Pregnancy ban lifted; gun raffle to benefit Orlando victims; boxing with Parkinson's
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Odd and interesting news from the Midwest.
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LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — About 1,200 Jehovah's Witnesses have volunteered to clean the venue in Lincoln where their annual regional convention is scheduled to be held this weekend.
The Lincoln Journal Star (http://bit.ly/299yuuM ) reports that more than 6,000 Jehovah's Witnesses will attend the convention at Pinnacle Bank Arena this weekend.
On Thursday morning, church members from Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri began cleaning the entire venue. They'll each volunteer three to eight hours.
The group has gone so far as to wipe down the railings, scrape gum off the bottom of chairs and vacuum rooms that will remain mostly empty.
They'll clean the area floor to ceiling again after the event ends Sunday.
Convention spokesman Brian Esser says the group likes to leave the venue cleaner than it was when they arrived.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com
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OAK CREEK, Wis. (AP) — Authorities are investigating after a semitrailer containing 20,000 pounds of cheese was stolen from a parking lot in southeastern Wisconsin.
Capt. Mike Bolender of the Oak Creek Police Department says the cheese was reported missing around 2 a.m. Thursday after the driver parked his semitrailer, left for several hours and returned to find it was gone.
Bolender says the cheese was produced by manufacturer U.S. Foods and was on its way to the New York City area from Green Bay. He says U.S. Foods values the cheese at more than $46,000.
A semitrailer carrying $70,000 worth of cheese was stolen from a Germantown trucking company in January.
- By GRANT SCHULTE Associated Press
- Updated
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska state officials failed to correct the prison terms of 15 inmates after discovering in 2014 that hundreds of sentences had been miscalculated, the corrections department's director acknowledged Thursday.
Scott Frakes said staffers didn't calculate new sentences two years ago even after learning they were inaccurate. He said he didn't know why the sentences weren't adjusted, but the staffers responsible were from a previous administration and no longer work for the department.
"The work was assigned and not completed," Frakes said in a briefing with reporters at the Capitol.
Frakes said corrections staffers reviewed more than 900 other sentences, and no other errors were discovered.
The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services announced in 2014 that it released more than 300 prisoners too early because it failed to follow two state Supreme Court rulings that spelled out the correct way to calculate sentences. Most were allowed to remain free because their correct release date had passed, but 32 are in limbo until a judge rules in two "test cases" that will determine whether they have to complete their sentences behind bars.
About 600 others who were still in custody at the time had their release dates changed. Some employees at the time told a legislative committee that they suspected the sentences contained errors, but were afraid to bring the issue to their superiors.
One of the 15 inmates, Sean McLaughlin, was rearrested on Wednesday. Another inmate, Aaron Finney, was discharged from parole too early because of the error and may have to resume it. Neither man has been charged with any crimes since he was released, Frakes said.
Frakes said 10 of the inmates are still incarcerated in Nebraska's prison system and will have their sentences adjusted, one is in federal custody, one is in a California prison and one was deported to Mexico.
McLaughlin was serving a four-year sentence for drug possession when he was released. However, the sentence that was miscalculated was for attempted burglary, methamphetamine possession and child abuse that began in 2009. Julie Smith, the department's general counsel, said McLaughlin still owes time for those crimes.
Finney was serving a three- to six-year sentence for firearm possession by a felon and shoplifting.
Frakes said he spoke briefly with McLaughlin on Wednesday after he was rearrested, and the former inmate was confused and concerned about why he had to return to custody. Frakes said he hopes prison officials can place McLaughlin in a work release program so he can return to the community, but the process could take as long as 90 days.
"He was still trying to process what had happened," Frakes said.
Smith said a judge will determine how much parole time Finney owes the state.
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MASON CITY, Iowa (AP) — A judge has lifted his pregnancy ban on a north Iowa woman convicted of child endangerment for shaking her infant son in 2014.
That move comes only after the Iowa Court of Appeals last month deemed the ban unconstitutional.
The Mason City Globe Gazette reports (http://bit.ly/298b7Sl ) that Judge James Drew lifted the ban on Tuesday.
Stephanie Fatland had appealed her child endangerment convictions and challenged her sentence of five years' probations. Among the conditions of probation was an order prohibiting her from becoming pregnant during probation.
In May, the appeals court upheld Fatland's conviction but said Drew's no-pregnancy order violated her "fundamental right to procreation."
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Information from: Globe Gazette, http://www.globegazette.com/
- By Jackie Rehwald Springfield News-Leader
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SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — Don't let her walker or silver hair fool you. Or that she has battled Parkinson's Disease for 16 years.
Patricia Sundstrom can pack a punch.
"You are used to feeling like you are getting worse," she said, following a boxing workout. "And this, it feels like you are getting better. And that is big."
Sundstrom was among the first students to sign up for The Bodysmith's Rock Steady Boxing program, a non-contact boxing fitness class for people with Parkinson's. Classes are tailored to meet the needs of clients and different levels are offered to accommodate varying degrees of the disease.
Susan Gilmore is one of three certified Rock Steady Boxing instructors at The Bodysmith.
"It's really life-changing for us. We see their progress," Gilmore said. "They say, 'I feel like I'm getting my life back.'"
