JOPLIN (AP) – A southwest Missouri man finds out that winning big at a casino and leaving with a woman he met there don’t always end up well.
The Joplin Globe reports a 29-year-old Joplin man won $1,200 Thursday at Downstream Casino, just across the Oklahoma border.
Police say he fell asleep on a couch in his home but was awakened by two men holding a knife to his throat and beating him with a baseball bat.
Police Capt. Bob Higginbotham says the attackers took all of his winnings and left, apparently also taking with them a woman the victim met at the casino and brought home.
The crimes remained under investigation and no arrests had been made as of Friday.
BETHANY- A Missouri man was injured in an accident just after 3 a.m. on Saturday in Harrison County.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 1992 Nissan driven by Anthony J. Harper, 21, Ridgeway, was traveling on U.S. 136 three miles west of Bethany.
The vehicle crossed the centerline. The driver overcorrected. The vehicle traveled off the south side of the highway, struck an embankment, became airborne, struck a fence and overturned in a field.
Harper was transported to Harrison County Community Hospital.
The MSHP reported he was not wearing a seat belt.
BONNE TERRE, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri man appealing his conviction in a live-in girlfriend’s murder has enlisted some unusual character witnesses: three former sheriff’s deputies who testified they planned to arrest another suspect until state troopers intervened.
Seventy-two-year-old Donald “Doc” Nash is serving a life sentence after his 2009 conviction in Judy Lynn Spencer’s death. The 1982 killing remained unsolved until new DNA evidence linked Nash to Spencer, a 21-year-old Salem hospital receptionist who was strangled with her shoelace and then shot.
The case against Nash relied primarily on minute traces of his DNA found beneath Spencer’s fingernails. Defense lawyers say that’s typical for couples living together.
A federal judge has ruled that Nash makes a strong claim for innocence but should pursue his appeal in state court.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Developers hoping to operate a state-owned casino in southeast Kansas have offered four proposals that provide a sharp contrast in approaches.
The two most expensive proposals would place the casinos near the Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas borders. One is Castle Rock Casino Resort’s $145 million facility, the other is a yet-unnamed casino proposed by Southeast Kansas Casino Partners for $140 million.
The Wichita Eagle reports both would compete with the Downstream Casino Resort just across the Oklahoma state line.
The other two are more moderately priced and would place the casino near Pittsburg, catering more to regional gamblers. The Emerald City Casino Resort would be a $110 million project in Frontenac north of Pittsburg, while the $62 million Kansas Crossing Casino would operate south of the city.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A Kansas City, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for illegally possessing firearms, following a high-speed car chase that ended with a collision that killed an employee of the Kansas City Police Crime Laboratory according to Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that
Larneal D. Davis, 29, of Kansas City, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Howard F. Sachs to 10 years in federal prison without parole.
On Aug. 12, 2014, Davis pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of firearms. Davis admitted that he possessed two firearms in the vehicle he was driving on July 6, 2013. The two firearms – a Taurus .40-caliber semi-automatic pistol and a Ruger, .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol – were discovered in Davis’s wrecked vehicle following its collision with another vehicle at 65th Street and Troost in Kansas City.
Michael Chou, a crime scene technician at the Kansas City Police Crime Laboratory, was killed when his vehicle was broadsided by Davis’s vehicle while Davis was fleeing from Kansas City police officers. Davis was arrested a short distance from the accident scene after a brief pursuit on foot.
Under federal law, it is illegal for anyone who has been convicted of a felony to be in possession of any firearm or ammunition. Davis has prior felony convictions for possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute, carrying a firearm in connection with a drug offense and distribution of a controlled substance.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney D. Michael Green. It was investigated by the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department.
Former Syracuse and NFL quarterback Don McPherson spoke Tuesday at a conference on domestic violence in Topeka. Credit Dave Ranney / Heartland Health Monitor
By Dave Ranney
Last year, more than 25,000 women and children spent time in one of the 29 domestic violence shelters in Kansas. A few men did as well.
“These are just the ones we know about,” said Joyce Grover, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.
Between 2009 and 2013, law enforcement officials in Kansas investigated nearly 96,000 reports of domestic violence, resulting in 68,000 arrests.
The best way to bring these numbers down, Grover said, is to “stop it before it starts.” And the best way to do that, she said, is to get people talking about changing the long-unchallenged “beliefs, attitudes and behaviors” that condone — or don’t do enough to condemn — violent relationships.
“The big picture we’re all aiming for here is for a world without intimate partner violence,” Grover said Tuesday at the start of a two-day conference in Topeka titled “Reweaving Our Social Fabric: Engaging to Prevent Sexual and Domestic Violence.”
Don McPherson, a 1987 consensus All-American quarterback at Syracuse University who later played in the National Football League and Canadian Football League, gave one of the conference’s keynote addresses.
Now an advocate and educator, McPherson, too, encouraged those in the audience to have public discussions aimed at dissecting the root causes of domestic violence.
“We don’t raise boys to be men,” he said. “We raise them not to be women, and in that process we raise them in a very narrow way in how they see themselves, how they come to understand who they are and how they come to see women as ‘less than.’ That’s an attitude that not only leads to violence against women but also to our collective silence about it.”
Similarly, McPherson said the worst thing a coach can say to a boy is “You throw like a girl” or “You run like a girl.” He also said that adults should stop using the adage, “Boys will be boys.”
