Authorities are searching for two young boys they believe were kidnapped by their father from their maternal grandparents’ Florida home after their grandmother was tied up.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday night asked for the public’s help in locating the boys, 4-year-old Cole Hakken and 2-year-old Chase Hakken.

Authorities allege that their father, 35-year-old Joshua Michael Hakken, entered his mother-in-law’s house north of Tampa, tied her up and fled with the children. They said the children could be in a black 2006 GMC pickup owned by their father.

The news release identified Hakken and the children’s mother, 34-year-old Sharyn Patricia Hakken, as suspects in the abduction.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that Joshua Hakken lost custody of his sons last year after a drug possession arrest in Louisiana.

More than 30 groups are expected to rally at the Nebraska Capitol to call for federal immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship.

The coalition will convene Thursday at 10 a.m. on the west steps outside the Capitol. The groups represent the interests of religious faiths, businesses, labor, children and families.

Speakers will include representatives from the Nebraska Catholic Conference, Nebraska Cattlemen, Nebraska Restaurant Association, Heartland Workers Center, and Latino Center of the Midlands

Midland University in Fremont has announced it will acquire the former Dana College campus in Blair.

Midland announced the plan Thursday, saying in a news release that its growing enrollment in the last four years has necessitated expansion of its campus.

Dana and Midland had shared Lutheran affiliations — and served as athletic rivals — in eastern Nebraska for decades before the Blair school closed its doors in 2010 following years of financial struggles and the loss of its accreditation.

More than half of Dana’s 600 students transferred to Midland, sending the Fremont school’s 2010 enrollment from 643 to 962. Midland has continued to see enrollment growth, and currently has more than 1,000 students.

Midland officials did not disclose how much it plans to bid for the Dana campus.

A former Nebraska stripper accused of fatally stabbing her client at his Des Moines home has reached a plea deal in the case.

Court documents filed Wednesday show Andrea Morris pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 1999 death of 43-year-old Patrick McRae. She also pleaded guilty to willful injury and first-degree theft.

Morris faces up to 70 years in prison but will be eligible for parole after 70 percent of her sentence is served.

Morris was convicted in 2006 for McRae’s death and sentenced to life in prison without parole. A new trial was later ordered after Morris said she wasn’t told that court workers had smelled alcohol on the breath of her attorney.

The White House says President Barack Obama will return 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury in light of automatic spending cuts that have led to furloughs for thousands of federal workers.

A White House official says Obama decided to return part of his salary each month for the rest of the year to share in the sacrifice that government employees are making. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The president makes $400,000 per year. A 5 percent pay cut amounts to a little less than 1,700 per month.

The decision is retroactive to the beginning of March. That’s when $85 billion in federal spending cuts kicked in after lawmakers failed to agree on a plan to undo them.

A new study finds that Alzheimer’s is the most expensive malady in the U.S., costing families and society $157 billion to $215 billion a year.

The study — by the nonprofit RAND Corp., estimates that around 4.1 million Americans suffer from dementia. That’s less than the widely cited 5.2 million estimate from the Alzheimer’s Association, which comes from a study that included people with less severe impairment.

The biggest cost of Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia isn’t drugs or other medical treatments, but the care that’s needed just to get mentally impaired people through daily life.

Dementia’s direct costs, from medicines to nursing homes, are $109 billion a year in 2010 dollars. That compares to $102 billion for heart disease and $77 billion for cancer.

The study was sponsored by the government’s National Institute on Aging and will be published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

A Lincoln nursing home says it’s treated a patient room for bedbugs that hitchhiked in on a visitor.

Jennifer Knecht is director of marketing for Tabitha, which offers a variety of at-home, residential and health care services to senior citizens. Knecht said Wednesday that the problem was discovered on Sunday at Tabitha Nursing & Rehabilitation Center.

She says the bedbugs were brought in by a person who was visiting a resident. They were found in only that patient’s room. Knecht says exterminators were brought in to treat that room and three others nearby as a precaution.

The best friend of a New Jersey man who admitted killing a teenager 23 years ago says his friend was overwhelmed by guilt and haunted by nighttime visions of the boy’s mother.

Steven Goff, of Ventnor, turned himself in to police Monday and admitted that he fatally stabbed 15-year-old Frederick Hart in Galloway in 1990. The cause of the boy’s death had been a mystery.

Goff’s best friend, Alan Rickel, says Goff could no longer deal with the guilt.

He says Goff told him after surrendering that he had nightmares in which the slain boy’s mother was staring at him.

Rickel says he got a call from Goff over the weekend. He says Goff told him he was fleeing to Canada but decided to return home and admit having done “something terrible.”