(AP) — NASA has eight new astronauts — its first new batch in four years.

The space agency announced its newest astronaut class Monday. Among the lucky candidates: the first female fighter pilot to become an astronaut in nearly two decades. A female helicopter pilot also is in the group. In fact, four of the eight are women, the highest percentage of female astronaut candidates ever selected by NASA.

The eight were chosen from more than 6,000 applications, the second largest number ever received. They will report for duty in August at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says these new candidates will help lead the first human mission to an asteroid, and then Mars.

According to a new study, drinking a beer a day reduces the risk of kidney stones by 41 percent.

This is great news for all beer drinkers because kidney stones are brutal. Just ask someone who’s had to deal with them.

Drinking coffee and wine also help, as coffee and wine reduce the risk by between 26 and 33 percent.

Unfortunately, you’re in trouble if you’re a soda junkie. People who drink one or more sugar-sweetened sodas per day are looking at a 23- to 33-percent higher risk of developing the problem.

(AP) — The utility that runs the Cooper nuclear power plant in southeast Nebraska must persuade regulators it has improved the way workers respond to problems.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials plan to meet on June 26 with the Nebraska Public Power District to discuss the concerns inspectors identified last year.

The NRC says that Cooper’s overall performance is acceptable, but regulators to know what NPPD has done to improve the way problems are analyzed and addressed.

NPPD spokesman Mark Becker says the plant’s managers are working to correct this issue, but he emphasized that Cooper continues to operate safely.

Cooper is located on the Missouri River about 70 miles south of Omaha.

(AP) — Coroner’s officials say a form of cancer killed the serial killer known as the Night Stalker who terrorized Southern California in the mid-1980s.

Richard Ramirez died June 7 at age 53 at a hospital where he had been taken for treatment of liver failure.

The Marin County coroner’s office said Monday that Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. It listed other “significant conditions” including chronic substance abuse and hepatitis C, which is often spread by the use of intravenous drugs.

He had been on death row at San Quentin State Prison since he was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders in 1984 and 1985 as well as rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.

However, executions have been on hold for years.

(AP) — Jurors in Lincoln have found a man not guilty in the stabbing death of a man last August.

The Lancaster County jury on Monday found Joshua Albright not guilty of murder.

Albright had been charged in the death of 30-year-old Benjamin Miller.

Police say the confrontation was about a woman both men dated.

Albright’s attorney argued his client was only defending himself.

An Oberlin, Kansas man has been sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder.

25-year-old Dylan Coryell was sentenced in Decatur County District Court on Monday.

Coryell was convicted in the shooting death of 22-year-old Corey Cook, of Oberlin, in March.

Prosecutors say Coryell killed Cook and shot his girlfriend on October 16, 2011 after he found the pair sleeping together.  They say Coryell and Cook had been exchanging heated text messages prior to the shooting, and both men had been drinking.

According to witness testimony, Coryell and the girl had recently begun a relationship.

The female survived the attack.

Coryell also received 13 months in jail for aggravated battery.

(AP) — The FBI has reached a milestone in its 63-year-old program of pursuing its “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.”

It has added the 499th and 500th names of fugitives to have appeared over the years on its regularly updated list.

The FBI says citizen cooperation has led to 155 of the fugitives being apprehended or their bodies found.

The two new additions are Jose Manuel Garcia Guevara, who allegedly murdered a 26-year-old woman in the presence of her 4-year-old stepson in Lake Charles, La., in 2008; and Walter Lee Williams, a former California professor wanted for the alleged sexual exploitation of children and traveling abroad to engage in illicit sex acts with children.

Guevara is believed to be in Mexico. Williams has lived in Palm Springs, Calif., and has traveled extensively in the Philippines and has reportedly lived in Indonesia, Polynesia and Thailand.

(AP) — A Nebraska woman who made a video in which she gleefully described robbing a bank has been given 10 to 20 years in prison.

Twenty-year-old Hannah Sabata, of Stromsburg, was sentenced on Monday in York County District Court. In May she’d pleaded guilty to robbery after a charge of theft was dismissed. She’d been charged with stealing a car to use for the robbery on Nov. 27 at the Waco branch of Cornerstone Bank.

After the robbery, Sabata recorded a video in which she displayed cash and bragged about stealing a car and robbing a bank. She spoke of having the best day of her life.

She posted the video to the Internet site YouTube.

(AP) — A 36-year-old man who was pulled unresponsive from the Platte River in eastern Nebraska has died.

Douglas County Chief Deputy Sheriff Tom Wheeler said Monday that Christopher Creekmore, of Omaha, was pronounced dead Sunday evening at an Omaha hospital.

Creekmore and his stepbrother, 19-year-old James Duncan, had been in the river at Two Rivers State Park on Sunday afternoon. They were jumping off a log into the water when Creekmore didn’t come up immediately after one leap. He appeared unconscious when he did surface.

Rescuers pulled Creekmore onto a sandbar and began CPR. A helicopter flew Creekmore to the Omaha hospital.

The plans of a former Microsoft manager to create the “Starbucks of Pot” are worrying other activists who pushed for the legalization of marijuana in Washington state.

They say Jamen Shively’s ambitions don’t merely raise questions about whether big corporations will come to dominate the legal pot industry, but also about whether his profit-driven approach might cause a backlash that could slow the marijuana reform movement across the country.

Shively is trying to raise $10 million from investors and eventually wants to build his company, Diego Pellicer (pay-EE’-sehr), into an international pot powerhouse.

But the states aren’t licensing marijuana stores yet. Legal experts say the way Shively is going about making deals with medical marijuana dispensaries could risk federal prosecution.