Sundstrom nodded.
"I had gotten to the point where I would not go out to lunch with people," she said. "It was just too hard, too hard to manipulate the knife and fork and the sandwich or to chew.
"Last week I went out to lunch and I didn't think about it."
Mark Overby, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's last year, said he is also getting his life back.
Overby said he hadn't been able to play a round of golf in three years. Since taking Rock Steady boxing classes, he's strong enough to enjoy the sport again.
"It's the small things. It felt great," he said. "I know it's helping. It forces me to concentrate. Concentrating is a problem.
"There is something about the activity and what you do, it just makes me feel the best I've felt in three years."
Overby and Sundstrom agree there is something about hitting a boxing bag — their arms crossing the midline of their body — that improves coordination and balance.
There's more than just the boxing component to the classes, reports the Springfield News-Leader (http://sgfnow.co/28Zeej8 ). There's stretching, balance moves, core work, weights, foot and leg work, and shouting exercises. Each exercise is designed to combat a specific symptom of the disease.
For Sundstrom, she and her instructor spend much of the time doing walking and marching exercises to help lengthen her gait and help with balance and stability.
Overby, whose disease is less advanced, spends more time punching the bags and beating a large tire with a baseball bat.
Watching Overby and Gilmore side-skip across the room, tossing a weighted ball back and forth, Coach Polly Brandman smiled.
"That forces you to be aware of your surroundings," Brandman explained. "Look how intense the workouts are. This would push anybody."
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About RockSteady Boxing
Rock Steady Boxing was founded in 2006 by a former Indiana prosecutor, Scott C. Newman, who has Parkinson's.
According to the Rock Steady website, the seed for what would eventually become Rock Steady Boxing was planted when Newman began intense, one-on-one, boxing training just a few years after he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's at the age of 40.
Newman witnessed the dramatic improvement in his physical health, agility and daily functioning through the intense and high-energy workouts. Newman's quality of life improved dramatically in a short time due to his fighting back against Parkinson's disease, the website says. Newman opened a small gym and boxing ring in a donated corner of a corporate employee gym as Rock Steady's first home.
Since then, about 140 affiliate studios have opened worldwide.
Though participants have reported anecdotal success for years, new research by the University of Indianapolis supports the notion that people with Parkinson's disease who participate in boxing training maintain greater physical ability and quality of life than those who participate in other modes of exercise.
The study found that boxers demonstrated significantly better balance and walking function over time, as well as greater distance on a functional reach test, compared to people who chose other forms of exercise.
The key may not be boxing per se, but instead the unique combination of activities that are common to boxing training, Professor Stephanie Combs-Miller said in a release from the university. The Rock Steady Boxing program is "multimodal" she said, enhancing strength, agility, endurance, flexibility and other positive traits.
"I think it's the collection of all these elements that is working for these people," she said. "People don't necessarily have to put on boxing gloves."
Shauna Smith, owner of The BodySmith, signed on to be a Rock Steady Boxing affiliate last year, traveled to Indianapolis for training and started her program this spring.
"Even though we started with small numbers, we've seen some great progress very quickly, which is encouraging," Smith said. "It's really rewarding for everyone involved."
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Information from: Springfield News-Leader, http://www.news-leader.com
- By CARLA K. JOHNSON AP Medical Writer
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CHICAGO (AP) — A jury's $53 million award in a birth injury case set a Cook County record this week, but won't necessarily be the final word after University of Chicago Medical Center fought back in a mistrial motion charging the plaintiff's attorney with making unfounded, inflammatory statements evoking Nazi Germany.
The jury's decision came Wednesday after a four-week trial before Cook County Circuit Judge John Kirby in a case involving an infant born at the hospital in 2004.
It is the highest award reported for a plaintiff in a birth injury case in Cook County, said John L. Kirkton, editor of the Jury Verdict Reporter, which has compiled Illinois awards data since 1959. The amount is notable, too, because "it's very tough to win a medical malpractice case at trial," Kirkton said. "More than seven out of 10 civil jury trials involving medical negligence go against the plaintiff."
Michigan attorney Geoffrey Fieger, known for defending assisted-suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian for nearly a decade, represented 12-year-old Isaiah Ewing. The lawsuit claimed the hospital was negligent during his birth and could have prevented his brain injuries if doctors had performed a cesarean section earlier. The boy has mental retardation and cerebral palsy, according to the lawsuit.
Attorneys for the hospital argued that the boy's condition was more likely caused by an infection before his birth.
"We have great sympathy for Isaiah Ewing and his family," hospital officials said in a written statement. "We strongly disagree with the jury's verdict and believe Mr. Fieger's conduct influenced the decision."
In one of two motions seeking a mistrial filed Wednesday, University of Chicago Medicine attorneys said Fieger's closing argument included improper prejudicial comments, accused the hospital of lying and referenced "a minister of truth and propaganda," which was "an obvious intent to evoke that incomparably horrific regime" of Nazi Germany.
Fieger's law office announced the jury award Thursday in a news release. "The University of Chicago mounted an obscene defense claiming that Isaiah's brain injury was due to an unknown phantom infection," Fieger said in the statement.
