LIBERAL, Kan. – A 90-year-old Satanta woman was injured in a one vehicle accident just after 5 p.m. Monday in Seward County.

According to the Kansas Highway Patrol, Genevieve Stanley was westbound on K-190 and struck a piece of paving equipment which was moving eastbound on that highway.

Stanley was taken to the Satanta Hospital for treatment of injuries. She was wearing her seat-belt according to KHP.

The accident occurring about 17-miles north of Liberal.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A new government report shows Kansas growers are still far behind in bringing in this season’s winter wheat crop.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service reported Monday that 61% of wheat in the state has been harvested. That is well behind the 84% typically cut by this late in the season.

About 92% of the wheat in Kansas has matured.

The agency said about 58% of the wheat out in the field is in good to excellent condition. About 27% is rated as good with 15% in poor to very poor shape.

By JOHN HANNA AP Political Writer

Eds: Updates with additional details from judge’s order, reaction from CEO of clinic operator, anti-abortion group. Updates information about members of state medical board.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A state-court judge declined Monday to give a Kansas clinic permission to provide telemedicine abortions.

Shawnee County District Judge Teresa Watson rejected a request from the Trust Women Foundation for an injunction to block the state from subjecting the clinic and its doctors to enforcement of state laws against telemedicine abortions. She did so despite another judge’s ruling that no ban can be enforced and a Kansas Supreme Court ruling in April that access to abortion is a “fundamental” right under the state constitution.

The foundation operates a Wichita clinic that in October began providing pregnancy-ending medications to patients who conferred with off-site doctors by webcam. But the clinic stopped Dec. 31, saying it the legal climate was too uncertain, and Julie Burkhart, Trust Women’s CEO, said Monday evening that it has no plans to resume the service because of the court order.

“We cannot broaden that access and feel confident that the clinic or the physicians will not be penalized for that,” Burkhart said. “If we’re putting our physicians or the clinic in jeopardy, we’re working against our mission. The mission is to bring access to people.”

The Legislature has passed three laws aimed at banning telemedicine abortions since 2011, but all were put in limbo by legal challenges in which Trust Women was not a party. Trust Women filed its own lawsuit in January, saying the local district attorney and the state medical board wouldn’t promise in writing that the clinic is allowed to do the abortions.

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life, responded to news of the ruling with, “Good, great, wonderful!” She and other abortion opponents have argued that a ban on telemedicine has been in force for at least several years.

“It’s truly justice,” she said of Watson’s decision.

Watson’s decision is the first lower-court ruling on abortion since the state Supreme Court’s sweeping ruling protecting abortion rights. The judge acknowledged the high court’s decision in her ruling but described as “speculative” Trust Women’s claims that its patients would be irreparably harmed if she did not issue the order it sought.

“There is no evidence the challenged laws decrease access to abortion,” Watson wrote.

Eighteen other states have laws requiring doctors to be physically present when abortion medications are dispensed, according to groups on both sides of the issue, and an Iowa law has been blocked in court. The Wichita clinic has two doctors who live outside Kansas and can be at the clinic two days a week.

The Kansas attorney general’s office had argued that patients aren’t harmed if the clinic does not have permission to do telemedicine abortions.

However, during a hearing in May, Burkhart testified that webcam conferences made the doctors available an extra eight to 12 hours a week and sometimes cut patient wait times to less than two hours from six to eight hours. Trust Women also hopes eventually to open a clinic in rural Kansas offering telemedicine abortions.

The clinic also faces a complaint over its past telemedicine abortions filed with the State Board of Healing Arts from the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life.

The board has 15 members. One position is vacant, and the other 14 members were named by anti-abortion Republican governors. Two members’ terms expired June 30, giving Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, an abortion rights supporter who took office in January, a chance to replace them.

Kansas enacted its first telemedicine-abortion ban in 2011, only to see it swept up in a broader lawsuit against multiple restrictions filed by father-daughter doctors who operated a women’s health center in the Kansas City-area. Another Shawnee County judge, Franklin Theis, blocked all of the restrictions together.

