LAWRENCE (AP) — More than a year after the University of Kansas adopted a policy allowing concealed guns on campus, only one gun-relation violation has been reported.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports that the sole violation was minor enough that it was corrected without disciplinary action. The violation was for carrying a gun inappropriately.

The policy was enacted in July 2017. In response to a Journal-World request, the university cited just the single violation that occurred Oct. 2 when a student was carrying a gun in the visible mesh part of a backpack, in violation of the provision that it be concealed from view.

A faculty member reported the incident, and the student corrected the problem.

By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN
Associated Press

TIJUANA, Mexico — Migrants approaching the U.S. border from Mexico were enveloped with tear gas Sunday after a few tried to breach the fence separating the two countries.

U.S. agents shot the gas, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene. Children were screaming and coughing in the mayhem.

Honduran migrant Ana Zuniga, 23, said she saw migrants open a small hole in concertina wire at a gap on the Mexican side of a levee, at which point U.S. agents fired tear gas at them.

“We ran, but when you run the gas asphyxiates you more,” she told the AP while cradling her 3-year-old daughter Valery in her arms.

Mexico’s Milenio TV also showed images of several migrants at the border trying to jump over the fence. A few yards away on the U.S. side, shoppers streamed in and out of an outlet mall.

U.S. Border Patrol helicopters flew overhead, while U.S. agents held vigil on foot beyond the wire fence in California. The Border Patrol office in San Diego said via Twitter that pedestrian crossings have been suspended at the San Ysidro port of entry at both the East and West facilities. All northbound and southbound traffic was halted.

Earlier Sunday, some Central American migrants pushed past a blockade of Mexican police who were standing guard near the international border crossing. They appeared to easily pass through without using violence, and some of the migrants called on each other to remain peaceful.

A second line of Mexican police carrying plastic riot shields stood guard outside a Mexican customs and immigration plaza.

That line of police had installed tall steel panels behind them outside the Chaparral crossing on the Mexican side of the border.

More than 5,000 migrants have been camped in and around a sports complex in Tijuana after making their way through Mexico in recent weeks via caravan. Many hope to apply for asylum in the U.S., but agents at the San Ysidro entry point are processing fewer than 100 asylum petitions a day.

Irineo Mujica, who has accompanied the migrants for weeks as part of the aid group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, said the aim of Sunday’s march toward the U.S. border was to make the migrants’ plight more visible to the governments of Mexico and the U.S.

“We can’t have all these people here,” Mujica told The Associated Press.

Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum on Friday declared a humanitarian crisis in his border city of 1.6 million, which he says is struggling to accommodate the crush of migrants.

Associated Press

Kansas officials are urging drivers to stay off the roads because of dangerous conditions across much of the state.

Gov. Jeff Colyer declared a state of emergency because of the winter storm moving across Kansas on Sunday that is creating blizzard conditions and slick roads. A section of Interstate 70 was closed Sunday morning between Salina and Wakeeny.

Colyer says travelers should consider delaying their trips until after the storm passes if possible. Anyone who must be on the road, should consult 511 road conditions hotlines and make sure their gas tank is full and cell phone fully charged.

In neighboring Missouri, Interstate 29 is closed near the Iowa border. Officials say additional road closures are likely during the storm.
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11:40 a.m.
Part of Interstate 80 is closed in eastern Nebraska because of multiple accidents after snow blanketed the area.
The Nebraska State Patrol closed westbound I-80 between Lincoln and Omaha because of the crashes on Sunday morning, which included semitrailer trucks jackknifed across the highway.
Strong winds and snow are expected to create blizzard conditions across much of Nebraska and parts of Kansas on Sunday. The National Weather Service is warning those conditions will make travel difficult in places.
Between 4 to 6 inches of snow is possible in the Kansas City area. Forecasters predict more than a foot of snow is likely in southeast Nebraska, northeast Kansas, northwest Missouri and southwest Iowa.
Several inches of snow are expected to fall in the Des Moines area Sunday, and difficult travel conditions are likely south of Interstate 80 in Iowa.
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11:15 a.m.
Nearly 500 flights have been cancelled on one of the busiest travel days of the year as a fast-moving winter storm bears down on much of the Midwest on the last day of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
The flight-tracking website FlightAware reported that 491 flights headed to or from the U.S. had been cancelled as of 11 a.m. Sunday.
The site reported that the majority of the cancellations are flights that were supposed to be routed through Chicago or Kansas City — two areas forecast to be hit hard by the storm.
The National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Iowa. Other parts of central plains and Great Lakes region are under a winter storm warning.
In total, the storm could dump a foot or more of snow in some places.
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10:42 a.m.
A fast-moving winter storm is expected to blanket much of the central Midwest with snow on the final day of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend — one of the busiest travel days of the year.
The National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Iowa. Other parts of central plains and Great Lakes region are under a winter storm warning. In total, the storm could dump a foot or more of snow in some places.
As of Sunday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration was reporting no flight delays in the region. But that is set to change later in the day, when the storm reaches the Chicago area. Chicago is home to one of the nation’s major airline hubs.

