(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.

(AP) — A December trial has been scheduled for a 26-year-old York man wounded in an exchange of gunfire with a sheriff’s deputy.

The attorney for Max McCall pleaded not guilty for him on Monday to all six charges connected to the Aug. 11 incident. The charges include attempted assault on an officer and three weapons counts. McCall’s trial is scheduled to begin Dec. 3. He remains jailed pending bail of $250,000.

Authorities say the deputy was responding to a call about McCall on Aug. 11 when the deputy spotted McCall’s vehicle and gave chase. The chase ended when McCall’s vehicle went into a ditch.

Sheriff Dale Radcliff has said McCall fired twice at the deputy. The deputy shot back, hitting McCall twice.

The deputy wasn’t wounded.

(AP) — A 31-year-old York man has been given seven to 15 years in prison on robbery and burglar convictions.

Robert Jones had pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and attempted burglary.

Jones admitted robbing a Taco John’s restaurant in York in October. In the unrelated burglary case, officers say Jones was caught burglarizing an apartment in York.

The judge gave Jones credit for 175 days already served.

(AP) — A 46-year-old man has lost his parole and been given more prison time for using a baseball bat to beat a pregnant woman in Lincoln.

Online court records say George Wortham was sentenced to 10 to 15 years on Monday. He’d pleaded no contest to an assault charge. Police say he beat the woman in April. The woman told officers Wortham hit her about 20 times on her head, back, arms and hands. Wortham was on parole from prison on convictions of terroristic threats, theft, assault, DUI and possession of hydrocodone.

The victim also said a woman with Wortham, Thenesia Bullock, hit and kicked her. The 45-year-old Bullock has pleaded not guilty to an assault charge and awaits trial.