OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — An Overland Park official admits he was mistaken about who paid for a $132,000 sculpture at the city’s community center that was damaged by a young boy.
City spokesman Sean Reilly said in July that the insurance company for the family of a 5-year-old boy who damaged the sculpture paid for the damages.
The Kansas City Star reports Reilly said Tuesday he misunderstood. He says the city’s insurance company paid $107,000 for damages to the sculpture at the Tomahawk Community Center. That amount paid for all but the $25,000 deductible in Overland Park’s policy.
Surveillance video showed the boy trying to hug the glass sculpture in May, when it was part of an art show. He then tried unsuccessfully to stop the sculpture from falling to the floor.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — In a night of firsts, Democrats in Vermont’s primary chose the nation’s first transgender gubernatorial nominee. In Minnesota, they picked a woman who would be the first Somali-American member of Congress. Connecticut Democrats nominated a candidate who could become the first black woman from the state to serve in Congress.
Democrats embraced diversity in Tuesday primaries, while Republicans in Minnesota rejected a familiar face of the GOP old guard in favor of a rising newcomer aligned with President Donald Trump.
But Minnesota Democrats also backed a national party leader who is facing accusations of domestic violence. He has denied the allegations, yet they threaten to undercut enthusiasm in his state and beyond.
On the other side, Trump tightened his grip on the modern-day Republican Party as the turbulent 2018 primary season lurched toward its finale. A one-time Trump critic, former two-term Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty lost a comeback attempt he was expected to win.
Trump fired off a celebratory tweet Wednesday, hailing “Great Republican election results” and adding “Red Wave!” He also endorsed a series of candidates in Wisconsin, including Bryan Steil who won the GOP primary for the House seat held by Speaker Paul Ryan and Leah Vukmir, who will face Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in November.
All but 10 states picked their candidates for November’s general election by the time the day’s final votes were counted. While the full political battlefield isn’t quite set, the stakes are clear: Democrats are working to topple Republican control of Congress and governors’ offices across the nation.
Four states held primaries Tuesday: Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Kansas’ gubernatorial primary, which was held last week, was finalized when Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded defeat.
In Minnesota, Republican County Commissioner Jeff Johnson defeated Pawlenty, who once called Trump “unhinged and unfit” and was hoping to regain his old post. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, endorsed just this week by Trump, won the right to seek a third term.
The president’s pick for Kansas governor, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, scored a delayed victory against Colyer, who became the first incumbent governor to fall this season.
In Vermont, Democrat Christine Hallquist won the Democratic nomination in her quest to become the nation’s first transgender governor. The former chief executive of Vermont Electric Cooperative bested a field of four Democrats that included a 14-year-old.
While she made history on Tuesday, Hallquist faces a difficult path to winning the governor’s race. Republican incumbent Phil Scott remains more popular with Democrats than members of his own party in the solidly liberal state.
Vermont Democrats also nominated Sen. Bernie Sanders, who hasn’t ruled out a second presidential run in 2020, for a third term in the Senate. The 76-year-old democratic socialist won the Democratic nomination, but he is expected to turn it down and run as an independent.
Democrats appeared particularly motivated in Wisconsin, where eight candidates lined up for the chance to take on Walker.
Walker’s strong anti-union policies made him a villain to Democrats long before Trump’s rise. State schools chief Tony Evers, who has clashed with Walker at times, won the Democratic nomination and will take on Walker this fall.
Once a target of Trump criticism, Walker gained the president’s endorsement in a tweet Monday night calling him “a tremendous Governor who has done incredible things for that Great State.”
Trump also starred, informally at least, in Wisconsin’s Senate primaries as Republicans try to deny Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin a second term.
Longtime state lawmaker Leah Vukmir, who was backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, won the Republican primary, even after struggling to explain footage recently unearthed from 2016 in which she called Trump “offensive to everyone.”
Tuesday’s primaries served as a test of Democratic enthusiasm in the upper Midwest, a region that has long been associated with liberal politics but has been trending red. Trump won Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point in 2016, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state since 1984.