TOPEKA (AP) — The incoming Kansas governor will face a large task dealing with a struggling child welfare system recently hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging conditions were so poor that children suffered mentally or ran away from foster homes.

The lawsuit filed in federal court this month alleges that children have been trafficked for sex, sexually abused inside adoptive homes or raped inside a child welfare office, The Wichita Eagle reported .

Lawmakers, experts and advocates say Democratic governor-elect Laura Kelly must significantly invest in the state’s Department for Children and Families to improve the system. Kelly will become governor on Jan. 14.

Kelly said the department will be “a high priority” for her administration. She said the agency has lacked resources for almost a decade.

“I will take the same approach to DCF, though, that we’re going to take to every agency, which is to during the transition time to dig deep and figure out where the issues are, what’s working, what’s not working, and then set a course for fixing whatever we find that needs to be fixed,” she said.

Many advocates said they believe Kelly’s experience as a member of a legislative task forced aimed at improving the child welfare system will help her make progress on the issues.

“She really works on that task force,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a Kansas City attorney and accredited child welfare law specialist. “She doesn’t just show up.”

The task force will deliver its recommendations in January and could possibly provide lawmakers with a road map on how to improve the system.

But Burns-Bucklew said Kelly faces a big challenge.

“She’s inheriting an under-resourced system,” she said. “This system has been stripped bare over the years. They haven’t just cut to the bone. They’ve cut into the bone.”

The task force has examined issues such as improving the agency’s outdated computer systems and its work force, which has seen high turnover and high caseloads.

By LISA MASCARO and MARY CLARE JALONICK
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Whatever happened to trying to impeach President Donald Trump?

As House Democrats begin laying out the vision for their new majority, that item is noticeably missing from the to-do list and firmly on the margins.

The agenda for now includes spending on public works projects, lowering health care costs and increasing oversight of the administration.

It’s the balance that Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is trying to strike in the new Congress between those on her party’s left flank who are eager to confront the president, and her instinct to prioritize the kitchen-table promises that Democrats made to voters who elected them to office.

“We shouldn’t impeach the president for political reasons and we shouldn’t not impeach the president for political reasons,” Pelosi recently told The Associated Press.

The California lawmaker, who hopes to lead Democrats as House speaker come January, calls impeachment a “divisive activity” that needs to be approached with bipartisanship.

“If the case is there, then that should be self-evident to Democrats and Republicans,” she said.

Those pressing for impeachment acknowledge they don’t expect action on Day One of the new majority, but they do want to see Democrats start laying the groundwork for proceedings.

“We’re for impeachment. We’re not for get-sworn-in-on-Jan.-1-and-start-taking-votes,” said Kevin Mack, the lead strategist for billionaire Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach campaign. “Our argument is the Constitution outlines a process to remove a lawless president.”

In a new ad, Steyer says Democrats “just need the will” to act. He says he’s calling on Americans to join the 6 million who have already signed on to his group to “give Congress the courage to act.”

“The American people are tired of being told to wait,” Mack said. “Our argument to Congress is you are a co-equal branch of government. It’s time to do what is morally correct.”

Twice over the past two years since Trump was elected, Democrats have tried to force votes on impeachment proceedings, winning a high-water mark of more than 60 supporters, far from the 218 needed.

Republicans are counting on, and possibly even hoping for, impeachment fervor to overtake Democrats, leading them astray from campaign promises or dealmaking with Trump.