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Follow AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson at https://twitter.com/CarlaKJohnson
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ST. LOUIS (AP) — Like most sporting venues, Busch Stadium prohibits guns. Soon, gun-carrying Cardinals fans will have the option of leaving their weapon in an armored truck instead of their car.
Starting July 15, a company called Weapon Safe Armory will park an armored truck at a bar that sits in the shadow of Busch Stadium. Owner Justin Hulsey, a National Guard veteran from Herculaneum, Missouri, outfitted a 22-foot-long vehicle with armor and security cameras, and hired guards to surround it when the vehicle is parked in public.
The plan is to park it at the bar for all Cardinals games. Fans can lock up guns and other valuables. The cost per item is $10 cash, or $15 with a credit card.
Both the Cardinals and St. Louis police have declined comment.
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WAVERLY, Iowa (AP) — A bur oak tree in Waverly estimated to be about 217 years old will soon be taken down.
The tree is on the bank of the Cedar River outside the city's Civic Center, and has about two to three years of life left, The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (http://bit.ly/29cax91 ) reports.
Iowa Department of Natural Resources Forest Health Program leader Tivon Feeley said he noticed some signs of decay years ago that is not uncommon for a tree of its age but the tree's condition has since worsened.
Feeley said there's evidence of root fungus and the tree is beginning to lean. Feeley said the likelihood that the tree, or some of its branches, might fall grows in its weakened state.
"It's a risk to people who use that parking lot and to City Hall," Feeley said.
The tree was almost taken down in 1991, when the city planned the Civic Center, but a couple led an effort to raise about $10,000 to design the building and parking lot to accommodate the oak tree.
The city may plant one of the tree's offspring in the same spot once it's taken down.
Waverly Leisure Services director Tab Ray said that is unlikely to immediately happen because most of the trees sprouted from acorns from the old oak tree are either too big or too small to transplant.
Another option would be to leave the tree's trunk where it is and create a wood sculpture.
No action will be taken until the fall after the tree produces acorns. Ray said he wants to give people one more chance to collect acorns if they wish to grow a tree of their own.
"We're going to try to treat it with respect," Ray said. "We'll put a plan together, and hopefully people remember it for a very long time."
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Information from: Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, http://www.wcfcourier.com
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CINCINNATI (AP) — Police say a man on a bus stop bench who was pinned against a building when a minivan struck him has died in Cincinnati.
City police say 55-year-old Wendell Allen Reed was sitting on the bench around 1 p.m. Wednesday when a minivan struck him after ending up on the sidewalk following a crash with another vehicle. Reed was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
Police say the minivan failed to stop at a red light and struck another vehicle before ending up on the sidewalk, where it struck Reed, another pedestrian and a building. The other pedestrian had minor injuries.
The two drivers weren't injured. Officers say a passenger in the minivan was treated for minor injuries at a hospital and released.
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BLOOMINGBURG, Ohio (AP) — State authorities say fireworks worth $40,000 have been stolen from a fireworks company in southern Ohio.
Investigators in the State Fire Marshal's Office said in a release that the theft occurred around 1:30 a.m. June 24 at Phantom Fireworks in Bloomingburg, about 40 miles south of Columbus. They believe the suspects arrived in multiple vehicles, cut through a fence to gain access to the property and then cut through a semi-trailer used to store the fireworks.
Authorities says those types of thefts have been reported in Pennsylvania and Florida and a similar robbery attempt was made at the Chillicothe (chihl-ih-KAHTH'-ee) Fireworks store in Chillicothe.
Phantom Fireworks is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the identification of those responsible for the theft.
- By ROY WENZL The Wichita Eagle
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WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Capt. Jeff Weible of the Wichita Police Department stood on a sidewalk on Douglas about a year ago, off duty, talking with an emergency room doctor. They watched as a motorcyclist rolled by, texting with both hands, at a speed Weible estimated at 35 mph.
One trouble with distracted driving, Weible said, is that "you are not monitoring your surroundings."
Another is that you could get killed.
"Yeah, that guy could end up in my ER," Weible remembers the doctor saying.
Many other drivers who looked illegally at cellphones or iPads or even DVDs have crashed and died. They've killed passengers and pedestrians, children and bicyclists and other drivers. In Kansas, 76 of the 341 fatal crashes in 2014 were identified by police as involving a distracted driver, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nationally, in 2014, 3,179 people were killed, and 431,000 were injured in distracted-driving crashes, according to Distraction.gov.
Some people have speculated that the danger will decrease after technologists invent better hands-free tools, like smartwatches.
But Jibo He, a scientist from Wichita State University, just completed research showing how smartwatches affect drivers.
It's worse.
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Research on simulators
Before cellphones, distracted-driving deaths were a small percentage of annual highway death tolls.
The big highway killer has been, and still is, drunken driving. In 2014, there were 9,967 fatalities involving drivers with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 or higher, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That's one in three highway deaths.
The National Safety Council now estimates that at least 27 percent of all accidents, from fatalities to fender-benders, are caused by distracted driving, said spokeswoman Maureen Vogel.
Unlike with alcohol, there's no real test for distraction. Unless drivers admit fault, it's hard to prove.
