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Man pleads guilty in 1987 case
ST. PAUL (AP) -- A serial burglar has pleaded guilty to killing an elderly woman after breaking into her St. Paul home three decades ago.
Sixty-year-old Michael Withers entered the plea to second-degree murder without intent Friday in Ramsey County District Court and could be sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Eighty-one-year-old Lillian Kuller fought with her intruder before he strangled her in 1987. Authorities had done DNA tests on evidence, but it wasn't until Y-chromosome profile tests on some evidence, including Kuller's fingernail clippings, were done that investigators came up with a match to Withers. Those results were received in March 2017.
Withers lived about a mile from Kuller's house at the time of the homicide.
Probe: Hospital violated privacy
EDINA (AP) -- A federal investigation has found a suburban Twin Cities hospital violated the privacy rights of some patients by videotaping psychiatric evaluations in the emergency department without their knowledge.
The Medicare investigation focused on a woman who was taken to the ER at Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina against her will in May 2017.
The woman requested security camera footage from the hospital as part of her lawsuit over her admission and treatment by police. The woman says she expected only footage of the hospital entrance and was shocked to learn the hospital had videotaped her the entire time she was there.
A hospital official says cameras had been added to the psychiatric evaluation rooms because of an increase in the number of violent patients. Fairview says it has ended the practice.
Quad-City firm, Microsoft team up
DES MOINES (AP) -- A Quad-Cities company is partnering with Microsoft to improve rural broadband access to about 126,000 people in Iowa, Illinois and South Dakota.
Illinois-based Network Business Systems will work to expand access to Iowa residents in Scott, Muscatine and Clinton counties. The partnership is through Microsoft's Airband initiative, which aims to expand broadband service to 2 million people living in rural areas of the U.S. by 2022.
More than 60 percent of rural residents in Muscatine County didn't have access to high-speed internet in 2016, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Less than 30 percent of Clinton County residents didn't have access, while more than 20 percent didn't have access in Scott County.