Employers pulled back sharply on hiring last month, a reminder that the U.S. economy may not be growing fast enough to sustain robust job growth. The unemployment rate dipped, but mostly because more Americans stopped looking for work.

The Labor Department says the economy added 120,000 jobs in March, down from more than 200,000 in each of the previous three months.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.2 percent, the lowest since January 2009. The rate dropped because fewer people searched for jobs. The official unemployment tally only includes those seeking work.

The economy has added 858,000 jobs since December — the best four months of hiring in two years. But Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has cautioned that the current hiring pace is unlikely to continue without more consumer spending.

A veteran who died 61 years ago in a North Korean prisoner of war camp will be buried in Wichita on Saturday.

Army Cpl. Henry Johnson’s great-niece and her mother live in Wichita, and are the only known remaining relatives of Johnson. He had no known ties to Wichita.

A memorial service for Cpl. Johnson will be at 11 a.m. Saturday at Jackson Mortuary and burial will be in Lakeview Gardens Cemetery.

The Wichita Eagle reports Johnson’s Army record shows he was taken prisoner in North Korea in 1950. Soldiers returning from prison camps in 1953 said Johnson died of starvation and exposure. He was 21 when he died.

Johnson’s remains were among 31 boxes of remains returned by North Korea in the 1990s. DNA analysis recently identified him.

The Kansas State Fire Marshall has pulled the plug on about 20 automated roll-your-own cigarette retail outlet stores in Kansas, citing fire hazards from the machines.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reported Friday that the Kansas Department of Revenue licenses the venues, which involve dual machines that allow customers to convert bags of loose tobacco and boxes of unfiltered papers into cigarettes.

Cease-and-desist letters went out in February noting a fire-safety law stipulating cigarettes rolled at commercial establishments had to use a type of paper that resists quick burn rates. Seth Valerius, general counsel with the Kansas fire marshal, said it’s a public safety issue.

Kansas regulators applied the safety standard only to operation of the rolling machines. There is no state law prohibiting individuals from rolling their own cigarettes.

The Kansas Department of Agriculture is urging residents to remove dead pine trees in April to prevent the spread of disease.

Trees that are killed by pine wilt can become hosts to the pine sawyer beetle, which spreads the disease from tree to tree. The agency says pine wilt disease has been established in the eastern half of Kansas but can be controlled.

Plant pathologist Jon Appel says pine sawyer beetles typically emerge from dead trees in May and continue through July.

The Agriculture Department recommends removing and cleaning up dead pine branches more than an inch in diameter. Dead pine wood can be chipped and buried, or taken to landfills to be burned. But the chips should not be used as mulch on pine, or used as firewood.

A Kansas agency is investigating the death of a morbidly obese Wichita woman who spent days, possibly weeks, on the floor of her home after falling off a sofa.

KAKE-TV reports reports the 54-year-old woman was unable to get up, and her mother and brother told police they were unable to lift her. The woman’s mother told KAKE her daughter weighed 350 pounds

Several details remained unclear Thursday, including when the fall occurred. A police report says the woman was on the floor somewhere between three days and three weeks before her family called paramedics.

The woman had bed sores and an infection and later died at Via Christi Hospital, which would not say when she died.

The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services is investigating.

Both sides have rested in the trial of a central Kansas man accused of killing a 14-year-old girl and burning her body at the asphalt plant where he worked.

Prosecutors ended their presentation of evidence Thursday morning in the trial of 38-year-old Adam Longoria, the Great Bend man charged with capital murder in the August 2010 death of Alicia DeBolt.

Defense lawyers then called witnesses to testify about various vehicles they saw leaving the asphalt plant in Great Bend during the night the girl disappeared. None of the descriptions matched that of the SUV Longoria was driving.

Longoria did not testify before the defense rested Thursday afternoon. Barton County District Judge Hannelore Kitts sent the jury home for the day, with closing arguments expected Friday.

By Fred Gough ~ Hutch Post

In court documents filed Wednesday, the First National Bank of Omaha has filed a petition of foreclosure against the owners of Hutchinson Outlots, LLC, and the Rubloff Development Company, based out of Rockford, Illinios. The company owns the Hutchinson Mall and surrounding property.

This is based on a promissory note dated July 27, 2007 in the original amount of 2-million, 707-thousand dollars, then modified the terms on October, 1, 2008. They also delivered to the bank a promissory note dated December 15, 2010, of over 2.4 million dollars.

The bank alleges the company defaulted on the loans or mortgages on parcels of mall property, and they’re now asking that the entire principal amount of the December 2010 note be paid including all accrued and unpaid interest. It should be noted that this does not include the mall building, but adjacent vacant properties including what is called the Home Depot addition.

The Omaha bank is asking for judgment in the amount of $2,182,623 plus interest, late charges, cost and attorney fees accruing from and after January 23, 2012, plus additional funds to pay the taxes, insurance, title search and surveys as a result in the default of making payments.