Jibo He is a psychology professor at WSU. The Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/28Yc6CT ) reports that he tested dozens of people three years ago while they held smartphones and drove in simulators. They drove all over the simulated roads and simulated ditches.
Now he's tested 34 more drivers wearing smartwatches, which technologists are predicting will become more popular soon. One possible virtue of smartwatches as opposed to smartphones is that you can keep both hands on the wheel.
But the drivers with smartwatches took their eyes off the road, drove into ditches and sped up and slowed down.
Jibo He sat at one of his simulators the other day with a smartwatch strapped to his wrist. He touched the simulation accelerator, merged into traffic, reached over to tap the screen on his smartwatch - and steered into the ditch.
"Look at that," he said. "I was only trying to open an app."
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Fatalities
Kip Scott, 43, remembers learning to drive and how the distraction he got warned about, in that simpler time decades ago, was "don't turn the radio on."
But now people blow through stop signs, as a woman did so recently at West 37th Street North and North Tyler Road.
Scott hit the brakes in the intersection and watched as the woman's car shot past him. "She had her head down and didn't look up, or if she did, it was after she passed through the intersection," he said.
Scott, the owner and operator of Prairie Pines Festivals, said he and his wife have tried to coach their teenage son as he learns to drive. "The phone has to stay in the back seat when you drive, where you can't reach it," Scott tells him.
"But we're not so much worried about him as we are about him maybe getting T-boned by somebody else," he said.
Tyler Blake Pettigrew, a 27-year-old Emporia man, was convicted on June 15 of vehicular homicide in connection with a 2012 crash that left one person dead and another injured, the Kansas Attorney General's Office said. He was convicted of vehicular homicide, use of a wireless communications device while driving, speeding and following too close. Sentencing has been set for Aug. 1 in Lyon County District Court.
In Wichita, police have worked several fatality accidents caused by distracted driving in recent years
Two passengers died in Wichita in April when the driver of their car looked down at his cellphone to get directions and then hit a pole, Wichita police said.
In 2010, a woman driving west on Kellogg heard her phone buzz. She told police she took her eyes off the road to shut the phone off and hit and fatally injured a man who had stopped to remove debris from the road.
In 2008, a man was driving home on Tyler after a date with his girlfriend. Witnesses told police later that he was going too fast for road conditions and lost control, hitting a tree. He died.
Police determined that the victim had sent a text to his girlfriend just before crash.
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'It freaked me out'
Distraction is easy. Talking to a passenger can reduce a driver's safety, Jibo He said.
Daanyaal Akbar, a WSU student, is Jibo He's research assistant.
If you want to see how dangerous distracted driving can be, ride with a driver scrolling on a mobile device, Akbar said.
"I've ridden with friends who have done that; it freaked me out," he said. "You don't notice how much you're distracted when you're driving yourself, because you think you're in control.
"But when you're sitting in the passenger seat, it really brings it home."
The smartwatches Jibo He used in his research did not have the ability that many smartphones have to take voice dictation. Many smartphones now can immediately translate complex spoken words into near-perfect sentences that can be dictated into Facebook Messenger or text messages while driving.
But voice dictation still makes mistakes. "So the temptation to touch your screen while driving and fix the mistake will be very enticing," Jibo He said.
Hands-free technology is dangerous, he has concluded..
Technologists, including him, are working on solutions. At WSU, he has fine-tuned at least four apps or other inventions in various stages of patent approval.
One app would literally shut off your phone while you are driving, diminishing the temptation to check your phone. Another highway killer is sleepiness; he's working on an app that could monitor a driver's eye movements and sound a warning if the driver begins to nod off.
Another app would make itself aware of conditions your car is driving through - stormy weather or heavy traffic, for example. The app, sensing those conditions, would mute your phone so you're not tempted to answer a call or read a message.
The best move, Jibo He said: Shut your phone off while driving. Put it in the trunk. Leave it home.
"Most people won't do those things."
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Distracted drivers
In downtown Wichita, a few minutes after that woman drove distracted on I-135, drivers were rolling up to the stoplights at Douglas and Washington.
In the 10 minutes between 7:50 and 8 a.m., hundreds of rush-hour motorists rolled through. Sit curbside, and you can see what drivers from all four directions are doing.
Most kept their eyes forward and hands on wheels. But in those 10 minutes, perhaps 1 in 10 rolled up while tapping brakes in a herky-jerky way, with eyes darting up and down from their laps to their windshields.
Or they looked at the phones held in one hand while they steered with the other. There was also the guy driving and eating; his distraction was a banana he had apparently peeled while driving.
A young man wearing a yellow billed cap turned backward rolled up while tapping his brake repeatedly, his eyes darting up-down-up-down before he stopped, a little too close, to the car ahead of him at the light.
All these drivers were driving ahead or behind or alongside other motorists driving tons of steel: heavy-duty pickup trucks, a big silver tanker truck hauling milk and a number of heavy-duty trucks hitched to flatbed steel trailers loaded with mowers.
One thing we should never do, Jibo He said: "Never look at other drivers to see how distracted they are." Watching their mistakes will distract you, he said.
But you can easily tell whether they are distracted merely by watching their speed. Distracted drivers invariably slow down and speed up as they look at their phones.
