards, check books and other items inside the vehicles, between June and August 2014.
The Springfield News-Leader reported Neal also snatched credit cards when someone would briefly leave a wallet on a store check-out counter while collecting bags.
Neal has had 18 prior felony convictions, including assault of a law enforcement officer. He was released from prison on parole in April 2014.
Kansas State pulled off a major upset over in state rival #8 Kansas Monday night 70-63 which ultimately led to fans storming the court.
This was the second straight year Kansas State has beat Kansas at home, and second straight year the game has ended in a court storm. However, the actions of a few may leave a sour taste in the mouths of many who watched it, as Kansas players were ran into during the bombardment.
Following the game, Kansas Head Coach Bill Self explained his dislike for storming the court.
“There were several students that hit our players. Not saying like with fists but you storm the court, you run in and you bump everybody stuff like that. This has got to stop,” said Self. “I think court storming is fine but surely you can get security to the point where a players safety is not involved like it is over here.”
Kansas State Head Coach Bruce Weber explained that he did apologize to Self and his team after the game for the actions of those who stormed the court.
“I felt bad, and I love the students, it’s a cool thing to be a part of that, but you also have to be careful of making sure no one get’s hurt,” said Weber.
No injuries were reported following the game.
The win was just the second of their last nine. It is also the first time the Wildcats have recorded back-to-back home wins versus the Jayhawks since the 1981-82 and 1982-83 seasons.
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – A measure to require annual inspections of abortion providers is the first abortion-related bill to move forward in the Missouri Legislature this year.
The Missouri House, by a vote of 119- 35, gave initial approval Monday to a bill requiring clinics providing abortions to be inspected each year.
Bill sponsor Republican Rep. Kathy Swan of Cape Girardeau says the inspections will protect women’s health. She cites a 2013 inspection that found violations at a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, including expired drugs.
The problems were resolved upon a follow-up visit by the state’s health department.
Opponents say the bill is intended to make it more difficult for women to access an abortion.
The House must vote again on the bill before it goes to the Senate.
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – A Missouri lawmaker is bucking national trends toward reducing use of plastic bags and instead is pushing legislation to prevent local restrictions on plastic.
The measure by Republican Rep. Dan Shaul, who is also state director of the Missouri Grocers Association, would stop Missouri cities and towns from banning or issuing fines for use of plastic bags.
Columbia is considering banning them and charging 10 cents for paper bags.
Shaul’s bill also comes months after California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags in grocery stores in hopes of reducing litter and protecting marine life.
Washington, D.C., Seattle and Chicago are among cities that have opted to ban plastic bags.
Shaul says it should be up to grocery stores and consumers to choose.
DETROIT (AP) — The death toll from crashes involving General Motors cars with defective ignition switches has climbed to 57.
The total is one more than last week. It was posted Monday on an Internet site by compensation expert Kenneth Feinberg.
Feinberg and aides are checking claims filed or postmarked before a Jan. 31 deadline to determine which are eligible for compensation. Each eligible death claim is worth at least $1 million under his guidelines. Feinberg was hired by GM to make payments.
As of Friday, he received 479 death claims and 3,866 injury claims. Of the injury claims, 94 will get compensation, up from 87 a week ago.
Feinberg has received a total of 4,345 claims. Of those, 666 were deemed ineligible, while Feinberg is reviewing or seeking documents for the rest.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A new study shows that Missouri suspended black elementary students at a higher rate than any other U.S. state, with the gap between suspensions of black and white students also tops in the country.
The report released Monday by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that Missouri elementary schools suspended 14.4 percent of their black students at least once during the 2011-12 school year, which is the latest data available.
That compares with 1.8 percent of their white Missouri counterparts and 7.6 percent of black students nationwide.
In Kansas, 1.6 percent of all elementary students were suspended at least once. That rate was 6.5 percent for black students, 5.4 percentage points higher than the rate for white students.
Photo by University of Missouri-Kansas City Mark Hoffman, director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Center for Health Insights, thinks the collaboration among Cerner Corp., Truman Medical Centers and UMKC will be “transformative.”
By Dan Margolies
Truman Medical Centers will have access to a treasure trove of health data as part of an unusual three-way collaboration with Cerner Corp. and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
The project, announced Wednesday, will allow the Kansas City, Mo., health care system to draw on medical information amassed by Cerner over the last 15 years from more than 47 million patients. The data is scrubbed of personal identifying information. “The goal is to really generate new knowledge through research,” says Harlen Hays, research manager at Cerner.