It was much the same in Minnesota, where Trump lost by less than 3 percentage points in a state that hasn’t backed a Republican presidential contender since 1972.
Nearly twice as many Minnesota Democrats as Republicans cast ballots in their parties’ respective gubernatorial primaries.
Pawlenty had been considered the heavy favorite in a two-person Republican contest for his old job. But he struggled to adapt to a GOP that had changed drastically since he left office in 2011 and flamed out early in a 2012 presidential bid.
The former two-term governor strained to live down his October 2016 comment that Trump was “unhinged and unfit for the presidency,” remarks that incensed many Republican voters in Minnesota and beyond. Johnson, his underfunded opponent, circulated Pawlenty’s critique far and wide, telling voters that he was a steadfast supporter of the president.
Johnson will face Democratic Rep. Tim Walz, who won a three-way race for his party’s nomination.
Three Minnesota women won Senate nominations, including incumbent Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith.
Smith, who had been appointed to replace Democrat Al Franken, will face Republican state Sen. Karin Housley, ensuring a woman will hold the seat once held by Franken, who left Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct toward women.
Nationwide, a record number of women are running this year for governor and Congress.
Meanwhile, a new scandal threatened to dampen Democratic enthusiasm.
Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democratic National Committee’s deputy chairman, captured his party’s nomination in the race to become the state’s attorney general. That’s after Ellison’s candidacy was rocked by allegations over the weekend of domestic violence amid a broader national outcry against sexual misconduct by powerful men in business, entertainment and politics.
Ellison has denied a former girlfriend’s allegations that he dragged her off a bed while screaming obscenities during a 2016 relationship she said was plagued by “narcissistic abuse.”
Also in Minnesota, Democrat Ilhan Omar, the nation’s first Somali-American legislator, won her party’s congressional primary in the race to replace Ellison.
In Connecticut, Republican businessman Bob Stefanowski emerged from a field of five Republicans seeking to replace the unpopular outgoing governor, Democrat Dan Malloy. Former gubernatorial candidate Ned Lamont won the Democratic nomination.
Connecticut Democrats picked former teacher of the year, Jahana Hayes, to run for the seat being vacated by Rep. Elizabeth Etsy, who is leaving Congress after bungling sexual abuse claims levied against a former staffer. Hayes could become the first black woman from the state to serve in Congress.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A priest raped a 7-year-old girl while he was visiting her in the hospital after she’d had her tonsils removed. Another priest forced a 9-year-old boy into having oral sex, then rinsed out the boy’s mouth with holy water. One boy was forced to say confession to the priest who sexually abused him.
Those children are among the victims of roughly 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania who molested more than 1,000 children — and possibly many more — since the 1940s, according to a sweeping state grand jury report released Tuesday that accused senior church officials, including a clergyman who is now the archbishop of Washington, D.C., of systematically covering up complaints.
The “real number” of abused children and abusive priests might be higher since some secret church records were lost and some victims never came forward, the grand jury said.
U.S. bishops adopted sweeping reforms in 2002 when clergy abuse became a national crisis for the church, including stricter requirements for reporting accusations to law enforcement and a streamlined process for removing clerics who abuse children. But the grand jury said more changes are needed.
“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote in the roughly 900-page report. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.”
Top church officials have mostly been protected and many, including some named in the report, have been promoted, the grand jury said, concluding that “it is too early to close the book on the Catholic Church sex scandal.”
In nearly every case, prosecutors found that the statute of limitations has run out, meaning that criminal charges cannot be filed. More than 100 of the priests are dead. Many others are retired or have been dismissed from the priesthood or put on leave. Authorities charged just two as a result of the grand jury investigation, including a priest who has since pleaded guilty, though some of those named had been charged years ago.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the investigation is ongoing.
The investigation of six of Pennsylvania’s eight dioceses— Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton — is the most extensive investigation of Catholic clergy abuse by any state, according to victim advocates. The dioceses represent about 1.7 million Catholics.
