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Prosecutors said Perez, who doesn't speak English and is represented by a public defender, beat and sexually assaulted a 93-year-old woman in her home Sunday.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and the attorneys general of 11 other states sued the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday, demanding that the agency turn over documents the states allege will show the agency cooperates with environmental groups as part of a "sue and settle" legal strategy to develop regulations. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City, alleges that binding consent decrees between the EPA and environmental groups that have sued the agency over the years have led to new rules and regulations for states without allowing their attorneys general to defend their interests and those of its...

The hot weather prompted the Davis family to cookout Sunday, July 7th. But the cookout ended when their dog Scooby started barking toward their backyard. "When I came around the corner there was a vehicle parked right out here in our alley, and I hadn't noticed at first but there was a guy completely under the hood of my husbands truck," said Jaynessa Davis, homeowner. Two men the Davis' had never seen before were rummaging under the hood of their truck. "When she said what are you doing, he said oh we are just trying to get a battery,"...

House GOP leaders took a big gamble Thursday in bringing a farm bill without food stamps to the floor, and it paid off — just barely. The House passed the bill 216-208, inching across a 213-vote threshold without a single Democrat supporting the measure.

Lambrecht Chevrolet of Pierce, Neb., was like many Midwestern, small-town dealers — owned and operated by a family, with minimal overhead and little need for advertising since most customers were neighbors. Ray and Mildred Lambrecht ran the dealership with just one employee for 50 years before closing up, and later this year the Lambrechts will sell off a trove of 500-odd vehicles they've held onto over the decades — including roughly 50 with less than 10 miles on their odometers. It's less a car sale than a time capsule auction. While many of the cars in the Lambrecht collection were...

Tenaska Inc. has dropped plans for a 600-megawatt power plant in West Texas, marking the latest in a series of coal-fired projects abandoned because of cheap and abundant natural gas. The Omaha, Neb.-based company on Friday also announced that it no longer will pursue the development of a coal-fired power plant in Illinois, saying it will shift its attention to natural gas and renewable sources. Since Tenaska began pursuing the coal projects in 2006, several market and policy changes “have contributed to our belief that these projects are no longer viable,” said Dave Fiorelli, the company’s president of development. The...

... In short, Mr. Obama is about to hammer the American energy industry, and he's doing it for money. The real elephant in the room is the Keystone XL pipeline project intended to bring Canadian oil to American Gulf Coast refineries and the resulting products onto the international market. In fact, the title of the Bloomberg article cited above includes the words "Keystone foes." Mr. Obama has already delayed Keystone, once and a final decision is coming up. While Keystone has received a lot of press attention, there are two interrelated aspects that have not yet come to the surface....

That's the allegation contained in a class action lawsuit, and it was reported by no less than the New York Times in 2007.  Business Insider noted this and other troubling information on the possible magnitude of NSA spying on Americans. Over the weekend James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times - who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for this story on the NSA gaining the cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to customer data - mentioned a detail from 2007 (emphasis ours):In Virginia, a telecommunications consultant reported, Verizon had set up a dedicated fiber-optic line running from New Jersey to...

Neb. Christian College Expels Lesbian, Charges Tuition [Pics in URL] Danielle Powell, right, and her spouse Michelle Rogers are June 12, 2013. OMAHA, NEB. Danielle Powell was going through a hard time in the spring of 2011, just months away from graduating from a conservative Christian college in Nebraska. She had fallen in love with another woman, a strictly forbidden relationship at a school where even prolonged hugs were banned. Powell said she was working at a civil rights foundation in Mississippi to finish her psychology degree when she was called back to Grace University in Omaha and confronted about...

To paraphrase William Shakespeare, there’s something rotten in Washington, and the odor is emanating not just from the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. It’s also coming from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies accused of colluding with radical environmental groups to write regulations that are threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study has found that the EPA has given green groups a seat at the table when drafting environmental regulations, but it has excluded the people and industries most likely to be affected. The Sierra Club has participated in “closed-door...

