(AP)-The public can learn more about the progress being made at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant on Friday.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Omaha Public Power District will discuss the latest inspections at the idle plant 20 miles north of Omaha at the meeting.

Fort Calhoun initially shut down for routine maintenance in April 2011, but flooding along the Missouri River and a series of safety violations forced it to stay closed.

The utility is working to address a list of about 480 items in 18 major categories the NRC says must be fixed before the plant will be allowed to restart.

OPPD officials say they think Fort Calhoun can be ready by late May.

Regulators say the plant won’t restart unless they’re confident it is safe.

Omaha cold case investigators have been looking for links between this week’s slayings of a Creighton University professor and his wife and the 2008 slayings of an 11-year-old boy and his family housekeeper.

The professor, Dr. Roger Brumback, was a colleague of the boy’s father and mother at Creighton’s medical school. They are Drs. William and Claire Hunter. Their son, Thomas Hunter, and their housekeeper, 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman, were stabbed to death at the Hunters’ home on March 13, 2008.

Police have not said how Roger and Mary Brumback were killed. Their bodies were discovered in their west-central Omaha home on Tuesday.

No arrests have been reported in either case.

Police won’t say whether they found any links, other than the professional relationships between Roger Brumback and the Hunters.

Sentencing has been rescheduled for a Blair woman who was convicted of negligent child abuse in the drowning of a toddler at her day care facility.

The new court date is May 30 and had been requested by the lawyer for 59-year-old Nancy Tierney. She’d pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge. Prosecutors dropped a manslaughter count in exchange for her plea. Tierney’s original sentencing date was May 16.

Police say Tierney was charged after a 16-month-old girl drowned in August last year in a pool at Tierney’s home, which served as a certified day care facility. A court document says Tierney left the girl, Isabella Thallas, and other children unattended when she used a bathroom. Tierney said she thought the gate to the pool had been locked.

Investigators say more than 130 marijuana plants have been found at the home of a woman who worked as a litigation assistant in the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office.

38-year-old Kimberly Meidell was arrested Wednesday at the home she shares with 38-year-old Eric Trost, who also was arrested.

An arrest warrant affidavit says that in addition to the marijuana plants, more than a pound of marijuana and marijuana paraphernalia were found in the home.

Meidell had worked in the Attorney General’s Office for more than nine years. Deputy Attorney General David Cookson said Thursday that Meidell’s “employment has been terminated.”

A Lancaster County jailer said Meidell and Trost remained in custody on Friday. Online court records don’t list the names of their attorneys.

(AP)-Drug company Novartis has begun laying off workers at its plant east of Lincoln.

The Swiss drugmaker says in a statement it had notified 72 people that their positions have been eliminated. The company also won’t fill 41 positions that had been open.

The positions are in technical operations, engineering and quality.

The job cuts are part of a plan Novartis announced last month to cut 300 jobs from its workforce of 750 in Lincoln. More layoffs are planned in early 2014 and a final round will occur in 2015.

The layoffs follow inspections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that found problems with quality control and complaint resolution at the plant.

A firefighter and a house occupant have been treated for injuries after a fire that gutted the house in northeast Nebraska.

The fire was reported around noon Wednesday in South Sioux City. Fire officials say embers in a grill used the night before rekindled and started a fire on a deck. The flames spread to the home.

Fire officials say a man who’d been in the house basement when the fire erupted was taken to a hospital for treatment. He’d been cut when he broke a window while trying to escape.

A firefighter was treated for heat exhaustion.

Authorities say that just five days after 37-year-old Daniel Cano left prison after serving time for drunken driving, he was caught driving drunk again.

Daniel Cano was sentenced on Wednesday to seven to 12 more years in prison.

Cano was arrested Jan. 16, after his car narrowly missed a police cruiser while Cano was driving in central Omaha. Authorities say his blood tested out at nearly four times the legal limit.

Cano had left prison on Jan. 11, having completed a sentence for his seventh drunken-driving conviction. It was his third prison stint for drunken driving.

(AP) — A central Pennsylvania woman will spend 60 days to two years in jail for hog-tying her 5-year-old grandson to a chair so she could go to a methadone clinic.

The Altoona Mirror reports 49-year-old Evelyn Himes, of Duncansville, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading no contest to endangering the welfare of a child and simple assault.

Police charged Himes after the boy’s preschool called county social workers after noticing a mark on his wrist. The boy told investigators he’d been tied down and investigators later determined Himes bound him with scarves. Himes claimed the boy was badly behaved and reminded the judge the court had given her custody of the boy.

Blair County Judge Jolene Kopriva told Himes that the boy has been well-behaved since he was placed in foster care and called Himes “misguided.”

(AP) — Some Omaha community groups are urging OPPD to phase out coal power and invest in more renewable energy production through wind and solar power.

The Sierra Club, Malcolm X Foundation and other groups presented a petition with more than 900 signatures on it to the Omaha Public Power District on Thursday.

The groups are especially concerned about OPPD’s north Omaha coal plant and its effect on the health of people who live nearby.

Retired nurse Cynthia Tiedeman says she worries that the pollutants emitted by the coal plant can irritate neighbors’ throats and lungs.

OPPD says it relies on the north Omaha coal plant to help it meet the power demands of more than 300,000 customers in southeast Nebraska.

A proposal to increase mental health services for children throughout Nebraska has won first-round approval from lawmakers.

Lawmakers advanced a bill Thursday that would create a pilot program to offer behavioral health services to children, using computer technology to connect them remotely with professionals.

The measure would establish three pilot clinics, with at least one in an urban area and one in a rural setting.

Sen. Amanda McGill says the bill is an extension of the promise she made to reform youth mental health services in the wake of Nebraska’s safe haven law. The law prompted parents to abandon older children at hospitals and emergency rooms, so they could gain access behavioral health services.

Lawmakers voted 35-0 to advance the bill.