The filing made Wednesday by Jerry Ricksecker of local Law Firm, Martindell, Swearer Shaffer and Ridenour.

The owners of the Hutchinson Mall had recently received other bad news when one of their main anchor stores, Dillard’s announced they were leaving partly because of sales being down, but also rumors of them not being able to get any response from the owners of the Mall over some issues with their store.

We did check with the Reno County Treasure Clark Miller over taxes owed by the owners of the mall. They are apparently up to date on all taxes. It shows they paid the first half of taxes owed this year, with the second half, $333,943 due on May 10.

City and Chamber officials have indicated to Eagle Radio recently their willingness to work with the owners to try to help solve some of the malls issues, but say they have received very little cooperation.

A former high school teacher in Kansas has pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual relations with students.

28-year-old Michelle Preston, a former freshman cheerleading coach and psychology teacher at Shawnee Mission West High School, is alleged to have had sexual relations with three male students occurring between September and December 2010.

Prosecutors said DNA evidence links one of the boys to a sofa in Preston’s home. Preston is alleged to have initiated contact with the students through Facebook.

A police investigation was launched in March 2011  after naked photos of Preston began circulating amongst students.

According to multiple sources, she is likely to receive probation and be forced to register as a sex offender, although jail time is still a possibility.

A Missouri judge has refused to dismiss misdemeanor charges against a Kansas City diocese and its bishop, who is the highest-ranking U.S. Roman Catholic official accused of shielding an abusive priest.

Bishop Robert Finn and the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph are charged with failing to report suspected child abuse. Prosecutors say each is a “mandatory reporter” under the state law. Defense attorneys argued the law is unconstitutionally vague, and that Finn wasn’t the diocese’s designated reporter.

Circuit Judge John Torrence said Thursday the law isn’t vague and there’s evidence to allow jurors to conclude Finn is a designated reporter.

Finn has acknowledged he had been told about child pornography found on a priest’s computer several months before the diocese turned over to police a disk containing the photos.

The University of Kansas Medical Center has eliminated about 80 of its 3,900 jobs.

The cuts came after a university-wide analysis of staffing needs.

The medical center cuts affected only administrative positions, not teaching staff. No employees at the University of Kansas Hospital were involved.

Barbara Atkinson, an executive with the medical center, wrote in a recent newsletter to employees that the job cuts were designed in part to free money for raises to employees, who have not received a pay increase for four years.

The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment benefits fell to a four-year low last week, as layoffs slow and the job market strengthens.

The Labor Department says weekly unemployment benefit applications dropped 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 357,000. That’s the fewest since April 2008.

The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell to 361,750, also the lowest in four years. The average has fallen nearly 13 percent in the past six months.

When unemployment benefit applications drop consistently below 375,000, it usually signals that hiring is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.

The decline coincides with the best three months of job growth in two years. On Friday, the government issues its March jobs report, which is expected to show the fourth straight month of strong hiring.

by CHRIS HAWLEY

Sales of the nation’s two most popular prescription painkillers have exploded in new parts of the country, an Associated Press analysis shows, worrying experts who say the push to relieve patients’ suffering is spawning an addiction epidemic.

From New York’s Staten Island to Santa Fe, N.M., Drug Enforcement Administration figures show dramatic rises between 2000 and 2010 in the distribution of oxycodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. Some places saw sales increase sixteenfold.

Meanwhile, the distribution of hydrocodone, the key ingredient in Vicodin, Norco and Lortab, is rising in Appalachia, the original epicenter of the painkiller epidemic, as well as in the Midwest.

The increases have coincided with a wave of overdose deaths, pharmacy robberies and other problems in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Florida and other states. Opioid pain relievers, the category that includes oxycodone and hydrocodone, caused 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008 alone, and the death toll is rising, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Nationwide, pharmacies received and ultimately dispensed the equivalent of 69 tons of pure oxycodone and 42 tons of pure hydrocodone in 2010, the last year for which statistics are available. That’s enough to give 40 5-mg Percocets and 24 5-mg Vicodins to every person in the United States. The DEA data records shipments from distributors to pharmacies, hospitals, practitioners and teaching institutions. The drugs are eventually dispensed and sold to patients, but the DEA does not keep track of how much individual patients receive.

The increase is partly due to the aging U.S. population with pain issues and a greater willingness by doctors to treat pain, said Gregory Bunt, medical director at New York’s Daytop Village chain of drug treatment clinics.

Sales are also being driven by addiction, as users become physically dependent on painkillers and begin “doctor shopping” to keep the prescriptions coming, he said.

“Prescription medications can provide enormous health and quality-of-life benefits to patients,” Gil Kerlikowske, the U.S. drug czar, told Congress in March. “However, we all now recognize that these drugs can be just as dangerous and deadly as illicit substances when misused or abused.”

