A 23-year-old man is charged with attempting to drown his two young children in Kansas City, Kan.

Wyandotte County prosecutors filed child abuse, making a criminal threat and domestic battery charges Friday against Lamonte J. Brown.

The Kansas City Star reported that Brown’s 1- and 3-year-old children were held underwater in a bathtub Thursday night. Police said they managed to stop Brown after they were called to the apartment and heard a woman screaming.

Authorities said the children did not suffer serious injury and are in the custody of their mothers.

Brown is being held on a $1 million bond. It wasn’t immediately known whether he had an attorney.

The long-lost dog tag of a World War I infantryman has been found in France and returned to his family in Kansas.

While searching battlefields with metal detectors, Michael Toussaint and Jean Claude Fonderflick have uncovered the identification tags belonging to five Americans, including Pvt. Kent Potter of Chase County, Kan.

Often such discoveries are sold on the Internet. But the Frenchmen were determined to return them to the families of their owners.

The search led them to the granddaughter of 1 of the Americans who lost his dog tag. The Illinois woman helped the Frenchmen reunite the dog tags with the relatives of other veterans.

Dale Potter, of El Dorado, Kan., received his late father’s dog tag Thursday at the Chase County Historical Museum.

The Kansas Court of Appeals has upheld sales and use taxes for oilfield machinery and equipment.

In a decision handed down Friday, the state appellate court affirmed an earlier decision by the Kansas Court of Tax Appeals. The tax court that denied oil and gas producers an exemption on down-hole machinery and equipment and surface pumping equipment.

The court concluded that such equipment is not an integral part of production operations by a processing plant and therefore not eligible for the exemption.

The decision comes in the lawsuit filed by Edmiston Oil Co. and other oil and gas producers.

The operators of the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant say a loss of off-site power prompted an automatic shutdown at the northeast Kansas facility.

The shutdown happened Friday afternoon. Wolf Creek officials say the plant’s two emergency diesel generators automatically started, supplying power to all safety-related equipment.

Plant officials declared a “notification of unusual event,” which is the lowest of 4 emergency classifications defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Wolf Creek is owned by Kansas City Power & Light Co., Topeka-based Westar Energy and the Kansas Electric Power Cooperative. During a shutdown, the companies rely on other generating plants they own or buy electricity from other utilities.

A group pursuing an amendment to the Kansas Constitution to ban abortion says 25 state House members have agreed to sponsor the measure.

Bruce Garren, chairman of the Personhood Kansas Committee, said Friday the measure is ready to be introduced in the House. Passage by two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate would put the question to a statewide vote.

The measure would amend the Kansas Constitution to say the state will guarantee the rights of every human being, starting at fertilization of the egg.

Abortion rights advocates call the proposal extreme and say it would ban common methods of birth control.

Some abortion opponents are also wary, arguing the movement will make permanent gains by pursuing less sweeping issues.

The Kansas attorney general’s office is expanding its alert system for missing children to include social media.

When an Amber Alert is issued it is typically broadcast by traditional media.

Now, Kansans can sign up to receive Amber Alerts on their mobile phones or Facebook accounts through the attorney general’s website at www.ksag.org .

Attorney General Derek Schmidt says in a news release that finding a child quickly can mean the difference between life and death.

Friday is the anniversary of the national alert program, which began in 1996 after the abduction of 9-year-old Amber Hageman in Texas.

Since its inception, Amber Alerts have helped bring 540 children home across the nation. In Kansas, 21 children have been safely returned since 2002.

by Randy Picking ~ Salina Post

U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) Friday issued the following statement on the President’s request to raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion:

“The President’s request to raise the debt ceiling yet again is a painful reminder of Washington’s out-of-control spending habits and failure to live by a budget. Our country’s debt now stands at more than $15 trillion and has grown by nearly $4.5 trillion in the past three years alone.

“Last year, I informed President Obama that I would not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless I saw substantial reductions in spending and structural changes in the way business is conducted in Washington, D.C.

“Nearly one year later, here we are again with the same request – yet the President and Congress have failed to put forward a long-term plan to address our growing fiscal crisis. The recommendations put forward by the Bowles-Simpson Commission represent a good starting point and should be seriously considered by Congress. Given the bipartisan support for many of their proposals, I am disappointed their recommendations continue to be ignored.

“Simply raising the debt limit without a serious plan to reduce our debt will only continue this pattern of fiscal irresponsibility, so I cannot support this request.”

The federal government has awarded a total of about $1.5 million to four north-central Kansas communities to improve housing.

The Kansas Commerce Department announced Thursday that the money will go to Clyde, Concordia, Glen Elder, and Wilson. The towns will use the money to fix 55 properties and demolish 15 units.

The communities will each contribute $2,000 in matching funds.

The money will be divided this way: Clyde will receive $377,000; Concordia receives $341,8000; Glen Elder and Wilson will each get $400,000.

The funds are from the federal Community Development Block Grant program.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback isn’t including a general pay increase for state employees in his proposed budget.

But the spending plan Brownback outlined Thursday would continue to fund a program that provides longevity bonuses to veteran state
employees during the fiscal year that begins July 1.

The proposed budget notes that state employees haven’t received pay increases for several years, as Kansas has struggled with financial problems.

Brownback’s administration says he’s not proposing a cost-of-living increase for workers, or funding the boost in pay that civil service workers normally receive if they’ve satisfactorily completed another year of work.

But Brownback’s budget does include $12 million for longevity bonuses. At 10 years, workers get a bonus of $50 for every year of service, up to $1,250.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt says he wants to improve the state’s efforts to fight human trafficking.

Schmidt announced Wednesday he’s expanded an existing task force to include more perspectives on the issue. He wants the task force to work with lawmakers and Gov. Sam Brownback to strengthen state laws.

The task force had included police, prosecutors, social workers and victims. The new members include a forensic nurse, a Sedgwick County corrections official and Rep. Steve Brunk of Wichita.

A recent analysis by a Washington nonprofit group found that Kansas has some of the weakest laws in the nation to deal with human trafficking.

Finney County officials say a fire that killed a woman and her two children started accidentally.

Sheriff Kevin Bascue says a preliminary autopsy indicated 22-year-old Nichole Savoy and her two children, 6-year-old Bryn and 22-month-old Madelyn, died of smoke inhalation during a fire Saturday at their Garden City home.

The Hutchinson News reports that fire investigators determined the fire started accidentally in a bedroom where Nichole Savoy was found dead.

A Kansas commission’s proposal to create a 401(k)-style pension plan for new teachers and government workers has received a big public endorsement from Gov. Sam Brownback.

The governor mentioned the proposal during his annual State of the State address Wednesday evening. He called a 401(k)-style plan for new hires, in his words, “honest” and said it would move the state away from having an unsound public pension system.

The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System projects an $8.3 billion gap between anticipated revenues and benefits promised to workers through 2033. Its traditional plans guarantee benefits up front, based on a worker’s salary and years of service, rather than tying them to investment earnings.

Critics contend such a change will shortchange new employees without attacking the long-term KPERS funding gap.