JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Missourians could lose welfare benefits if they go too long without using them in the state under legislation advanced by the House.

The House gave the measure first-round approval Wednesday. It needs a second vote before moving to the state Senate.

Recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families would be warned of possible suspensions if they go 60 days without using their electronic benefit card in Missouri. The Department of Social Services would suspend accounts if benefits went unused in Missouri after 90 days. State officials would investigate whether a recipient is a Missouri resident.

A state audit in December identified 366 cases in which recipients used $461,000 of benefits exclusively out of state for at least three months.

SPRINGFIELD (AP) – A Missouri judge says prosecutors don’t have to provide evidence before the preliminary hearing for a 46-year-old man accused of killing a 10-year-old Springfield girl.

Craig Michael Wood faces first-degree murder charges in the Feb. 18 death of Hailey Owens, who was killed after being abducted in her neighborhood. Wood, a middle-school football coach, attended the hearing Wednesday in Greene County court. Wood is being held without bond.

The Springfield News-Leader reports Judge Mark Powell on Wednesday overruled a defense motion to have the prosecution produce evidence before Wood’s preliminary hearing, which has been rescheduled for April 24.

The judge also said he would take under advisement an objection by Wood’s public defender to having television cameras in the courtroom for future hearings on the case.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri hospitals have eliminated about 1,000 positions and put a hiring freeze on more than 2,100 vacant positions in the past six months.

The Missouri Hospital Association released the figures Wednesday as part of its push to get the state Legislature to expand Medicaid coverage for thousands of lower-income adults.

The eliminated or frozen positions amount to about 2.5 percent of the roughly 123,000 hospital jobs in Missouri.

The hospital association says its survey also found that 37 hospitals are delaying or canceling capital improvement projects totaling more than $100 million.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — A federal agency overseeing transportation safety is warning pilots to take extra precautions after a pair of recent plane landings at the wrong airports.

The National Transportation Safety Board issued the safety alert Wednesday, about three months after a Southwest Airlines plane with 124 passengers mistakenly landed at a small airport in Hollister, Mo., rather than one several miles away in Branson.

An Atlas Air cargo plane headed for a military base near Wichita, Kansas, in November 2013 instead landed 12 miles away at an airstrip with a runway half the size.

The safety alert notes that the risks of wrong landings increase at night and when other airports are nearby.

Government safety data shows that at least 150 flights made such mistakes over the past two decades.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says a federal law barring people convicted of minor domestic violence offenses from possessing guns can be enforced even in states where no proof of physical force is required to support the domestic violence charge.

The justices on Wednesday reinstated charges against a Tennessee man who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault in 2001. He was then charged in 2009 with illegal possession of a firearm. Lower courts threw out the gun charge because Tennessee law doesn’t require physical, or violent, force to have been used in misdemeanor domestic assault.

The Supreme Court reversed that decision in an opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The Obama administration argued that the lower courts’ reading of the law would render it unenforceable in many states.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The former chairman of a mid-Missouri bank was sentenced to two years of probation for using federal bailout money to buy a luxury condominium in Florida.

Darryl Layne Woods, former chairman of the Mainstreet Bank, based in Ashland, was sentenced Tuesday for a misdemeanor of making a false writing.

The Columbia Daily Tribune reports  Woods used money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was intended to help banks during the recession.

PARSONS — A Kansas teen died in a rollover crash just before 10 p.m. Tuesday in LaBette County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported Henry James Bussinger, 15, Parsons, was driving a 1997 Honda eastbound on Southern Boulevard 4 miles east of Parsons.

The vehicle left the roadway and overturned, and Bussinger was pronounced dead at the scene.

The KHP reported he was not wearing a seat belt.