Jerret Raffety / Rawlins (Wyo.) daily times

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IOWA CITY — A University of Iowa athletics board has approved guidelines allowing school administrators to check players' sites on public networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.

The policy was approved Thursday by the Presidential Committee on Athletics.

It goes into effect in August, a year after Facebook photos surfaced showing a number of Iowa football players who are no longer with the team. The players were holding cash and liquor bottles.

An athletic department administrator will monitor the sites. All student athletes must sign the policy before competing.

The athletic department has the right to investigate and take action against any athlete who violates, or appears to violate, rules under the guidelines.

ALTON — Sandy Baumberger said she never expected to see her wallet again when it was stolen 35 years ago. But it has been found by a 30-year-old dental student who tracked her down and returned it.

Eric Wherley said he found the wallet in a bathroom stall at school after a water pipe broke and loosened some ceiling tiles. The thief who stole the wallet apparently had hidden it in the drop ceiling.

The wallet contained Baumberger's driver's license, library cards and Social Security card. It also had her student ID, a grocery list and cloth swatches from her bridesmaids' dresses.

Baumberger said she and her husband are planning to give Wherley a gift for his efforts.

INDIANAPOLIS — An expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program that legislators approved last year has won federal approval, making low-cost coverage available to more kids in moderate-income Indiana households — but not as many as once hoped.

A key state lawmaker who welcomed the expansion said the state must find ways to enroll more Hoosiers not only in SCHIP, but also in the Healthy Indiana Plan for low-income adults. Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, said lawmakers might take up the matter in summer study committees.

The Family and Social Services Administration last week announced the approval from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand the SCHIP program to children in households earning up to 2 1/2 times the federal poverty level. Agency Secretary Mitch Roob said the expansion will bring more than 5,000 children into Indiana's SCHIP program this year and as many as 10,000 eventually.

WICHITA — Amid a deepening world hunger crisis, the Agriculture Department forecast on Friday that the nation's farmers are poised to harvest a bountiful wheat crop this season with continued strong commodity prices.

The department's estimated harvest of 1.78 billion bushels of winter wheat, if realized, would make the 2008 winter wheat crop 17 percent larger than last year, the National Agriculture Statistics Service said. Yields nationwide were pegged at an average of 44.3 bushels per acre.

In Kansas, the nation's leading wheat producer, the forecast pegged the winter wheat crop at 357.2 million bushels, up 26 percent from last year's weather-plagued harvest. Average yields were expected at 38 bushels per acre.

GRAND RAPIDS — A 7-year-old Iraqi boy born with a heart defect that left him too weak to walk more than a few steps at a time is recovering from an operation arranged by some Michigan soldiers.

"I have no words to show my feelings," Salwa, the child's mother, said Thursday while standing in a room at Helen DeVos Children's Hospital a few feet from her son, Hasan. The military is withholding their full names for their protection when they return to Iraq.

Hasan underwent a four-hour procedure Tuesday in which surgeons replaced a leaky pulmonary valve and closed a hole in his lower heart chamber.

Michigan Army National Guard troops befriended Hasan and Salwa early last year in a Baghdad police station.

Hasan and his mother should be able to return to Iraq in three or four weeks.

ST. PAUL — Five years and more than $8 million into a project plagued by delays and glitches, state human-services officials decided to abandon their first attempt to develop software for an online health-care sign-up system and start over.

A 20-page assessment outlined issues with the HealthMatch project two months after the Department of Human Services dropped the software developer, ACS State and Local Solutions Inc., for insufficient progress. The report said the software was "incomplete, error-prone and not always efficient to use."

Assistant Commissioner Brian Osberg said Friday that his agency didn't know the extent of the problems until it terminated the contract.

Now, human-services officials will spend the next six months studying their technological options and coming up with a new plan. They have about $15 million left to develop HealthMatch.

JEFFERSON CITY — The state Supreme Court's newest member defended the merits of Missouri's method for picking judges Friday and joked with fellow attorneys about criticism surrounding her selection last year to the court.