Concerning the NFL’s response to Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice’s assault of Janay Palmer, his then-girlfriend and now his wife, McPherson said, “I hope that at some point, as a culture and as a society and as a nation, we get to ask the question: Why do we idolize and lionize men in professional sport who are part of a culture of abuse? And at some point, we have to ask why the NFL continues to give us this product when we know these are not necessarily good people.”
He questioned the media’s stories on why Palmer remained with Rice after he knocked her unconscious in a hotel elevator. “Why didn’t anyone ask why Ray Rice remained in that relationship?” McPherson said. “Think about it. What kind of man would want to stay with someone he’s spit on, someone he assaulted on a public elevator? What does that say about him?”
He welcomed President Obama’s appearance in a video shown Sunday during the Grammy Awards that condemned domestic violence. But the nation’s music industry, he said, has done little to lessen its promotion of “misogamy, sexism and violence against women.”
Laura Patzner, who runs the Family Crisis Center, a 10-county domestic violence shelter based in Great Bend, welcomed McPherson and Grover’s calls encouraging public conversations about domestic violence.
“The biggest thing that people don’t understand, I think, is how pervasive it is,” Patzner said. “This isn’t just about abusive marriages or how many people get arrested or how many people we see (at the shelter). It’s cultural, it’s bullying, it’s about how we get along with others.”
Patzner said her 16-bed shelter in almost always full.
“I tell people we just did an expansion – we bought two blow-up mattresses,” she said. “When we need them, which is a lot of the time, we use them.”
Grover encouraged any civic group or organization interested in hosting a conversation on domestic violence issues to contact the shelter in their region.
Dave Ranney is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
The egg is in hot water again thanks to recent reports of high cholesterol levels in the U.S. population. With this linkage between high serum cholesterol and coronary heart disease (CHD), these studies and others have led people to believe CHD is the fault of “those dirty rotten eggs.”
Not so fast.
The three major risk factors for coronary heart disease are cigarette smoking, high blood pressure and elevated serum cholesterol levels, according to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
Other risk factors for this disease – gender and family history for example – cannot be changed – or not easily, ACSH says. Males appear to be at greater risk than females.
If there is a history of heart disease in your family, giving up that omelet will do nothing to change genetics.
Some risk factors can be controlled, though not necessarily through diet. The risk of coronary heart disease can be reduced through exercise and stress reduction, ACSH says.
How do eggs fit into all of this?
Eggs contain high levels of cholesterol – 218 mg of cholesterol per egg yolk, studies say. But with all the bad ink lately, it is easy to forget the benefits of eggs.
Eggs continue to be an excellent protein source and low in calories. Eggs also contain riboflavin, vitamin B12, folic acid, phosphorus, iodine, iron, vitamin A, calcium, zinc and thiamin. Eggs are convenient, versatile and low in price.
Every year, there’s talk about “lowered-cholesterol” eggs – you know eggs without the yolk, egg whites, etc. This sounds good until you also hear about eggs that smelled like fish. Seems the hen’s diet consisted of fish oil supplements. Some eggs in this category actually contained more cholesterol than the USDA standards.
All cost significantly more than average large eggs.
So what is good for breakfast?
Eggs in moderation is the simple answer. Major health organizations recommend three eggs a week.
So go ahead and eat that occasional omelet, just remember to vary your breakfast with fruits, cereals, muffins, bagels and other foods.
Here’s to health and egg in your diet.
John Schlageck, a Hoxie native, is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.
Google mapJEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Sen. Claire McCaskill is going to Cuba this weekend to learn about the country and help open doors for Missouri in the agricultural and business sectors.
McCaskill’s office said in a statement Friday the senator has met with Missouri agricultural groups and Cuba’s top diplomat to the U.S. to prepare for the trip.
McCaskill will return next week. While in Cuba, she plans to meet with diplomats, business owners, health care workers and other groups.
The trip comes following President Barack Obama’s recent decision to normalize relations and ease trade restrictions with the nation that’s off the coast of Florida.
Gov. Jay Nixon plans to travel to Havana on March 1 to build relationships and increase opportunities for Missouri to export goods to Cuba.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – A University of Missouri-Kansas City professor has resigned after an audit found that he told a subordinate to submit inflated data in applying for rankings for the business school.
Michael Song said Friday that in a written statement that he was leaving to allow the school to focus on “training the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators.” UMKC Chancellor Leo Morton thanked Song for putting students first.
Earlier this month, the Princeton Review announced it was pulling the school’s 2014 through 2011 top 25 rankings for graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship programs.
The move came just days after the release of an audit that Gov. Jay Nixon had requested. Questions arose after an article last year in The Kansas City Star called into question the school’s pursuit of higher rankings.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A man convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing an 8-year-old Topeka girl before stuffing her body in a clothes dryer has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that a Shawnee County District judge handed down the sentence Friday for 31-year-old Bill Frank Davis Jr.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty after Davis was convicted in December of 10 counts, including capital murder in the 2012 killing of 8-year-old Ahliyah Nachelle Irvin. But defense witnesses testified that Davis suffered from severe mental illness, and jurors couldn’t unanimously decide to recommend execution.
Along with his life sentence, Davis also received more than 60 years in prison for other convictions.
Ahliyah’s family has said they’re pleased Davis will spend the rest of his in prison.
JOPLIN (AP) – A southwest Missouri man finds out that winning big at a casino and leaving with a woman he met there don’t always end up well.