Opioids like hydrocodone and oxycodone can release intense feelings of well-being. Some abusers swallow the pills; others crush them, then smoke, snort or inject the powder.

Unlike most street drugs, the problem has its roots in two disparate parts of the country – Appalachia and affluent suburbs, said Pete Jackson, president of Advocates for the Reform of Prescription Opioids.

“Now it’s spreading from those two poles,” Jackson said.

The AP analysis used drug data collected quarterly by the DEA’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System. The DEA tracks shipments sent from distributors to pharmacies, hospitals, practitioners and teaching institutions and then compiles the data using three-digit ZIP codes. Every ZIP code starting with 100-, for example, is lumped together into one figure.

The AP combined this data with census figures to determine effective sales per capita.

A few ZIP codes that include military bases or Veterans Affairs hospitals have seen large increases in painkiller use because of soldier patients injured in the Middle East, law enforcement officials say. In addition, small areas around St. Louis, Indianapolis, Las Vegas and Newark, N.J., have seen their totals affected because mail-order pharmacies have shipping centers there, said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy.

Many of the sales trends stretch across bigger areas.

In 2000, oxycodone sales were centered in coal-mining areas of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky – places with high concentrations of people with back problems and other chronic pain.

But by 2010, the strongest oxycodone sales had overtaken most of Tennessee and Kentucky, stretching as far north as Columbus, Ohio and as far south as Macon, Ga.

Per-capita oxycodone sales increased five- or six-fold in most of Tennessee during the decade.

“We’ve got a problem. We’ve got to get a handle on it,” said Tommy Farmer, a counterdrug official with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

Many buyers began crossing into Tennessee to fill prescriptions after border states began strengthening computer systems meant to monitor drug sales, Farmer said.

In 2006, only 20 states had prescription drug monitoring programs aimed at tracking patients. Now 40 do, but many aren’t linked together, so abusers can simply go to another state when they’re flagged in one state’s system. There is no federal monitoring of prescription drugs at the patient level.

In Florida, the AP analysis underscores the difficulty of the state’s decade-long battle against “pill mills,” unscrupulous doctors who churn out dozens of prescriptions a day.

In 2000, Florida’s oxycodone sales were centered around West Palm Beach. By 2010, oxycodone was flowing to nearly every part of the state.

While still not as high as in Appalachia or Florida, oxycodone sales also increased dramatically in New York City and its suburbs. The borough of Staten Island saw sales leap 1,200 percent.

New York’s Long Island has also seen huge increases. In Islip, N.Y., teenager Makenzie Emerson says she started stealing oxycodone that her mother was prescribed in 2009 after a fall on ice. Soon Emerson was popping six pills at a time.

“When I would go over to friends’ houses I would raid their medicine cabinets because I knew their parents were most likely taking something,” said Emerson, now 19.

One day she overdosed at the mall. Her mother, Phyllis Ferraro, tried to keep her daughter breathing until the ambulance arrived.

“The pills are everywhere,” Ferraro said. “There aren’t enough treatment centers and yet there’s a pharmacy on every corner.”

The American Southwest has emerged as another hot spot.

Parts of New Mexico have seen tenfold increases in oxycodone sales per capita and fivefold increases in hydrocodone. The state had the highest rate of opioid painkiller overdoses in 2008, with 27 per 100,000 population.

Many parts of eastern California received only modest amounts of oxycodone in 2010, but the increase from 2000 was dramatic – more than 500 percent around Modesto and Stockton.

Many California addicts are switching from methamphetamine to prescription pills, said John Harsany, medical director of Riverside County’s substance abuse program.

Hydrocodone use has increased in some areas with large Indian reservations, including South Dakota, northeastern Arizona and northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Many of these communities have battled substance abuse problems in the past.

Experts worry painkiller sales are spreading quickly in areas where there are few clinics to treat people who get hooked, Bunt said.

In Utica, N.Y., Patricia Reynolds has struggled to find treatment after becoming dependent on hydrocodone pills originally prescribed for a broken tailbone.

The nearest clinics offering Suboxone, an anti-addiction drug, are an hour’s drive away in Cooperstown or Syracuse. And those programs are full and are not accepting new patients, she said.

“You can’t have one clinic like that in the whole area,” Reynolds said. “It’s a really sad epidemic. I want people to start talking about it instead of pretending it’s not a problem and hiding.”

Construction is under way in south-central Kansas of what’s expected to be the state’s largest wind farm.

State officials joined representatives of BP Wind Energy and Sempra U.S. Gas & Power on Wednesday to mark the start of work on the Flat Ridge 2 wind farm in Harper County.

Gov. Sam Brownback said in a news release the project is important for the nation’s energy production and revitalizing rural Kansas.

The $800 million wind farm is located on a 66,000-acre site about 40 miles southwest of Wichita.