Kansas City Star

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Federal prosecutors in Kansas City, Mo., announced a new defendant and fresh charges Wednesday in a south Missouri sex torture case.

The wife of the alleged ringleader of a scheme that purportedly held a young woman as a sex slave for years now faces charges of conspiracy, sex and forced labor trafficking and document servitude.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The Missouri Highway Patrol has reported that methamphetamine laboratory seizures jumped 10 percent last year.

The highway patrol said there were 1,960 seizures in Missouri in 2010, up from 1,774 in 2009.

"Once again, Missouri has the unfortunate distinction of being the leader in meth lab seizures, despite the hard work of the state's drug task forces and all law enforcement," Col.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Is an ordinary cell phone a computer?

Yes it is, a panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday. If you use the cell phone to help transport a minor across state lines for illegal sex, a judge can sentence you to more prison time.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- That first year of college has always been tough. But tight economic times have made it even harder.

Pressures to pay for college and choose studies that will produce good jobs have stressed this year's college freshmen at unprecedented levels.

In a new report, college freshmen rated their emotional health at the lowest level in the 25 years of the survey.

The data, published by the University of California, Los Angeles, mirrored observations of some high school and college counselors.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- For Karla O'Malley, free speech is one thing but trash-talking the dead is beyond the pale -- or should be.

The Overland Park, Kan., woman is trying to stir up support for a federal law to bar people from posting offensive comments or pictures on website memorial pages.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The 1963 Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination was shot on it.

So, too, were the portraits of Sir Edmund Hillary on Mount Everest, a famed 1985 National Geographic cover of a beautiful Afghan refugee girl, and probably a generation or two of your family's vacation slides.

"They give us those nice bright colors; they give us the greens of summers," Paul Simon sang, immortalizing the film in his 1973 hit "Kodachrome."

So when Angie Jennings of Prairie Village, Kan., learned that Kodachrome was going away -- that Kodak would stop making the film in 2009 and that the last Kodachrome processing machine on the globe would shut down at the end of 2010 -- she knew what to do.

In September, the 45-year-old art photographer trekked with her mother, 72, up a lush hillside in China's Fujian province. There, visiting the tea fields of a dear friend, she stood on the rise of a winding path. Shrubs rich with the buds of her favorite white tea covered the mountainside.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Ever dream about a honeymoon in space?

You may want to think twice after you hear about Joe Tash's research.

The near-zero gravity of Earth orbit may do serious harm to the male and female reproductive systems, the University of Kansas Medical Center biologist has discovered.

Sperm counts drop. Egg-producing ovary cells waste away.

At least that's been the case among the laboratory and space-traveling rodents that Tash has studied.