Until now, there have been just nine investigations by a prosecutor or grand jury of a Catholic diocese or archdiocese in the United States, according to the Massachusetts-based research and advocacy organization, BishopAccountability.org.
The Philadelphia archdiocese and the Johnstown-Altoona diocese were not included in the investigation because they have been the subject of three previous scathing grand jury investigations.
The grand jury heard from dozens of witnesses and reviewed more than a half-million pages of internal diocesan documents, including reports by bishops to Vatican officials disclosing the details of abusive priests that they had not made public or reported to law enforcement.
The panel concluded that a succession of Catholic bishops and other diocesan leaders tried to shield the church from bad publicity and financial liability. They failed to report accused clergy to police, used confidentiality agreements to silence victims and sent abusive priests to so-called “treatment facilities,” which “laundered” the priests and “permitted hundreds of known offenders to return to ministry,” the report said.
The conspiracy of silence extended beyond church grounds: police or prosecutors sometimes did not investigate allegations out of deference to church officials or brushed off complaints as outside the statute of limitations, the grand jury said.
Diocese leaders responded Tuesday by expressing sorrow for the victims, stressing how they’ve changed and unveiling, for the first time, a list of priests accused of sexual misconduct.
James VanSickle of Pittsburgh, who testified he was sexually attacked in 1981 by a priest in the Erie Diocese, called the report’s release “a major victory to get our voice out there, to get our stories told.”
The report is still the subject of an ongoing legal battle, with redactions shielding the identities of some current and former clergy named in the report while the state Supreme Court weighs their arguments that its wrongful accusations against them violates their constitutional rights. It also is expected to spark another fight by victim advocates to win changes in state law that lawmakers have resisted.
Its findings echoed many earlier church investigations around the country, describing widespread sexual abuse and church officials’ concealment of it. U.S. bishops have acknowledged that more than 17,000 people nationwide have reported being molested by priests and others in the church going back to 1950.
The report comes at a time of fresh scandal at the highest levels of the U.S. Catholic Church. Pope Francis last month stripped 88-year-old Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of his title amid allegations that McCarrick had for years sexually abused boys and committed sexual misconduct with adult seminarians.
One senior American church official named in the grand jury report is Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who leads the Washington archdiocese, for allegedly helping to protect abusive priests when he was Pittsburgh’s bishop. Wuerl, who was bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese from 1988 to 2006, disputed the allegations.
Terry McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org said the report did a good job of highlighting the two crimes of church sex abuse scandals: the abuse of a child and the cover up by church officials that allows the abuse to continue.
“One thing this is going to do is put pressure on prosecutors elsewhere to take a look at what’s going on in their neck of the woods,” McKiernan said.
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Associated Press writers Nicole Winfield in Vatican City, Claudia Lauer and Michael Rubinkam in Pennsylvania and David Porter in New Jersey contributed to this report.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A Wichita church has started raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore a pipe organ that was installed in the 1950s.
The Wichita Eagle reports that the cost of renovating the organ at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament ranges from $250,000 to $1 million, depending on the extent of the repairs.
The Kilgen organ was installed at the church around the time it was built. It only has a life-span of about 50 years.
Music director Rachel Dugan says congregation members want their “grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be able to walk down the aisle and be able to hear this great instrument.” Dugan says the organ is the “instrument of the church” and is used for all High Masses, feast days and weddings throughout the year.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says more than 600 birds were removed from a house in central Ohio after reports of animal neglect and a complaint from the public about living conditions.
The ASPCA says the birds were living in extremely overcrowded conditions in a home in a Columbus neighborhood. ASPCA and Columbus Humane officials say birds removed from the home Tuesday under a search warrant include parakeets, cockatiels, finches, macaws and cockatoos.
Some birds had medical issues, including missing feathers and plucking mutilation.
The organizations say they are focusing on assessing the birds’ welfare and ensuring they receive appropriate care.
They say the birds have been relocated to a temporary shelter until a court determines custody.
The home’s owner wasn’t immediately identified.