If you see that, "steer clear."
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Information from: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, http://www.kansas.com
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — About 1,200 Jehovah's Witnesses have volunteered to clean the venue in Lincoln where their annual regional convention is scheduled to be held this weekend.
The Lincoln Journal Star (http://bit.ly/299yuuM ) reports that more than 6,000 Jehovah's Witnesses will attend the convention at Pinnacle Bank Arena this weekend.
On Thursday morning, church members from Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri began cleaning the entire venue. They'll each volunteer three to eight hours.
The group has gone so far as to wipe down the railings, scrape gum off the bottom of chairs and vacuum rooms that will remain mostly empty.
They'll clean the area floor to ceiling again after the event ends Sunday.
Convention spokesman Brian Esser says the group likes to leave the venue cleaner than it was when they arrived.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com
OAK CREEK, Wis. (AP) — Authorities are investigating after a semitrailer containing 20,000 pounds of cheese was stolen from a parking lot in southeastern Wisconsin.
Capt. Mike Bolender of the Oak Creek Police Department says the cheese was reported missing around 2 a.m. Thursday after the driver parked his semitrailer, left for several hours and returned to find it was gone.
Bolender says the cheese was produced by manufacturer U.S. Foods and was on its way to the New York City area from Green Bay. He says U.S. Foods values the cheese at more than $46,000.
A semitrailer carrying $70,000 worth of cheese was stolen from a Germantown trucking company in January.
- By GRANT SCHULTE Associated Press
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska state officials failed to correct the prison terms of 15 inmates after discovering in 2014 that hundreds of sentences had been miscalculated, the corrections department's director acknowledged Thursday.
Scott Frakes said staffers didn't calculate new sentences two years ago even after learning they were inaccurate. He said he didn't know why the sentences weren't adjusted, but the staffers responsible were from a previous administration and no longer work for the department.
"The work was assigned and not completed," Frakes said in a briefing with reporters at the Capitol.
Frakes said corrections staffers reviewed more than 900 other sentences, and no other errors were discovered.
The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services announced in 2014 that it released more than 300 prisoners too early because it failed to follow two state Supreme Court rulings that spelled out the correct way to calculate sentences. Most were allowed to remain free because their correct release date had passed, but 32 are in limbo until a judge rules in two "test cases" that will determine whether they have to complete their sentences behind bars.
About 600 others who were still in custody at the time had their release dates changed. Some employees at the time told a legislative committee that they suspected the sentences contained errors, but were afraid to bring the issue to their superiors.
One of the 15 inmates, Sean McLaughlin, was rearrested on Wednesday. Another inmate, Aaron Finney, was discharged from parole too early because of the error and may have to resume it. Neither man has been charged with any crimes since he was released, Frakes said.
Frakes said 10 of the inmates are still incarcerated in Nebraska's prison system and will have their sentences adjusted, one is in federal custody, one is in a California prison and one was deported to Mexico.
McLaughlin was serving a four-year sentence for drug possession when he was released. However, the sentence that was miscalculated was for attempted burglary, methamphetamine possession and child abuse that began in 2009. Julie Smith, the department's general counsel, said McLaughlin still owes time for those crimes.
Finney was serving a three- to six-year sentence for firearm possession by a felon and shoplifting.
Frakes said he spoke briefly with McLaughlin on Wednesday after he was rearrested, and the former inmate was confused and concerned about why he had to return to custody. Frakes said he hopes prison officials can place McLaughlin in a work release program so he can return to the community, but the process could take as long as 90 days.
"He was still trying to process what had happened," Frakes said.
Smith said a judge will determine how much parole time Finney owes the state.
MASON CITY, Iowa (AP) — A judge has lifted his pregnancy ban on a north Iowa woman convicted of child endangerment for shaking her infant son in 2014.
That move comes only after the Iowa Court of Appeals last month deemed the ban unconstitutional.
The Mason City Globe Gazette reports (http://bit.ly/298b7Sl ) that Judge James Drew lifted the ban on Tuesday.
Stephanie Fatland had appealed her child endangerment convictions and challenged her sentence of five years' probations. Among the conditions of probation was an order prohibiting her from becoming pregnant during probation.
In May, the appeals court upheld Fatland's conviction but said Drew's no-pregnancy order violated her "fundamental right to procreation."
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Information from: Globe Gazette, http://www.globegazette.com/
- By Jackie Rehwald Springfield News-Leader
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — Don't let her walker or silver hair fool you. Or that she has battled Parkinson's Disease for 16 years.
Patricia Sundstrom can pack a punch.
"You are used to feeling like you are getting worse," she said, following a boxing workout. "And this, it feels like you are getting better. And that is big."
Sundstrom was among the first students to sign up for The Bodysmith's Rock Steady Boxing program, a non-contact boxing fitness class for people with Parkinson's. Classes are tailored to meet the needs of clients and different levels are offered to accommodate varying degrees of the disease.
Susan Gilmore is one of three certified Rock Steady Boxing instructors at The Bodysmith.
"It's really life-changing for us. We see their progress," Gilmore said. "They say, 'I feel like I'm getting my life back.'"
Sundstrom nodded.
