(AP) — When pheasant hunters take to the fields of South Dakota this weekend to renew a treasured rite of autumn, they’ll have less land to do it on thanks to the federal government shutdown.

About 150,000 acres in the national wildlife refuge system will be off-limits for the state’s annual public lands hunt. It’s a scenario being played out across the country, affecting millions of acres ordinarily available to hunters seeking antelope in Colorado, ducks in Montana or bears in Alaska.

In South Dakota, millions of acres of land leased or owned by the state will still be available.

But Mark Norton of the state wildlife department says the national wildlife refuge system offers some of the best cover for upland birds. He says sportsmen will feel the loss.

(AP) — Montana officials want to make salvaging roadkill for the dinner table as easy as a mouse click.

State officials plan to let drivers who accidentally kill big game to print out permits at home that allow them to harvest the meat for food.

Later on, there will be an app for that, too.

State lawmakers earlier this year passed the bill allowing motorists to salvage the carcasses of deer, elk, moose and antelope struck by vehicles. They left it to the state Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency to sort out how to issue roadkill permits.

Wildlife commissioners are expected to approve regulations Thursday that allow people to go online for the permits. Spokesman Ron Aasheim says there are plans in the works for a smartphone application for permits, as well.

(AP) — The Omaha Tribe of Nebraska has declared a state of emergency in an area where a tornado damaged homes and injured people.

The tribe says the declaration will help coordinate response efforts to meet the needs of displaced residents in Macy, which is located in northeast Nebraska.

The tornado on Saturday injured two residents, severely damaged five homes and damaged a business. The tribe is assisting at least four displaced families by offering new trailer homes that are in the process of being built.

Omaha Tribal Chairman Rodney Morris says the tribe is grateful for the outpouring of support from nearby communities. They’re encouraging people to help displaced families with needs like groceries, toiletries and other household goods.

(AP) — The University of Nebraska Foundation says it’s had a record year for private gifts: nearly $240 million.

The foundation says the figure is around 43 percent higher than the previous year and 37 percent higher than the record of $172 million set in fiscal 2011.

The foundation’s fiscal year ended June 30.

The foundation’s total assets, including its endowment, cash holdings and other assets, totaled $1.9 billion.

(AP) — An attorney has accidentally copied an email to the chief justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court.

The email was congratulating two other attorneys on their oral arguments to the court on Sept. 30. The email sent by Warren Whitted Jr. included a reference to “some ill-conceived and uninformed questions” posed by court members that day.

Within three hours Whitted sent an email directly to Chief Justice Michael Heavican, apologizing “for any offense caused by my congratulatory email.”

The emails came to light after Heavican filed a disclosure last week to let all the attorneys know about the first email and reassure them that it wouldn’t affect his consideration of the case.

(AP) — A northeast Nebraska man has been hospitalized in Iowa after falling into a fire pit.

The Dakota County Sheriff’s office says the accident occurred around 4:30 p.m. Monday in South Sioux City. The man was driving a skid loader when he fell. He was burned as he escaped the pit.

The man was taken to Unity Point Health-St. Luke’s in Sioux City for treatment. His name hasn’t been released.

(AP) — A former prison inmate accused of killing four people in Omaha has pleaded not guilty.

Twenty-seven-year-old Nikko Jenkins was arraigned Wednesday morning in Douglas County District Court on four counts of first-degree murder and 10 weapons counts.

Authorities say Jenkins killed all four within a month of leaving prison on July 30. He had served more than a decade for robbery, assault and weapons convictions.

At Jenkins’ preliminary hearing Oct. 1, two investigators testified that in September interviews Jenkins confessed to the slayings. They reported that he said voices and commands from an Egyptian god made him to kill the four.

Police have said robbery likely was the motive.

(AP) — A woman suspected of selling stolen items from a fundraiser for a Nebraska homicide victim has been arrested.

26-year-old Kristin V. Hunt was taken in Tuesday following an arrest warrant for theft.

Hunt is accused of selling a plasma television and a framed picture of the University of Nebraska Memorial Stadium to a local pawn shop.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s office says those items were taken from a Sept. 27 fundraiser for the family of Andrea Kruger. She is one of four victims tied to the Omaha killings this summer.

Jeffrey A. Johnson, a volunteer at the fundraiser, is accused of taking the items. The 50-year-old has been arrested on suspicion of felony theft.

Court records do not list attorneys for Johnson or Hunt.

(AP) — Court records show a Denver couple accused of keeping four malnourished young sons in a filthy apartment were accused of similar neglect of three other children in 2006.

The parents, Wayne Sperling and Lorinda Bailey, appeared in court Tuesday on felony child-abuse charges. Authorities say their children, ages 2 to 6, lived in an apartment littered with cat feces and flies and couldn’t speak.

Bailey, who is free on bail, declined to comment. Sperling’s lawyer made no public statement.

Records show police found similar conditions at the couple’s apartment in 2006, when they had three other children.

The parents pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child-abuse charges in that case and were ordered to serve probation and take parenting classes.

All the children were placed with a child services agency.

(AP) — Yahoo’s free email service is becoming a bit more like Google’s Gmail as part of its second makeover in less than a year.

The similarities to Gmail probably aren’t coincidental. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer helped design some of Gmail’s features while she was a top executive at Google Inc. Since its debut nearly a decade ago, Gmail has grown into the world’s most popular email service.

Yahoo’s redesigned email unveiled Tuesday includes a Gmail-like tool that will thread together emails related to specific topics so they appear as a succession of messages. The “conversation view” has become a widely used email feature since Gmail helped popularize the concept after it embraced the format in 2004.

Users can turn off Yahoo’s new conversational tool if they want.

Another new feature will enable Yahoo’s email users to decorate their inboxes with a selection of scenic pictures plucked from the company’s photo-sharing service, Flickr. Gmail has been allowing its users to spruce up their inboxes with various themes for years.

When Yahoo’s email users choose a picture as their backdrop, the same look will automatically appear on the mobile email applications that the company is modifying as part of the redesign. The updated apps are for Android devices, Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad and tablets running on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 8 operating system.

In another change, Yahoo is now promising each email account a maximum of one terabyte, or about 1,000 gigabytes, of storage. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company says that amount should be enough to cover the storage needs of its average email user for about 6,000 years. Yahoo Inc. had previously promised its email users that they would never run out of storage, but it hadn’t established a specific limit.

Gmail vastly expanded the capacity of email boxes in 2004 when it rolled out its service with a limit of one gigabyte per account. At the time, industry-leading email services run by Yahoo and Microsoft Corp. were limiting storage on their free accounts to 25 megabytes or even less.

Yahoo’s terabyte limit now dwarves Gmail, which has a per-account limit of 15 gigabytes that also includes material kept on Google’s Drive and Photo Plus services.

Since defecting from Google 15 months ago, Mayer has been revamping many of Yahoo’s services in an attempt to attract more Web surfers and bring in more revenue from ads. Yahoo’s ad sales remain lackluster at a time Google and Facebook Inc. are enjoying strong growth, but Mayer says the number of monthly visitors to the company’s services has increased by 20 percent to 800 million people since her arrival.

Yahoo’s last major overhaul of its email service occurred in December. The company now has about 289 million monthly users worldwide, second only to Gmail at 304 million, according to the most recent data from the research firm comScore Inc.