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Nebraska carried out its first-ever lethal injection Tuesday, executing double murderer Carey Dean Moore, said Scott Frakes, director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. The execution, which involved a four-drug cocktail, began at 10:24 a.m. (11:24 a.m. ET), and Moore was declared dead at 10:47 a.m., Frakes said. "I am required to carry out the order of the court," Frakes said in a statement. "This agency has done so with professionalism, respect for the process and with dignity for all involved."

Federal authorities Thursday announced the arrest of 13 people they say were ringleaders in a massive scheme to exploit illegal immigrants as cheap labor on farms and Hispanic-oriented businesses in Minnesota and Nebraska. They also carried out search warrants on 11 of the businesses Wednesday and nabbed 133 illegal immigrant workers they found at the time. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they suspect some of the migrants were coerced into working in rough conditions, either by force or threats of being reported to authorities for deportation...

GRAND ISLAND — During a multi-state operation led by special agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a series of criminal arrest warrants were executed Wednesday for 17 individuals connected to an alleged criminal conspiracy to exploit illegal alien laborers for profit, fraud, wire fraud and money laundering in Nebraska and Minnesota. In addition to these arrest warrants, authorities also served search warrants for worksite hiring violations at agricultural firms in Nebraska and Minnesota, and federal document search warrants at locations throughout Nebraska, in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota; Appleton, Minnesota; and Las Vegas, Nevada. During this...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers Wednesday issued criminal arrest warrants for 17 employers and other individuals charged with exploiting illegal immigrant employees in six Nebraska communities during a series of raids that swept up 133 workers. The operation, which also impacted two communities in Minnesota, was directed at employers and workers in O'Neill, Atkinson, Stromsburg, Ainsworth, Bartlett and Royal. Search warrants were also issued in Las Vegas. Businesses in Nebraska included a tomato greenhouse operation, restaurants, a grocery store, a grain company, a cattle company, farms and ranches.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided businesses in Montana and Nebraska on Wednesday, indicting 17 business owners and mangers for fraud and money laundering. The agents in the Homeland Security Investigations arm of ICE led the raids on businesses they allege knowingly hired and improperly treated undocumented immigrants, the Associated Press reported. Authorities took 14 of the people indicted into custody, and are still searching for three others. Special agent in charge Tracy Cormier told the AP that the raids were part of one of the largest operations in the 15 years of the Homeland Security Investigations branch. “The...

Our country rightly paused last week to honor the service of America’s Korean War veterans and to note our continuing interest in helping protect a democratic South Korea. Fighting in the Korean War came to a halt 65 years ago, when negotiations finally yielded an armistice that halted hostilities, created the Demilitarized Zone and separated the Korean Peninsula into a north-south division. The conflict, which included some of the American military’s most desperate battles and most inspiring demonstrations of heroism, took the lives of 36,000 Americans. Among the dead was Marine Pfc. Edward “Babe” Gomez of Omaha, a graduate of...

“This trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers,” said Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) on Tuesday, “and White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend $12 billion on gold crutches.” Referring to Donald Trump’s tariff brinksmanship with China, Senator Sasse was decrying Donald Trump’s request to Congress for compensatory farm subsidies. Sasse insisted that “America’s farmers don’t want to be paid to lose” — but regardless of what farmers want, we should want free trade. Tariffs are taxes, after all. Consumers ultimately pay for them all. Now, Trump’s requested “crutches” may amount to nothing more than just another fine...

Pssst! Don't call it socialism, especially in the Midwest. Pass it along. New York magazine writer Eric Levitz admits in his July 3 article that the socialism of Democratic-Socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx by way of Westchester County might be a tough sell to voters in the Midwest. His solution is to rebrand that leftist ideology in a way to make socialism somehow palatable to them. Levitz makes his palatability proposals in Ocasio-Cortez’s Socialism Can Work in the Midwest — With a Rebrand:

The Nebraska Democratic candidate for attorney general who was accused of attacking his father has stepped aside, citing health reasons. Van Argyrakis had faced calls to remove himself from the ballot because he was charged with felony strangulation following an altercation with his 82-year-old father on April 8. Party leaders can choose a replacement Democrat to appear on the ballot.

