A committee in the Kansas House expects to debate proposals next week for cracking down on illegal immigration.

Chairman Steve Brunk, a Bel Aire Republican, says the Federal and State Affairs Committee will take up immigration issues Monday.

Brunk said the panel will start with a proposal to require government contractors to check the immigration status of their workers using the federal E-Verify database.

Also before the committee are bills making it a crime to knowingly harbor an illegal immigrant; requiring applicants for government assistance to prove they’re in the U.S. legally; and directing law enforcement officers to check the status of some people they stop.

Meanwhile, business groups are promoting a bill to create a program for placing illegal immigrants in hard-to-fill jobs.

Twenty-three Kansas hospitals will share more than $10 million in Medicaid incentive payments for moving toward electronic health records.

The Department of Health and Environment says the incentives will be distributed over three years, with the first payments being made Thursday.

The hospitals are being rewarded for taking steps to improve medical coordination and improving services for patients.

Along with the hospitals, KDHE says 10 medical professionals will share about $212,000 for participating in the electronic records program.

A soldier who was left mostly paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet in Afghanistan has died of his wounds, less than five weeks after he arrived home in Topeka.

Penwell-Gabel Funeral Home in Topeka confirms the death Wednesday of 27-year-old Sgt. Jamie Jarboe.

Jarboe was stationed at Fort Riley in 2009 and deployed to Afghanistan in February 2011. He was on foot patrol there last April when a sniper’s bullet penetrated his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.

The married father of two had more than 100 surgeries and was due for more after his Feb. 17 return to a hero’s welcome in Topeka.

Jarboe was a native of Frankfort, Ind. He was assigned to 4th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Heavy Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division.

The Kansas Democratic Party has determined that anti-abortion activist Randall Terry is not a bona fide Democrat and won’t be awarded any delegates from the party’s April 14 Kansas caucuses.

Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, is seeking the Democratic nomination for president. His supporters were setting up Kansas campaign headquarters Wednesday in Wichita.

But Kansas Democratic Party attorney Joe Sandler says the party’s delegate selection rules only recognize candidates who have demonstrated a commitment to the party’s goals and objectives.

He says Terry also missed two state deadlines and submitted his application only days ago.

The state party issued a statement saying Terry’s name won’t be on the caucus ballot.

Terry says he meets legal and party requirements to be a candidate.

The Kansas Senate’s decision to reverse course and pass a bill cutting taxes came after Gov. Sam Brownback and his staff talked to some senators.

Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag said Wednesday that Brownback and his staff spoke with an unspecified number of senators between two votes only two hours apart.

The bill reduces income and sales taxes, and it’s dramatically different from Brownback’s plan to overhaul the individual income tax code. But Brownback declared that it’s a step toward creating more jobs.

The Republican-controlled Senate initially rejected the bill on a 20-20 vote, which left supporters one vote shy of the majority they needed. It was seen as a snub of Brownback.

But nine GOP senators switched their votes two hours later, when the vote was 29-11.

The Kansas Senate has approved a measure that adds protections for victims of stalking and domestic violence.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports that Kansas Senate this week approved a version of the measure that the House passed earlier. The bill now heads to conference committee.

The bill would make violations of protection from stalking and protection from abuse orders a level 6 felony. Such crimes are now misdemeanors. The measure also would allow judges to extend the length of time that protection orders are valid, up to life. Orders are now valid for up to one year, and victims have to reapply every year.

KBI deputy director Kyle Smith, who helped write the bill, said a new law would be a welcome change for victims and advocates.

An eastern Kansas man who pleaded no contest to sexually abusing a child will serve at least 25 years of a life sentence before he qualifies for parole.

Duane Francis Brannan, 33, received the maximum term allowed by state law at his sentencing Monday in Franklin County District Court. Four other counts were dropped in exchange for the Ottawa man’s plea last month to a single count.

Brannan’s victim — an 8-year-old girl — calmly answered questions from a prosecutor before the judge pronounced the sentence. The girl, who was known to Brannan, also read a statement and told Brannan he had made her “very sad.”

The girl was joined in court by family members and about 15 members of the group Bikers Against Child Abuse.

A woman who abducted an 81-year-old woman outside a northeast Kansas grocery store and forced her to withdraw money from banks is going to prison.

A Johnson County judge on Tuesday sentenced 24-year-old Sarah Nicole Zaragoza to 11 years. It’s the same sentence given earlier to her female co-defendant in the August 2010 crime.

Edna Wells was in the courtroom to see the second of her kidnappers sentenced.

The women grabbed Wells at knifepoint outside a Shawnee supermarket and forced her to drive around Johnson County withdrawing money from ATMs. The episode ended when Wells decided to drive to a bank where they had to go inside to get money. She mouthed the word “help” to a teller and her kidnappers took off.

The Kansas House has given first-round approval to a congressional redistricting bill keeping the Kansas City area in a single district rather than splitting it between two.

House members advanced the measure on a voice vote Tuesday after substituting their favored plan for one drafted by House Speaker Mike O’Neal, a Hutchinson Republican.

The House expects to take final action Wednesday.

The measure would cut southeast Kansas in half, putting Pittsburg in the 4th District with Wichita, about 150 miles away.

The O’Neal plan would have split the Kansas City area between two districts. It would have put much of Wyandotte County, with urban Kansas City neighborhoods, into the 1st Congressional District of western and central Kansas with rural communities more than 400 miles away.

A federal judge has refused to issue a gag order in a lawsuit accusing a Kansas military school of allowing older students to abuse younger ones in the name of discipline.

Lawyers for St. John’s Military School in Salina sought to bar the parties from talking publicly about the case.

But U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum said Tuesday a trial is still more than a year away, so that pretrial publicity likely wouldn’t taint the prospective jury pool.

The lawsuit by parents of four former cadets contends the school allows and encourages abuse of younger students by older ones.

St. John’s has settled nine similar lawsuits since 2006. The school’s lawyer says the motion for a gag order was an attempt to keep the case from being tried in the media.

 

University of Kansas students gave a man in Arkansas something to cheer about when they lifted a car off of him in a parking lot in Little Rock, Ark.

Members of the school’s spirit squad and band were preparing to get on a bus Sunday for a women’s NCAA Tournament game when they saw a commotion in a hotel parking lot.

Four cheer squad members and five band members ran toward a Cadillac after they realized someone was pinned beneath it.

The nine male students lifted the car, and the trapped man crawled out. Other than being disoriented and covered in grease, he appeared relatively unharmed.

The group then got on their bus in plenty of time to watch the Jayhawks beat Nebraska 57-49.