“We know the Democrats have a plan: They want to disrupt, they want to try to impeach,” said GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California after winning the GOP’s internal election to serve as minority leader in the new Congress. He warned that Democrats were laying the groundwork to impeach Trump.

Pelosi has made it clear the new majority will not engage in what she calls a “scattershot” approach to investigating the administration.

Instead, the incoming Democratic leaders of House committees will conduct oversight of the president’s business and White House dealings. Democrats are also trying to ensure special counsel Robert Mueller completes his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. They may try to add legislation to protect that probe to the must-pass spending bill in December to help fund the government. They want Mueller’s findings made public.

“You have to be very reluctant to do an impeachment,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said recently on ABC. Nadler, who served on the committee during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, cited “the trauma of an impeachment process.”

Democratic leaders also know that moving quickly on impeachment would not sit well with their newly elected members, who helped the party win a House majority in the recent midterms. Many come from swing districts where impeachment could prove unpopular.

“I didn’t work 18 months listening to people in my district to get involved in a political back and forth for the next 18 months,” said Rep.-elect Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. “People want to talk about health care. It’s not a coincidence that most of us who won in tough districts, we won because we talked about issues, not because we talked about internal Washington stuff.”

For now, outside liberal groups are largely standing by Pelosi’s approach, putting their emphasis on pushing Democrats to chart a bold agenda on the domestic pocketbook concerns that won over voters.

Pelosi has some experience with impeachment, serving as a newer lawmaker when Republicans led impeachment proceedings against Clinton. When she became House speaker in 2007 she resisted pressure from her liberal flank to launch impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush over the Iraq War.

Pelosi believes that if Democrats had tried to impeach Bush when she was speaker, voters may never have elected Barack Obama as president in 2008.

Politically, Democrats may be right. In 1974, Americans only came to agree that President Richard Nixon should be removed from office on the eve of his resignation, according to Pew research. Voters responded to Clinton’s impeachment by electing more Democrats to the House.

“If we had gone down that path, I doubt we would have won the White House,” she said. “People have to see we’re working there for them.”

TOPEKA (AP) — Authorities say a man walked up to the Topeka police headquarters and threw a rock through the glass front door.

Police say an officer working the front desk heard the glass break about 10 p.m. Friday and thought the person had shot through the door.

An emergency call drew officers from several surrounding agencies.

Officers took the apparent rock-thrower into custody. He wasn’t identified because he appeared to be having a mental crisis.

He was held at the Shawnee County jail.

COFFEYVILLE, Kan. (AP) — Firefighters in Coffeyville rescued three unconscious people from a house fire but one didn’t survive.

KSN-TV reports firefighters were called to the house fire just after 3 a.m. Saturday and found heavy flames coming from the second floor.

Firefighters used a ladder to rescue three unconscious people from a second-story window. All were taken to a Coffeyville hospital, and authorities say one person died.

The conditions of the other victims weren’t available.

Officials from several agencies are investigating the cause of the fire.

By ROXANA HEGEMAN
Associated Press

WICHITA — When iconic Dodge City faced a lawsuit before the midterm elections for moving its sole polling place outside city limits, its top elections official turned to a hired legal gun to battle charges of voter suppression.

Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox hired Bradley Schlozman, who is little-known outside the legal community but is well-known for defending states and towns accused of trying to restrict voting.

Schlozman was a top lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the George W. Bush administration. He has been involved in some of the thorniest voting issues of the last two decades.

At the Justice Department, Schlozman in 2005 backed Georgia, among the first to enact voter ID. He overruled the career attorneys who had argued it would reduce minority voting.

By ANNE KNIGGENDORF
Kansas News Service

Abdoulie Fatajo, a Shawnee, Kansas, philanthropist and community leader from Gambia, was arrested and detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on November 9. He’s being held at the Morgan County Detention Center in Versailles, Missouri.

He’s had limited access to a phone and has relied on a friend to spread the word of his arrest, though his family is being careful about who hears.

“They don’t want my mom to know about it right now because it would just traumatize her. It’s like a humiliation,” Fatajo told KCUR in a phone call from the jail.

Fatajo’s Shawnee-based business, Hy-5 Traders, began as a small bicycle repair and consignment clothing business in 2012. He repaired bicycles at low cost, and donated bikes to children whose parents couldn’t afford one.

