According to a Reuters report, Roeder has been punished with 45 days of solitary confinement for comments he made in a telephone interview back in April. A prison hearing determined that his statements could intimidate members of the now-renamed South Wind Women’s Center. According to the Kansas Department of Corrections, he will spend 23 hours per day in his cell for 45 days, and have “reduced privileges” for 60 days.

Roeder’s interview was with David Leach, a well-known anti-abortion activist based in Iowa.

“To walk in there and reopen a clinic, a murder mill where a man was stopped, is almost like putting a target on your back saying, ‘Well, let’s see if you can shoot me,’” said Roeder.

Roeder was convicted in 2010 for the murder of Tiller, one the only doctors in the U.S. who performed late-term abortions. Roeder shot Tiller in the head at point blank range while Tiller was attending a worship service at a Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.

The bodies – two adult men and one woman – were found on a farm west of Ottawa. Two people – Kortni McGill and Corey Schlotzhauer – originally checked out the property after they had lost contact with a friend. They found a foul odor emanating from the property at the time, and called the police to investigate. An initial sweep of the area found nothing, but McGill found one of the bodies under a tarp the next day.

Besides the three bodies, investigators also found a burn barrel with baby items and clothing. Some think that the discovery may indicate that the woman found was a Kansas City mother that went missing with her 18-month-old baby last week. Tests are still ongoing, but it could explain the existence of the baby items if the tests come back positive.

The investigation has now pulled in over 40 detectives from across the state as they attempt to find answers to a very bizarre murder case.

[h/t: AP]

Bing says in a blog post, “With the newest version of the Challenge site, in addition to search results, you’ll get to learn about a new homepage every day, rollover video preview and instant translation all on the same site – some of our unique features that give you even more reasons to fall in love with Bing.”

They’re kicking off a new nationwide campaign. This time they went to Topeka to ask people if they know that most people prefer Bing search results to Google’s.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” one participant says, before being wowed by the awesomeness that is Bing.

As you may recall, a few years ago, Topeka temporarily adopted the name “Google” for its city in a campaign to get Google Fiber (which ultimately debuted in Kansas City).

“In Google, Kansas, you made me a Bing man,” says one person.

You can try the challenge here. Just remember that the experience is completely different (for both search engines) than when you actually search on Google or Bing, as it strips out key features like Google’s Knowledge Graph and Bing’s social features.

Home base being Kansas City, the location of Google’s Fiber’s first installment. The next town to be blessed with Google’s super-fast internet is Shawnee, Kansas, which is located south-west of Kansas City. Google won’t have to expand their service that far to accomodate the people of Shawnee.

“Shawnee, which is right outside of Kansas City, is known as a tight-knit community and a great place to do business. We’ve also been impressed by Shawnee’s vision to keep their citizens informed and involved using the Internet. Recently, the City modernized their website, so that locals can easily access city info—from crime maps to fiscal reports to streamed audio of city council meetings.

This is a great example of how access to information via the web can help make communities stronger. Google Fiber—and widespread connectivity throughout Shawnee—will be a great complement to the great work the City is already doing,” says Google Fiber Community Manager Rachel Hack.

Google says that they don’t yet have an estimate on when things will get underway.

Today’s announcement comes during a period of many expansion announcement for Google Fiber. Last month, Google announced that Fiber would we coming to Austin, Texas by mid-2014. Less than two weeks later, it was Provo, Utah that was added to the list.

On the heels of Google’s 1Gbps advances, other ISPs have announced plans to up their game. We’ve just recently seen ISPs in Vermont and Tennessee detail plans for Gigabit internet. Not to be outdone, AT&T has also announced plans to build a 1Gbps Fiber network in Austin. Call it the Google Fiber effect, but it has people thinking. And acting.

[Image via Facebook]

He’s vowed to sign into law the onerous “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” – a bill he freely admits that he has not read – that would permit doctors to withhold information from patients, force women to hear the fetal heartbeat prior to an abortion procedure, and contains the absolutely bananas provision that would require doctors to lie to women by telling them that abortions would increase the risk of breast cancer.

As a result of his willfully blind determination to sign the bill, the governor’s Facebook account has been swarmed with a wave of “sarcasm bombing,” a new phenomenon consisting of coordinated trolling en masse, wherein commenters mocked Governor Brownback by facetiously addressing him as some kind of women’s health expert. Here are a few of the gems left by the bombers (hat tip to Kate Freeman at Mashable for catching these):

While Brownback does appear to have deleted these comments from his wall, that seems to have only emboldened the bombers, who have now moved to simply continuing the posts in the comment sections of unrelated wall posts made by Brownback. After all, when you cause this much of a stink, you’re not gonna be able to shoo away all the flies.

In a wall post titled, “Lt. Gov. Colyer: Legislative Oversight Essential to Providing Highest Quality of Services under KanCare,” which is a press release about the state’s Medicaid program, some people responded with highly related comments like:

In a different wall post related to the grand opening of Cabela’s, a retailer of hunting and other outdoorsy supplies, in Wichita this past Wednesday, bombers mused with very relevant comments like:

It just keeps going on from there and the most recent comment I saw was from as recently as five minutes ago.