Theis ruled Dec. 31 that his order on the 2011 restrictions also blocked a 2015 version of the telemedicine-abortion ban. And he declared that a 2018 version was an “air ball” without enforcement provisions. The state has appealed. The Wichita clinic is not a party in that case.

Watson said in her ruling that Trust women’s request for an order had added to “a growing procedural backwater” that hindered her ability “to resolve the underlying merits of the telemedicine abortion issue.”

Kansans for Life launched its complaint against Trust Women’s clinic before Theis’ ruling in December and received a notice in April that it had been assigned to an investigator. The Board of Healing Arts regulates the clinic’s physicians, while the clinic itself is regulated by the state health department, which is under Kelly’s control.

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SALINA, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a Salina man has died after a fight in a fast-food restaurant parking lot.

The Salina Journal reports that police Capt. Gary Hanus said in a news release that officers were dispatched Friday afternoon to a McDonald’s for a report of an unconscious person. Thirty-two-year-old Scott McMurray was transported from the scene to the Salina Regional Health Center, where he died later that night.

Witnesses said that a 29-year-old man had punched McMurray during a physical altercation, causing McMurray to fall to the pavement. The 29-year-old was questioned and booked into jail before he was released early Sunday with no charges filed.

The investigation is ongoing, and an autopsy has been ordered to determine McMurray’s exact cause of death.

GREAT BEND, Kan. (AP) — A Texas man has pleaded guilty in the deaths of a couple who were killed at a Kansas county fair after one suspect ordered the killings as part of a “carnival mafia” initiation.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s office said in a news release that Rusty Lee Frasier, 36, of Aransas Pass, Texas, pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of first-degree premediated murder the 2018 deaths of Alfred “Sonny” Carpenter and Pauline Carpenter at the Barton County Fair, where they were vendors. The bodies of the Wichita couple were discovered in a national forest near Van Buren, Arkansas.

Also on Monday, Thomas Donald Drake, 32, of Van Buren, Arkansas, pleaded guilty Monday to one count of obstructing apprehension.

Their sentencings have not been scheduled.

The latest guilty pleas come on the heels of guilty pleas by two others for their roles in the deaths. Christine M. Tenney, 39, of La Marque, Texas, pleaded guilty in May to aggravated robbery and obstructing apprehension in the case. Michael Fowler, Jr., 54, of Sarasota, Florida, pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and one count of theft in the case. Both are also awaiting sentencing.

Police in Arkansas alleged that a Kansas carnival worker posed as a member of a fictitious mafia group and ordered fellow workers to kill a couple as part of an initiation ritual. Investigators said there is no such thing as a “carnival mafia .”

Carnival workers Kimberly Younger, Fowler, Frasier and Tenney were first charged in Arkansas with abuse of a corpse, theft by receiving and tampering with physical evidence in the Kansas vendors’ deaths. Those charges in Arkansas were dropped after they were extradited to Kansas to face more serious charges.

Younger allegedly posed as a carnival mafia member named “Frank Zaitchik” and texted others last month to kill the Carpenters on the fairgrounds. The suspects allegedly loaded the bodies into the couple’s camper and dumped them in a creek bed north of Cedarville, Arkansas.

TOPEKA, Kan. – A man from Mexico was sentenced today to 51 months in federal prison after a state trooper found 15 pounds of crystal methamphetamine hidden in child booster seats and other locations in his car, U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister said.

Israel Felix Garcia, 32, was a passenger in a car driven by his girlfriend when the Kansas Highway Patrol stopped the car on I-70 at milepost 341 in Wabaunsee County, Kan. A trooper found five plastic wrapped bundles of crystal methamphetamine in two booster seats in the car. He found more bundles hidden under the rear window deck, bringing the total to 15 pounds. Garcia told investigators he was being paid $400 per bundle to drive the drugs from California to Topeka. He said his girlfriend and two children in the car did not know about the methamphetamine.

McAllister commended the Kansas Highway Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Hunting for their work on the case.