Shortly after an article about him appeared in the Kansas City Star in 2015, Hy-5 Traders blossomed into a multi-warehouse shipping operation. Fatajo now has dozens of American employees and ships not only bicycles, but cars, clothing, food, and household goods to the people of Gambia.

Fatajo arrived on a student visa in November 1999. He said he was enrolled at Penn Valley and then Johnson County Community College until 2003, when he said he began working full time to care for his infant son, who was born in the United States.

That same year, he was involved in an altercation with a man who forced his way into Fatajo’s apartment. Fatajo was arrested but quickly released, and was not charged in the incident.

Shawn Neudauer, ICE spokesman for Kansas/Missouri, said that even though charges were dropped in that altercation, Fatajo did not operate entirely within the law, garnering a few other misdemeanors that immigration officials continue to take into account.

Neudauer also questioned whether Fatajo ever enrolled in school after he arrived on his student visa, saying government records do not show that he was enrolled at Penn Valley. Neudauer said that it’s not unheard of for immigrants to pay for classes with cash and to enroll under alternate names.

Seeing that he was not in school, immigration agents told him he would be deported as soon as travel documents arrived from Gambia.

Sharma-Crawford’s firm handled the case of Lawrence chemist Syed Jamal, who faced deportation to his native Bangladesh until an immigration appeals board halted Jamal’s deportation earlier this year. Jamal is scheduled to appear in immigration court later in November, Sharma-Crawford said.

“The new administration came in and started threatening to withhold funding, and suddenly travel documents became available,” Sharma-Crawford said.

The documents can take the form of a passport or a statement on official government letterhead with a photo of the immigrant attached that will allow him to pass through customs.

For 15 years, Fatajo regularly checked in with immigration officials, fearful of those documents.

“They put me under orders of supervision. You go there and they check that you didn’t commit any crimes or you didn’t do anything, and they will let you go, and they will renew your work card, that’s what I have been doing,” Fatajo said.

But Neudauer said that in 2005, the Board of Immigration denied Fatajo’s appeal to continue living in the United States, and that Fatajo did nothing more to legally extend his stay here.

Two weeks ago when Fatajo checked in at immigration, the official he spoke with announced that the travel documents the government had been waiting on since 2003 had arrived.

Fatajo said he hasn’t seen the documents and has no idea how long he’ll be held. Meanwhile, he’s concerned about his family and employees.

“Bicycles are the main transportation for people in Gambia. Ninety percent rely on bicycles,” he said.

Bicycles and bike repairs in Gambia are extremely expensive. Because a new bike in Gambia costs a year’s wages, Fatajo saw an opportunity to make a big difference. His sister and cousin opened a shop similar to Hy-5 Traders in Banjul, Gambia’s capitol, and he sent them a shipping container of bikes and other things he collected from garage sales or thrift stores every few months.

Gambians all over the United States contact him to send items to their families back home, and he ended up sending a 40-foot long container every week.

“Today, the whole family is employed because of me over there. Because of these shipments that I’m shipping to them, both my brothers’ kids, my nephews and me, my sister’s kids, even my cousins, all of them are working because of this business I’m doing here. So that’s why this is so painful,” he said.

“Even my employees, most of them, their entire lives depend on this business. And back home, the entire family, their survival is based on this business,” he added. “I am their only shipper that ships their stuff to Gambia. I am the only one.”

On Tuesday morning, Fatajo began working with Overland Park immigration attorney J. Bradley Pace, who told KCUR he is considering filing a stay on humanitarian grounds. He said Fatajo is a special case because of all the charitable work he does.

Sharma-Crawford said he sees these cases often.

“You have somebody who’s been involved in the community and is doing all these things, and been out in the open and cooperating with immigration for the past 10 years,” he said, “and then suddenly they’re just taken into custody.”

He said that while that’s jarring, he understands that ICE operates with the element of surprise to keep immigrants from hiding. And for someone like Fatajo, who is not interested in hiding, this treatment has been most jarring of all.

“These past nine years I was doing so well,” Fatajo said. “I told them, ‘What can I do just to be out of this situation?’ Because every year when you go there, the feeling that you get, it’s like I don’t know what kind of crime did I do to be in that situation? Just not going to school.”