“By sharing this wealth of information, it allows for more researchers to access in a safe way – because it is de-identified – this information and create new findings.”
The collaboration, among the few of its kind in the country, was sparked by Mark Hoffman, who heads the UMKC Center for Health Insights and was previously vice president of research at Cerner for 16 years.
“When we talk about big data, this is it,” Hoffman says. The Center for Health Insights was established in 2013 and draws on data-driven research to improve understanding of human health. Truman has a longstanding relationship with the university; it’s the primary teaching hospital for UMKC’s medical school and other health-related programs.
As an example of how the collaboration might work, Hoffman says diabetes researchers at Truman may want to know how many patients between the ages of 40 and 60 have glucose levels between 150 and 200 and are taking a particular drug. Right now, they’d only be able to come up with a rough estimate.
“This application lets them give you a very precise answer to that question, and that helps move your research much faster,” he says. Cerner already provides the electronic health records system used at Truman. Combining the Cerner data with an NIH-funded software application called i2b2 – short for Informatics for Integrating Biology and Bedside – will enable medical researchers to understand considerably more about Truman’s patient population.
Jeffrey Hackman, chief medical information officer at Truman, says the project will offer ways to quickly determine if the hospital qualifies for a research project when, say, the National Institutes of Health or another research organization puts out a request.
As an example he cited a national organization that recently put out a proposal on managing patients who have both diabetes and osteoporosis. Truman had to spend considerable time determining if it had enough patients who met those criteria. “Just figuring out if we would have enough patients to qualify was a lot of work,” Hackman says.
“With i2b2, we’re able to literally drag and drop and pick a few criteria, and it spits out a list of patients with de-indentified information.” Hackman says the collaboration also will allow Truman to achieve better outcomes by comparing the health of local patients with those in the nation as a whole, or even in particular regions, “on a much more granular level than Medicare data would allow you to do.” That ability to do local analysis and then compare it to national data is “very powerful,” Hoffman says.
“Likewise we can do the opposite direction. If we do an analysis in my team with the national data, see an interesting trend and then want to confirm whether that same trend holds up locally at Truman, we’ll have all of the pieces in place to do that. And I think that will be transformative for both UMKC, Truman and hopefully Kansas City,” he says.
In theory, the collaboration should lead to improved health outcomes, reduced health disparities and even lower medical costs. For a safety net hospital like Truman, which serves some of the area’s most vulnerable populations, those are goals that aren’t always easy to achieve.
“Anytime there’s the opportunity to look at the data that’s available about the health of our patients and the health of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of patients is an opportunity to potentially improve their health,” Hackman says. “Because it’s obviously very difficult to impact that or make changes if we don’t know where we’re starting from or where the problems really are.”
Photo by University of Missouri-Kansas City Mark Hoffman, director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Center for Health Insights, thinks the collaboration among Cerner Corp., Truman Medical Centers and UMKC will be “transformative.”
Dan Margolies is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
BRANSON, Mo. (AP) — Court records say a 55-year-old man lured a 6-year-old girl to his southwest Missouri motel room with snacks and strangled her.
John P. Roberts of Branson was jailed without bond Monday in Taney County after he was charged Sunday with first-degree murder in the death of Jasmine Miller. Taney County prosecutor Jeffrey Merrell said he didn’t know whether Roberts had an attorney.
The probable cause statement, which was released Monday, says the girl’s body was found Saturday under the bed in the Windsor Inn room where Roberts was staying alone. Police said in a news release that the discovery was made while officers were investigating a lost child report. Merrell says the girl and her family also were living at the extended-stay motel.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — As St. Louis law enforcement officials grapple with a high homicide rate, they’re seeking tips from Kansas City, where an anti-violence initiative has helped decrease the number of killings.
The Kansas City Star reports that a group of St. Louis community members and law enforcement officials will visit Kansas City Monday to study the Kansas City No Violence Alliance.
There have been 22 homicides in St. Louis this year, which is already more than the city had this time last year. Kansas City has only had 10 homicides this year.
Susan Ryan, a spokeswoman for Jennifer Joyce, the circuit attorney for the city of St. Louis, says that the group has also been traveling to other cities like Philadelphia and New York to study their violence reduction programs.
SPRINGFIELD (AP) – A Springfield man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing money, vehicles and other belongings of Greene County residents and businesses.