WASHINGTON — Nebraska volleyball coach John Cook has jumped into the controversy surrounding this week’s canceled White House visit by the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. Cook posted a tweet Tuesday night: “Nebraska would love to go to the White House! Huskers would be honored and proud to visit our leaders in DC and represent Nebraska and the Natty! #gbr” The tweet appeared to be deleted Wednesday afternoon. Cook’s statement quickly drew a wave of responses from others on the social media platform, ranging from attaboys to how-dare-yous.

<p>The Nebraska State Patrol says the nearly 120 pounds of suspected cocaine and fentanyl that troopers seized last month turned out to be all fentanyl, a deadly opioid that federal officials blame for thousands of deaths nationwide.</p> <p>The patrol says the stash was a record fentanyl seizure in Nebraska and estimates the drugs may have been worth up to $20 million on the street. The Drug Enforcement Administration says just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal. The fentanyl seized was enough to kill 26 million people, according to DEA estimates.</p>

Lawsuit could undercut 2012 amnesty, end ongoing legal battles over Trump phaseoutTexas and a half-dozen other states filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the legality of the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty, opening up a new legal front in the increasingly messy battle over illegal immigration. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in southern Texas, asks judges to rule against the 2012 program that’s granted tentative legal status to more than 800,000 illegal immigrant “Dreamers.”

The anti-gun left has apparently fully embraced that old saying from the late sixties and early seventies: the personal is political. It’s not enough to protest the NRA’s headquarters, call its leaders Nazis and ask how many kids have they killed today in tediously un-original chants. Now they’re attacking their homes and families. National Rifle Association lobbyist Chris Cox says his house was splashed with fake blood — twice. Then, someone made a fake website for his wife’s interior design business, altering images of artwork to show photos of child gun violence victims. Last week, two gun control activists...

After suggesting last week that the U.S. government would seek to rejoin the sovereignty-shredding Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), President Donald Trump took to social media on April 18 to slam the controversial “free trade” regime that he once described as the “rape of our country.” Instead, Trump is seeking a bilateral agreement with remaining Pacific-rim governments such as Japan. Grassroots conservatives celebrated the announcement. But establishment voices were less than happy about it. Writing after a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump suggested he was still opposed to TPP and preferred a bilateral trade deal...

The head of the Nebraska Democratic Party called Tuesday on the Democratic candidate for attorney general to drop out of the race after he was accused of an attack on his elderly father.

Mark Zuckerberg faced a mixture of tough and softball questions at yesterday’s Senate hearing. Many questions were left unanswered, and members of the House will have to pick up the slack today. The toughest questions in the Senate hearing came from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who grilled Zuckerberg on Facebook’s political bias, its possible status as the “largest publisher in the world”, and its definition of “hate speech.” Democrats, when they weren’t urging Zuckerberg to do more to censor so-called “hate speech,” focused on irrelevant panics like Russian propaganda and “fake...

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts signed a budget Wednesday that will eliminate federal family-planning funding to Planned Parenthood of the Heartland. The $8.8 billion two-year budget would prohibit money to facilities that commit, promote, or refer clients for abortions. The budget also mandates health clinics in the state to legally, financially, and physically separate from abortion facilities. Ricketts, who is pro-life, approved the package after it was passed by the state legislature on a 38-6 vote. The Nebraska governor proposed the measure in his budget earlier this year. Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts signed a budget Wednesday that will eliminate federal family-planning...

Earlier this month, we noted that California faced a lawsuit from the Department of Justice over its new status as a “Sanctuary State“. Several red and purple states have now boarded this particular “Trump Train”. Texas and more than a dozen other states led by Republican governors got behind the Trump administration on Monday in its lawsuit over California’s so-called sanctuary laws that protect people in the U.S. illegally. California’s laws are designed to interfere with or block federal immigration enforcement but the state does not have that authority, the other states said in a court filing in the U.S....

Offutt Airbase, Nebraska (CNN)If the unthinkable happens and a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea or Russia happens, President Donald Trump will rely on a secure underground facility at a base in the middle of the United States to carry out his orders. And four-star Air Force Gen. John Hyten, the commander of US Strategic Command, would be at the center of it all. "Our strategic responses are always ready to respond and everybody should know that," Hyten told CNN in an interview inside the highly secured 'Battle Deck' where he would oversee a nuclear response if the...

Crews draining Wedgewood Lake in east Lincoln found a handgun Tuesday, Lincoln police said. The handgun was rusting and covered in mud, Officer Angela Sands said Wednesday. The lake is south of O Street between 70th and 84th streets.