Syed Jamal’s case, meanwhile, drew attention from U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Jamal’s Congresswoman, Rep. Lynn Jenkins, who sponsored a private bill that would have granted him permanent residence. A federal district court judge granted Jamal’s habeas petition, which allowed him to go free while his case continues. His immigration court date is November 27.

Fatajo is in Kevin Yoder’s district, but Yoder has not responded to KCUR’s attempt to reach him.

Follow KCUR contributor Anne Kniggendorf on Twitter, @annekniggendorf.

By NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis named the Vatican’s top sex abuse investigator and a close U.S. ally to an organizing committee for a February abuse prevention summit whose stakes have grown after the Holy See blocked U.S. bishops from taking action to address the scandal.

Abuse survivors and women working at the Vatican will also contribute to the preparatory committee. Notably absent from the lineup announced Friday was Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who heads the pope’s sex abuse advisory commission, though one of his members, the Rev. Hans Zollner, is the point-person for the group.

In addition to Zollner, the committee includes Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, for a decade the Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor, Francis appointee Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich and Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias, a member of Francis’ key cardinal adviser group.

Francis summoned leaders of the world’s bishops’ conferences to the Vatican Feb. 21-24 after the abuse scandal erupted in his native South America and again in the U.S. and he botched the case of a Chilean bishop implicated in cover-up.

The stakes of the meeting grew exponentially after the Vatican told U.S. bishops earlier this month not to vote on proposed new measures to investigate sexual misconduct or cover-up within their ranks.

The Vatican still hasn’t explained why it blocked the vote on a U.S. code of conduct for bishops and a lay-led board to investigate them, though the proposals were only given to the Vatican at the last minute and were said to contain legal problems. The head of the U.S. bishops conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, said the Holy See wanted to delay any vote until after the February global summit.

However, it is unlikely that such a diverse group of churchmen, some representing national churches that continue to deny or downplay the scandal, will over the course of four days come up with any universal proposals that come close to the accountability norms that U.S. bishops were seeking.
Cupich has said he was disappointed by the Vatican’s decision, but at the time of the U.S. bishops’ meeting, he proposed they go ahead and debate the measures and even came up with a revised proposal himself.

His inclusion as a member of the Vatican organizing committee is significant, since he is not himself the head of a bishops’ conference — as are Scicluna and Gracias — and would otherwise have no reason to attend the February summit. That Francis chose him over DiNardo is perhaps understood by the obvious tensions between DiNardo and the Vatican over the rejected U.S. accountability proposals and DiNardo’s public call this summer for a Vatican investigation into the U.S. scandal, which Rome refused.

Cupich, on the other hand, is far more of a defender of the embattled pope, whose popularity in the U.S. has tumbled over his uneven handling of the abuse crisis.

“Pope Francis is calling for radical reform in the life of the church, for he understands that this crisis is about the abuse of power and a culture of protection and privilege, which have created a climate of secrecy, without accountability for misdeeds,” Cupich wrote in a blog post Thursday. “All of that has to end.”

Zollner, who heads a safeguarding institute of study at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, acknowledged that the expectations were high going into the meeting.

“And it’s understandable that they are high, given the gravity of the scandal that has shocked and hurt so many people, believers and not, in so many countries,” he told Vatican Media.

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said Francis’ decision to host the meeting showed he considered protection of minors a “fundamental priority for the church.”

By ANDREA TUDHOPE
Kansas News Service

There’s a new crosswalk in northwest Kansas City, Kansas. If you’re in the area, you’ll likely slow down to take a look. And that’s the point.

The neighborhood association of Northridge at Piper Estates told the city they wanted to find a new way to make sure cars don’t speed. So, City Traffic Engineer Lideana Laboy did some research, and came across 3D crosswalks in Iceland.

Laboy pitched it to the neighborhood a few months ago and they were in favor, so the city’s Public Works team got to work.

The metro’s first 3D crosswalk was finished late last week. Laboy said that if the test run works, she’d like to put more of them up across the city, specifically in residential neighborhoods.

“This is a creative way to attract pedestrians to the area where they should cross rather than cross anywhere else. And from the driver perspective, we want to monitor how that influences their behavior,” she said.

Laboy’s team plans to monitor the crosswalk over the next few months.

Andrea Tudhope is a reporter at KCUR 89.3. Email her at [email protected], and follow her on Twitter @andreatudhope.