A fraternity house at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln is set to reopen after a deadly fire nearly six years ago.

The Lincoln Journal Star  says Phi Kappa Tau will start anew on Saturday when it regains its national standing and becomes an official Wesleyan fraternity with 34 members.

Nineteen-year-old Ryan Stewart, of Ord, died in the November 2006 fire that gutted the house. The fraternity was suspended from the national chapter and the university for at least four years.

Investigators determined the fire started in Stewart’s room, but couldn’t figure out the cause due to the damage.

The university has since installed sprinklers in housing for all 1,100 of its students, including its seven Greek houses. That effort started after the fire and finished this summer.

A Grand Island man who faces three felony counts of child abuse is accused of using a pipe to hit at least one of them.

The Grand Island Independent reports that 33-year-old Josh Swaim has bonded out of jail after being arrested Tuesday. Officers began in investigation after school officials reported seeing bruises on Swaim’s 8-year-old daughter. Grand Island police officer Butch Hurst says investigators determined that the bruises likely came from being struck by a pipe of unknown size.

Hurst also says the girl’s 6-year-old brother told investigators that Swaim had kicked the boy’s infant sister.

Swaim’s wife, 28-year-old Samarra Swaim, said Thursday that he denies the allegations and will fight them in court.

A new report says wind power has the potential to boost Nebraska’s economy, but the state is still trailing its neighbors in tapping the resource.

A group of lawmakers and environmental advocates unveiled a report Thursday that ranks Nebraska as the fourth-best wind-resource state in the nation. Yet the report says Nebraska ranks 25th when it comes to installed wind capacity. Nebraska ranks lower than Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas.

Skip Laitner, an Arizona-based energy economist who authored the report, says expanding wind energy could save Nebraska consumers a combined $3.8 billion over the next two decades. Laitner says shifting from coal power to wind could also lower the nation’s health care costs.

The announcement follows the dedication this week of a new wind farm near Broken Bow.

Confidential files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on men they suspected of child sex abuse are set to be released after a two-year-long court battle.

The anticipated release of the files on Thursday by Portland attorney Kelly Clark will reveal 20,000 pages of documents the Scouts kept on men inside — and in some cases outside — the organization believed to have committed acts of abuse.

The court-ordered release of the so-called perversion files from 1965 to 1985 has prompted the organization to pledge that they will go back into the files and report any offenders who may have not been reported to the police when alleged abuse took place.

That could prompt a new round of criminal prosecutions for offenders who have so far escaped justice.

Union Pacific railroad will release its third-quarter earnings report Thursday morning.

Investors will be looking closely at how much coal the Omaha-based railroad carried during the quarter. Two other major freight railroads, Norfolk Southern and CSX, have both reported continued weak coal demand because of the low natural gas prices and the mild winter.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet are expecting Union Pacific to report earnings per share of $2.18 on sales of $5.38 billion.

Railroad results are considered an indicator of the health of the economy. That’s because the carloads of products and raw materials railroads carry can tell investors how other businesses are doing.

Union Pacific operates 32,400 miles of track in 23 states from the Midwest to the West and Gulf coasts.

Three people convicted in a fraudulent Nebraska investment scheme have been sentenced to prison and ordered to make restitution of more than $16.6 million.

The three were sentenced on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Lincoln.

Stella Levea and James Masat, both of Grand Island, were given eight years and a month in federal prison. Kenneth Motin, of St. Libory, was given five years. They must serve three years of supervised release after leaving prison.

Levea and Masat were the principals of First Americans Insurance Service, which had been under investigation since a 2009 bankruptcy filing. Motin worked for them.

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning compared First Americans’ dealings to a Ponzi scheme in which investors are promised high returns and early investors are paid with money from later investors.

A 21-year-old Omaha man faces a new charge of motor vehicle homicide following a crash in which another man died.

Sergio Valdivia-Marquez previously faced charges of driving under the influence causing serious injury and reckless driving in the crash just after midnight Saturday.

Omaha television station KETV reports (https://bit.ly/PDXugQ) that the Douglas County Attorney’s Office filed the new charge following the death Wednesday of 18-year-old Michael Tran.

Tran was taken off life support and died around 10 a.m. Wednesday. An autopsy has been scheduled for Thursday.

Police say Valdivia-Marquez’s headlights and tail lights were not functioning properly and that he was speeding when he ran a red light and slammed into Tran’s car.

A trucker who wanted a quick bite to eat received a citation Saturday for putting his young puppy in a quarter-slot newspaper box in Lincoln.

The trucker, Nebyou Brook, of Oakland California, wanted to grab something to eat from a fast-food restaurant. Brook said he wasn’t allowed to take the puppy inside and he didn’t want to leave him in the truck, so he inserted the required amount of quarters and placed the approximately 7-week-old terrier puppy in a newspaper sales box.

According to the Associated Press, another man saw what happened, so he put popped some coins into the box to retrieve the puppy.

The trucker was cited for animal neglect and was allowed to keep the puppy.

A Lincoln-based postal contractor who misused a gas card given to him by the U.S. Postal Service has been given three years of probation.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that 73-year-old Ervin Stepanek was sentenced on Tuesday.

Stepanek told the judge he was sorry and that he accepted full responsibility for his crime. Stepanek had pleaded guilty to theft of public money.

He’s already paid back $90,000. He must pay nearly $37,000 more.

Court records say Stepanek admitted that from May 2005 until early 2008 he stole gas by misusing the card. At the time, Stepanek’s company, Blue Falcon Mail Service, had contracted to carry mail between postal outlets.

A Fremont man has won $1 million from the Nebraska Mega Millions lottery game.

The Nebraska Lottery says a ticket bought by Gerald Ritter at Tom’s Beverage Shop in Fremont matched five of the six numbers from Friday’s drawing: 6, 10, 24, 26 and 42. That won him $250,000, But he’d added the $1 Megaplier option, which multiplied the $250,000 by four.

Ritter says he and his wife, Robin Ritter, plan to pay bills and save the rest of the money for their future.