"I had gotten to the point where I would not go out to lunch with people," she said. "It was just too hard, too hard to manipulate the knife and fork and the sandwich or to chew.
"Last week I went out to lunch and I didn't think about it."
Mark Overby, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's last year, said he is also getting his life back.
Overby said he hadn't been able to play a round of golf in three years. Since taking Rock Steady boxing classes, he's strong enough to enjoy the sport again.
"It's the small things. It felt great," he said. "I know it's helping. It forces me to concentrate. Concentrating is a problem.
"There is something about the activity and what you do, it just makes me feel the best I've felt in three years."
Overby and Sundstrom agree there is something about hitting a boxing bag — their arms crossing the midline of their body — that improves coordination and balance.
There's more than just the boxing component to the classes, reports the Springfield News-Leader (http://sgfnow.co/28Zeej8 ). There's stretching, balance moves, core work, weights, foot and leg work, and shouting exercises. Each exercise is designed to combat a specific symptom of the disease.
For Sundstrom, she and her instructor spend much of the time doing walking and marching exercises to help lengthen her gait and help with balance and stability.
Overby, whose disease is less advanced, spends more time punching the bags and beating a large tire with a baseball bat.
Watching Overby and Gilmore side-skip across the room, tossing a weighted ball back and forth, Coach Polly Brandman smiled.
"That forces you to be aware of your surroundings," Brandman explained. "Look how intense the workouts are. This would push anybody."
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About RockSteady Boxing
Rock Steady Boxing was founded in 2006 by a former Indiana prosecutor, Scott C. Newman, who has Parkinson's.
According to the Rock Steady website, the seed for what would eventually become Rock Steady Boxing was planted when Newman began intense, one-on-one, boxing training just a few years after he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's at the age of 40.
Newman witnessed the dramatic improvement in his physical health, agility and daily functioning through the intense and high-energy workouts. Newman's quality of life improved dramatically in a short time due to his fighting back against Parkinson's disease, the website says. Newman opened a small gym and boxing ring in a donated corner of a corporate employee gym as Rock Steady's first home.
Since then, about 140 affiliate studios have opened worldwide.
Though participants have reported anecdotal success for years, new research by the University of Indianapolis supports the notion that people with Parkinson's disease who participate in boxing training maintain greater physical ability and quality of life than those who participate in other modes of exercise.
The study found that boxers demonstrated significantly better balance and walking function over time, as well as greater distance on a functional reach test, compared to people who chose other forms of exercise.
The key may not be boxing per se, but instead the unique combination of activities that are common to boxing training, Professor Stephanie Combs-Miller said in a release from the university. The Rock Steady Boxing program is "multimodal" she said, enhancing strength, agility, endurance, flexibility and other positive traits.
"I think it's the collection of all these elements that is working for these people," she said. "People don't necessarily have to put on boxing gloves."
Shauna Smith, owner of The BodySmith, signed on to be a Rock Steady Boxing affiliate last year, traveled to Indianapolis for training and started her program this spring.
"Even though we started with small numbers, we've seen some great progress very quickly, which is encouraging," Smith said. "It's really rewarding for everyone involved."
___
Information from: Springfield News-Leader, http://www.news-leader.com
- By CARLA K. JOHNSON AP Medical Writer
CHICAGO (AP) — A jury's $53 million award in a birth injury case set a Cook County record this week, but won't necessarily be the final word after University of Chicago Medical Center fought back in a mistrial motion charging the plaintiff's attorney with making unfounded, inflammatory statements evoking Nazi Germany.
The jury's decision came Wednesday after a four-week trial before Cook County Circuit Judge John Kirby in a case involving an infant born at the hospital in 2004.
It is the highest award reported for a plaintiff in a birth injury case in Cook County, said John L. Kirkton, editor of the Jury Verdict Reporter, which has compiled Illinois awards data since 1959. The amount is notable, too, because "it's very tough to win a medical malpractice case at trial," Kirkton said. "More than seven out of 10 civil jury trials involving medical negligence go against the plaintiff."
Michigan attorney Geoffrey Fieger, known for defending assisted-suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian for nearly a decade, represented 12-year-old Isaiah Ewing. The lawsuit claimed the hospital was negligent during his birth and could have prevented his brain injuries if doctors had performed a cesarean section earlier. The boy has mental retardation and cerebral palsy, according to the lawsuit.
Attorneys for the hospital argued that the boy's condition was more likely caused by an infection before his birth.
"We have great sympathy for Isaiah Ewing and his family," hospital officials said in a written statement. "We strongly disagree with the jury's verdict and believe Mr. Fieger's conduct influenced the decision."
In one of two motions seeking a mistrial filed Wednesday, University of Chicago Medicine attorneys said Fieger's closing argument included improper prejudicial comments, accused the hospital of lying and referenced "a minister of truth and propaganda," which was "an obvious intent to evoke that incomparably horrific regime" of Nazi Germany.
Fieger's law office announced the jury award Thursday in a news release. "The University of Chicago mounted an obscene defense claiming that Isaiah's brain injury was due to an unknown phantom infection," Fieger said in the statement.