Meanwhile, some poor staffer will assuredly be assigned the undesirable task of cleaning up Governor Brownback’s Faceback page. Good luck stemming that tide, kiddo.

Announced today on the Google Fiber Blog, Kevin Lo said that they will be taking thousands of cables and stretching them across Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. The new glass fiber cables will create a new online infrastructure that will carry data at 100 times faster speeds than what most Americans have access to right now.

They’re going to be focusing on building the backbone of the fiber network for now, but they’ll start connecting houses once the infrastructure is up and running.

The Kansas City Star is reporting that Google took their time due to issues over where Google would attach the fiber optic cables to. The original agreement said that Google would be able to hang its wires for free in the upper part of utility poles that usually host electrical lines.

The problem came with the fact that using the higher up portions of electrical lines brought higher fees from construction and hiring more advanced engineers that charge more for their services. A source from Google told the Kansas City Star that Google was going to opt out of the offer and put their wires at the same level as other Internet providers in the community.

Google has about 100 people working in Kansas City at the moment with more people coordinating the efforts back at their HQ in Mountain View, California.

Google hasn’t said how much their service will cost, but promises it will be competitive with what local ISPs are charging.

Are any of our readers in Kansas City? If so, have you seen Google employees out and about today?

This is no joke or repaint-the-town-sign prank.  According to Tim Hrenchir, Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten consulted yesterday with all seven city council members and got their approval.  Then he "signed a proclamation . . . calling for Topeka to be known for the month of March as ‘Google, Kansas – the capital city of fiber optics.’"

Considering that not a lot of other cities are likely to take this step (and now, they’ll look like copycats even if they do), it’s a good bet that this’ll earn Topeka big points in Google’s eyes.

As for the related Facebook group (because there is one of those, too), "Bring Google’s Fiber Experiment to Topeka!" has 10,717 members at the moment, and that number represents about 8.74 percent of Topeka’s population (according to 2007 census data).  Which is rather impressive.

Anyway, Google’s supposed to keep collecting responses to its broadband network proposal until March 26th, and then the company should name its target communities later this year.

Granted, the average person isn’t likely to consider the information exciting.  “Examples of records that will now be searchable include public school FCAT scores, water and waste permits, employment data and consumers’ commuting patterns,” reports The Buzz.

Still, it’s an interesting development insofar as it involves Google and a branch of government.  Google and Florida aren’t alone in this matter; states including Utah, Michigan, California, Virginia, and Arizona are already onboard.  Add in the company’s previous (and unrelated) relationships with Minnesota and Kansas (and even the U.N.), and you’ve got something of a trend.

Make of that what you will – this article isn’t for finger-pointing or conspiracy theories.  Google just happens to be present in a lot of places, and in reference to the newest arrangement, The Buzz reports, “a Google official, John Burchett, said he hoped his firm would receive increased traffic as a result.”

Burchett may be overestimating the public’s desire to see waste permits, but in any event, there you have it.

Actually, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and the World Wildlife Fund are all members of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, but Google seems most closely tied to this new development.  “We can reduce the energy used by computers by 50% or more,” the company’s director of clean energy, Bill Weihl, told Elizabeth Landau.

So, thanks to an agreement between the Climate Savers Computing Initiative and the National Governors Association, energy-efficient PCs will become a common sight in Minnesota and Kansas government buildings.  And although they’ll initially cost a bit more than a normal computer, lower electricity bills should (over time) make the purchases worthwhile.

For this reason, look for other states to make similar arrangements; the National Governors Association believes that over $20 million could be saved “if all states adopt the initiative’s criteria.”  Also, lest we forget the initiative’s “green” aspects, know that the $20 million in electricity corresponds to around 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Go Google.  And Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, the World Wildlife Fund.

The availability of Google’s geo-oriented services, especially the APIs that enable other programmers to build upon Google’s applications, has prompted Google to break out the standard blogging template and debut a new blog called Google LatLong.

"Things are changing so fast we thought a blog focused on this topic would be the best way to communicate with you," wrote John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Maps, "both about our products and about the overall development of geo on the web."

The power of this geoweb focus becomes starkly evident when viewing satellite imagery of places stricken by natural events. Google Earth’s before and after look at Greensburg, Kansas shows a place that moved from a pretty green community to a blasted scene of devastation, in the time it took a tornado to sweep through there.

Geoweb isn’t a fully defined term yet, according to Hanke. "I expect the "it" will evolve substantially over the next few months and years as we (the geo ecosystem on the web) collectively figure out how "earth browsers," embedded maps, local search, geo-tagged photos, blogs, the traditional GIS world, wikis, and other user-generated geo content all interrelate," he wrote.

Google has started to push what can be done with this geoweb to ordinary Internet users. Through the My Maps function on Google Maps, people can create custom maps of whatever they like. That content will be available to others through local searches, via a "see user-created content" link.