ST. LOUIS (AP) — Officials in many areas of Missouri are assessing damage after massive storms brought high winds, heavy rain, flash floods and tornadoes to the state.

University City in St. Louis County was hit by an EF1 tornado before dawn Thursday, and was hit again by 75 mph winds Thursday night in another round of the storm. About 100 homes were damaged.

Forecasters are calling for a dry, but cool, weekend, with highs mainly in the 50s.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — On the playing field, the University of Missouri views Auburn and LSU as Southeastern Conference rivals. Not so for students who are using their schools’ affinity for tiger mascots to promote wildlife conservation.

Campus activists from Missouri, Auburn, Louisiana State and Clemson University are gathering this weekend in Columbia for the annual meeting of the National Tigers 4 Tigers Coalition.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — The widow of a firefighter who was killed in February after a walkway collapsed at a University of Missouri apartment complex has filed a wrongful death suit against the school’s board of curators.

The Columbia Daily Tribune reports Leigh Britt and her daughter are plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Monday. Britt says the curators are responsible for her husband’s death because they failed to properly maintain or construct the University Village Apartments.

A spokesman for the University of Missouri system says the university doesn’t comment on active litigation.

JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Missouri lawmakers have passed a resolution encouraging President Barack Obama’s administration to approve a proposed oil pipeline route through the middle of the United States.

The Senate approved the measure endorsing the Keystone XL pipeline with a 24-5 vote on Thursday. The same resolution passed the House earlier this year.

Obama told a group of governors at a White House meeting in February that he expects to make a decision on the project’s future in a couple of months.

The Missouri resolution also encourages the U.S. to drill for oil off the northern coast of Alaska.
Missouri’s two U.S. senators and Gov. Jay Nixon have also come out in favor of the Keystone pipeline project.

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Good news for people who are sticklers for punctuality: The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a new atomic clock that isn’t supposed to gain or lose a second in roughly 300 million years.

The new clock was launched Thursday. It’s located at the institute’s Boulder center.

The Boulder Daily Camera reports the clock is the nation’s civilian time standard. The U.S. Naval Observatory maintains military time.

The new clock is about three times more accurate than the old one. The institute says it will keep operating both and use comparisons to improve them.

Banks, computer networks and others use the atomic clock to synchronize their own. The institute’s radio broadcasts update about 50 million timekeepers daily. Its Internet service gets about 8 billion automated synchronization requests daily.

JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Missouri senators have passed legislation that could lead to a reduction in jobless benefits for people laid off in the future.

The bill would make Missouri one of only a few states to link the duration of unemployment benefits to the state’s unemployment rate.

Missouri workers currently can receive unemployment benefits for 20 weeks.

Under the bill, the full 20 weeks of benefits would be available only if the state’s unemployment rate is at least 9 percent. The maximum duration of jobless benefits would be cut by a week for each one-half percentage point reduction in the unemployment rate – bottoming out at 13 weeks of benefits when the unemployment rate is less than 6 percent.

The Senate’s 24-8 vote Thursday sends the bill to the House.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Beer breweries in Nebraska are sounding an alarm about a federal proposal that would put an end to their practice of giving spent grains to local farmers to use as cattle feed.

The practice is mutually beneficial. It not only gives farmers cheap and nutritious feed for cattle, it keeps breweries’ from having to pay the cost of hauling the spent grain to a landfill.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the federal Food and Drug Administration wants to require brewers to meet the same standards that livestock and pet-food manufactures must meet. That would include sanitary handling procedures, record-keeping and other food safety processes.

Several Lincoln breweries say those requirements would be too onerous, and they’d have to stop donating the spent grain.