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Follow AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson at https://twitter.com/CarlaKJohnson
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Like most sporting venues, Busch Stadium prohibits guns. Soon, gun-carrying Cardinals fans will have the option of leaving their weapon in an armored truck instead of their car.
Starting July 15, a company called Weapon Safe Armory will park an armored truck at a bar that sits in the shadow of Busch Stadium. Owner Justin Hulsey, a National Guard veteran from Herculaneum, Missouri, outfitted a 22-foot-long vehicle with armor and security cameras, and hired guards to surround it when the vehicle is parked in public.
The plan is to park it at the bar for all Cardinals games. Fans can lock up guns and other valuables. The cost per item is $10 cash, or $15 with a credit card.
Both the Cardinals and St. Louis police have declined comment.
WAVERLY, Iowa (AP) — A bur oak tree in Waverly estimated to be about 217 years old will soon be taken down.
The tree is on the bank of the Cedar River outside the city's Civic Center, and has about two to three years of life left, The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (http://bit.ly/29cax91 ) reports.
Iowa Department of Natural Resources Forest Health Program leader Tivon Feeley said he noticed some signs of decay years ago that is not uncommon for a tree of its age but the tree's condition has since worsened.
Feeley said there's evidence of root fungus and the tree is beginning to lean. Feeley said the likelihood that the tree, or some of its branches, might fall grows in its weakened state.
"It's a risk to people who use that parking lot and to City Hall," Feeley said.
The tree was almost taken down in 1991, when the city planned the Civic Center, but a couple led an effort to raise about $10,000 to design the building and parking lot to accommodate the oak tree.
The city may plant one of the tree's offspring in the same spot once it's taken down.
Waverly Leisure Services director Tab Ray said that is unlikely to immediately happen because most of the trees sprouted from acorns from the old oak tree are either too big or too small to transplant.
Another option would be to leave the tree's trunk where it is and create a wood sculpture.
No action will be taken until the fall after the tree produces acorns. Ray said he wants to give people one more chance to collect acorns if they wish to grow a tree of their own.
"We're going to try to treat it with respect," Ray said. "We'll put a plan together, and hopefully people remember it for a very long time."
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Information from: Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, http://www.wcfcourier.com
CINCINNATI (AP) — Police say a man on a bus stop bench who was pinned against a building when a minivan struck him has died in Cincinnati.
City police say 55-year-old Wendell Allen Reed was sitting on the bench around 1 p.m. Wednesday when a minivan struck him after ending up on the sidewalk following a crash with another vehicle. Reed was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
Police say the minivan failed to stop at a red light and struck another vehicle before ending up on the sidewalk, where it struck Reed, another pedestrian and a building. The other pedestrian had minor injuries.
The two drivers weren't injured. Officers say a passenger in the minivan was treated for minor injuries at a hospital and released.
BLOOMINGBURG, Ohio (AP) — State authorities say fireworks worth $40,000 have been stolen from a fireworks company in southern Ohio.
Investigators in the State Fire Marshal's Office said in a release that the theft occurred around 1:30 a.m. June 24 at Phantom Fireworks in Bloomingburg, about 40 miles south of Columbus. They believe the suspects arrived in multiple vehicles, cut through a fence to gain access to the property and then cut through a semi-trailer used to store the fireworks.
Authorities says those types of thefts have been reported in Pennsylvania and Florida and a similar robbery attempt was made at the Chillicothe (chihl-ih-KAHTH'-ee) Fireworks store in Chillicothe.
Phantom Fireworks is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the identification of those responsible for the theft.
- By ROY WENZL The Wichita Eagle
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Capt. Jeff Weible of the Wichita Police Department stood on a sidewalk on Douglas about a year ago, off duty, talking with an emergency room doctor. They watched as a motorcyclist rolled by, texting with both hands, at a speed Weible estimated at 35 mph.
One trouble with distracted driving, Weible said, is that "you are not monitoring your surroundings."
Another is that you could get killed.
"Yeah, that guy could end up in my ER," Weible remembers the doctor saying.
Many other drivers who looked illegally at cellphones or iPads or even DVDs have crashed and died. They've killed passengers and pedestrians, children and bicyclists and other drivers. In Kansas, 76 of the 341 fatal crashes in 2014 were identified by police as involving a distracted driver, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nationally, in 2014, 3,179 people were killed, and 431,000 were injured in distracted-driving crashes, according to Distraction.gov.
Some people have speculated that the danger will decrease after technologists invent better hands-free tools, like smartwatches.
But Jibo He, a scientist from Wichita State University, just completed research showing how smartwatches affect drivers.
It's worse.
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Research on simulators
Before cellphones, distracted-driving deaths were a small percentage of annual highway death tolls.
The big highway killer has been, and still is, drunken driving. In 2014, there were 9,967 fatalities involving drivers with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 or higher, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That's one in three highway deaths.
The National Safety Council now estimates that at least 27 percent of all accidents, from fatalities to fender-benders, are caused by distracted driving, said spokeswoman Maureen Vogel.
Unlike with alcohol, there's no real test for distraction. Unless drivers admit fault, it's hard to prove.
Jibo He is a psychology professor at WSU. The Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/28Yc6CT ) reports that he tested dozens of people three years ago while they held smartphones and drove in simulators. They drove all over the simulated roads and simulated ditches.