Speaking at a Missouri Bar luncheon, Judge Patricia Breckenridge said the current system keeps politics and money out of the awarding of judgeships, and she praised lawyers for their willingness to defend it.

When Breckenridge was picked last year for a spot on the state high court, Republican politicians and conservative legal groups criticized the selection process used for the state's appeals court judges and many trial judges around Kansas City and St. Louis.

Nominating committees submit three potential nominees to the governor, who makes the appointment. The members of those committees consist of a judge, lawyers chosen by the Missouri Bar and citizens nominated by the governor.

Republican critics argue that the current selection system is secretive and unaccountable to the public.

SCOTTSBLUFF — Ill-timed weather has taken a toll on the fledgling sugar-beet crop on the Nebraska-Wyoming border.

Officials said a late April freeze destroyed plantings on 890 acres in the Gordon area.

Then, said Jerry Darnell of the Western Sugar Cooperative, the snow and wind of May 1 and 2 required producers to replant about a third of the region's sugar beet acreage.

Final figures are not in, but Darnell said the total loss is expected to hit between 10,000 and 12,000 acres.

Crop insurance will cover some of the losses and costs of replanting.

DICKINSON — Uranium found in groundwater in western North Dakota is naturally occurring and not from mining for the radioactive element, a state health official says.

Some Billings County residents questioned the quality of their drinking water at a recent meeting in Belfield regarding new rules for uranium mining in the state.

Uranium was mined in the state in the 1960s but was largely unregulated. Some wondered if the uranium from the mines leached into groundwater.

"Uranium in the groundwater in southwest North Dakota is purely naturally occurring," said Kris Roberts, an environmental scientist with the state Health Department. "To say that past mining released uranium into the groundwater is not true."

Roberts conducted a study in the early 1990s that analyzed the concentration of uranium in private wells throughout western North Dakota.

"What we found was that there were many areas that had elevated concentrations of naturally occurring uranium," Roberts said.

Two previous studies, including one done by the federal Department of Energy, had similar findings, Roberts said.

YANKTON — A 10-ton load limit has been placed on the Meridian Bridge at Yankton, forcing heavier vehicles to detour 50 to 70 miles to get over the Missouri River.

The double-deck Meridian Bridge was built in 1924. A replacement is under construction and is expected to be open in autumn.

A routine inspection found corrosion on some of the gussets that hold steel beams together, officials said Friday.

The bridge links South Dakota and Nebraska through U.S. 81, a major north-south route.

The load limit doesn't affect passenger cars. The nearest bridges over the Missouri River are at Vermillion or Springfield.

MILWAUKEE — One of the nation's largest trucking companies is capping its drivers' speeds at 60 mph, a move designed to save fuel and protect the environment.

Schneider National Inc. expects the change to save the company nearly 3.8 million gallons of diesel fuel a year. It also will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 40,000 tons, according to the Green Bay-based company.

The company already uses computer equipment on its 10,600 trucks that prevents drivers from going faster than 63 mph while on cruise control. By July 1, the equipment will be reset to limit the maximum speed to 60 mph, she said.

The decrease would save 3.75 million gallons of diesel fuel per year, the company said. With the price of a gallon of diesel averaging $4.15, savings could exceed $15.5 million.

Schneider's announcement followed an industrywide call by the American Trucking Associations, an Arlington, Va.-based group that represents 37,000 companies. The group on Thursday urged Congress to enact a nationwide speed limit of 65 mph for all vehicles, including passenger cars, to save fuel and cut greenhouse-gas emissions

OTTAWA — The head of a native addictions agency says drug users will needlessly overdose and die if the federal government shuts down Canada's only safe-injection site.

Sharon Clarke, executive director of the National Native Addictions Partnership Foundation, says the supervised Insite program in Vancouver has filled a gap in the fight against drugs. Without it, she predicts users will once again contract illness from dirty needles.

Health Minister Tony Clement said the government will decide next month whether to extend the site's license beyond its expiration on June 30.