Mayor Jean Stothert is dedicated to making Omaha city government more efficient and customer service oriented. Her priorities include improving public safety and reducing crime, enacting policies that help attract new businesses and create jobs in Omaha, and restoring the public’s confidence in city government. Mayor Stothert is also committed to smarter budgeting by eliminating waste and finding efficiencies, as well as keeping taxes low for Omaha families and businesses. Demonstrating her commitment to fiscal discipline and leading by example, Mayor Stothert has cut the mayor’s personnel budget and her own salary by 10 percent. A graduate of Seattle Pacific...

Several counties want to secede from Colorado The counties in Colorado that say they want to leave the state / KCNC-TV Several Colorado counties that strongly oppose increased regulation of the oil and gas industry say they want to form their own state. They are planning on calling it North Colorado or Northern Colorado, reports CBS affiliate KCNC in Denver. The counties are frustrated with the new agricultural and energy bills that have recently been signed into law. "We really feel in northern and northeastern Colorado that we are ignored -- citizens' concerns are ignored, and we truly feel disenfranchised,"...

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this morning on a measure that will effectively end debate on the misnamed “farm” bill, cutting off opportunities to fix the deeply flawed legislation. At a cost of a nearly $1 trillion — 80 percent of which goes to the food-stamp program — American taxpayers deserve a robust debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) won’t let that happen. This isn’t the first time Reid has pulled this stunt. His iron-fisted approach to running the Senate is one reason Americans hold Washington in such low regard and have a strong distrust of politicians....

Nebraska voters are very upset about the IRS and Department of Justice scandals, according to a new Conservative Intelligence poll of the state conducted by Harper Polling. Seventy-six percent of likely Nebraska voters believe the IRS workers who targeted conservatives should be fired and/or face legal consequences, the poll shows. And 54 percent said the scandal makes them less likely “to vote for a Senate candidate who supports the Obama Administration.” ...

Omaha should cut down on suburban sprawl, restructure incentives for inner-city development and do a better job sharing data between government departments, according to a new report from IBM business consultants. The city was one of 33 communities that received a grant last year for a study. A team of five consultants visited Omaha in October to assess the city's planning and development efforts and offer their recommendations. Monday, the city released the consultants' final report.

Whenever Congress throws too much into one bill, special interests profit. The massive farm bill — which is already 80 percent food stamps — is no exception.

As late as last year, the FBI ran a child pornography operation in an attempt to nab its customers.  The service ran for two weeks "while attempting to identify more than 5,000 customers, according to agent's statements to the court." Court records indicate the site continued to distribute child pornography online while under FBI control; the Seattle-based special agent, a specialist in online crimes against children, detailed the investigation earlier this month in a statement to the court. The methods used in the child pornography ring depart from traditional investigations, "historically, child pornography investigations stem from tips made to law...

Live coverage: http://www.ksn.com/weather/live-radar-and-storm-coverage/ Large tornado confirmed on the ground. Weather service has issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation warning.

Rev. James D. Conley, the Catholic bishop for the diocese of Lincoln, Neb., said the mainstream media, which usually pursue news stories that involve violence and death, largely ignored the gruesome story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his “house of horrors” abortion clinic that was “reminiscent of Auschwitz.” “Somehow, this story went largely unnoticed by mainstream reporters,” said Bp. Conley in his May 3 column. “One would expect a murderous doctor, running a ‘clinic’ reminiscent of Auschwitz, to face a media blitz and a burst of public outrage.”“Instead, Gosnell’s trial has been treated as a low-key, local story,” said the...

Shortly after Barack Obama won reelection in November, New Jersey governor Chris Christie pointed out that Republicans’ cloudy political prospects had a bright silver lining. “One of the reasons you have 30 Republican governors in America, and why we’re the only organization to add Republican strength,” Christie said, “is because people see us getting things done.” Christie’s stance countered most of the elite postelection commentary, which gleefully pronounced the Republican Party’s political irrelevance. But the governor was right. Since Obama first took office in 2008, Republicans have picked up a net nine governorships, bringing their total to 30 states,...