Now he's tested 34 more drivers wearing smartwatches, which technologists are predicting will become more popular soon. One possible virtue of smartwatches as opposed to smartphones is that you can keep both hands on the wheel.
But the drivers with smartwatches took their eyes off the road, drove into ditches and sped up and slowed down.
Jibo He sat at one of his simulators the other day with a smartwatch strapped to his wrist. He touched the simulation accelerator, merged into traffic, reached over to tap the screen on his smartwatch - and steered into the ditch.
"Look at that," he said. "I was only trying to open an app."
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Fatalities
Kip Scott, 43, remembers learning to drive and how the distraction he got warned about, in that simpler time decades ago, was "don't turn the radio on."
But now people blow through stop signs, as a woman did so recently at West 37th Street North and North Tyler Road.
Scott hit the brakes in the intersection and watched as the woman's car shot past him. "She had her head down and didn't look up, or if she did, it was after she passed through the intersection," he said.
Scott, the owner and operator of Prairie Pines Festivals, said he and his wife have tried to coach their teenage son as he learns to drive. "The phone has to stay in the back seat when you drive, where you can't reach it," Scott tells him.
"But we're not so much worried about him as we are about him maybe getting T-boned by somebody else," he said.
Tyler Blake Pettigrew, a 27-year-old Emporia man, was convicted on June 15 of vehicular homicide in connection with a 2012 crash that left one person dead and another injured, the Kansas Attorney General's Office said. He was convicted of vehicular homicide, use of a wireless communications device while driving, speeding and following too close. Sentencing has been set for Aug. 1 in Lyon County District Court.
In Wichita, police have worked several fatality accidents caused by distracted driving in recent years
Two passengers died in Wichita in April when the driver of their car looked down at his cellphone to get directions and then hit a pole, Wichita police said.
In 2010, a woman driving west on Kellogg heard her phone buzz. She told police she took her eyes off the road to shut the phone off and hit and fatally injured a man who had stopped to remove debris from the road.
In 2008, a man was driving home on Tyler after a date with his girlfriend. Witnesses told police later that he was going too fast for road conditions and lost control, hitting a tree. He died.
Police determined that the victim had sent a text to his girlfriend just before crash.
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'It freaked me out'
Distraction is easy. Talking to a passenger can reduce a driver's safety, Jibo He said.
Daanyaal Akbar, a WSU student, is Jibo He's research assistant.
If you want to see how dangerous distracted driving can be, ride with a driver scrolling on a mobile device, Akbar said.
"I've ridden with friends who have done that; it freaked me out," he said. "You don't notice how much you're distracted when you're driving yourself, because you think you're in control.
"But when you're sitting in the passenger seat, it really brings it home."
The smartwatches Jibo He used in his research did not have the ability that many smartphones have to take voice dictation. Many smartphones now can immediately translate complex spoken words into near-perfect sentences that can be dictated into Facebook Messenger or text messages while driving.
But voice dictation still makes mistakes. "So the temptation to touch your screen while driving and fix the mistake will be very enticing," Jibo He said.
Hands-free technology is dangerous, he has concluded..
Technologists, including him, are working on solutions. At WSU, he has fine-tuned at least four apps or other inventions in various stages of patent approval.
One app would literally shut off your phone while you are driving, diminishing the temptation to check your phone. Another highway killer is sleepiness; he's working on an app that could monitor a driver's eye movements and sound a warning if the driver begins to nod off.
Another app would make itself aware of conditions your car is driving through - stormy weather or heavy traffic, for example. The app, sensing those conditions, would mute your phone so you're not tempted to answer a call or read a message.
The best move, Jibo He said: Shut your phone off while driving. Put it in the trunk. Leave it home.
"Most people won't do those things."
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Distracted drivers
In downtown Wichita, a few minutes after that woman drove distracted on I-135, drivers were rolling up to the stoplights at Douglas and Washington.
In the 10 minutes between 7:50 and 8 a.m., hundreds of rush-hour motorists rolled through. Sit curbside, and you can see what drivers from all four directions are doing.
Most kept their eyes forward and hands on wheels. But in those 10 minutes, perhaps 1 in 10 rolled up while tapping brakes in a herky-jerky way, with eyes darting up and down from their laps to their windshields.
Or they looked at the phones held in one hand while they steered with the other. There was also the guy driving and eating; his distraction was a banana he had apparently peeled while driving.
A young man wearing a yellow billed cap turned backward rolled up while tapping his brake repeatedly, his eyes darting up-down-up-down before he stopped, a little too close, to the car ahead of him at the light.
All these drivers were driving ahead or behind or alongside other motorists driving tons of steel: heavy-duty pickup trucks, a big silver tanker truck hauling milk and a number of heavy-duty trucks hitched to flatbed steel trailers loaded with mowers.
One thing we should never do, Jibo He said: "Never look at other drivers to see how distracted they are." Watching their mistakes will distract you, he said.
But you can easily tell whether they are distracted merely by watching their speed. Distracted drivers invariably slow down and speed up as they look at their phones.
If you see that, "steer clear."
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Information from: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, http://www.kansas.com
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