Former Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse on Tuesday said he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.

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Sasse, 53, made the announcement on social media, saying he learned of the disease last week and is “now marching to the beat of a faster drummer.”

“This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase,” Sasse wrote. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”

Sasse was first elected to the Senate in 2014 and won reelection in 2020. He resigned in 2023 to serve as the 13th president of the University of Florida after a contentious approval process. He left that post the following year after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.

Sasse was an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, and he was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict the former president of “incitement of insurrection” after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard, St. John’s College and Yale, worked as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. He then served as president of Midland University before he ran for the Senate. Midland is a small Christian university in eastern Nebraska.

Sasse and his wife have three children.

“I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more,” Sasse wrote. “Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived.”

By FATIMA HUSSEIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Medicaid programs made more than $200 million in improper payments to health care providers between 2021 and 2022 for people who had already died, according to a new report from the independent watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services.

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But the department’s Office of Inspector General said it expects a new provision in Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill requiring states to audit their Medicaid beneficiary lists may help reduce these improper payments in the future.

These kinds of improper payments are “not unique to one state, and the issue continues to be persistent,” Aner Sanchez, assistant regional inspector general in the Office of Audit Services told The Associated Press. Sanchez has been researching this issue for a decade.

The watchdog report released Tuesday said more than $207.5 million in managed care payments were made on behalf of deceased enrollees between July 2021 to July 2022. The office recommends that the federal government share more information with state governments to recover the incorrect payments — including a Social Security database known as the Full Death Master File, which contains more than 142 million records going back to 1899.

Sharing the Full Death Master File data has been tightly restricted due to privacy laws which protect against identity theft and fraud.

The massive tax and spending bill that was signed into law by President Donald Trump this summer expands how the Full Death Master File can be used by mandating Medicaid agencies to quarterly audit their provider and beneficiary lists against the file, beginning in 2027. The intent is to stop payments to dead people and improve accuracy.

Tuesday’s report is the first nationwide look at improper Medicaid payments. Since 2016, HHS’ inspector general has conducted 18 audits on a selection of state programs and had identified that Medicaid agencies had improperly made managed care payments on behalf of deceased enrollees totaling approximately $289 million.

The government had some success using the Full Death Master File to prevent improper payments earlier this year. In January, the Treasury Department reported that it had clawed back more than $31 million in federal payments that improperly went to dead people as part of a five-month pilot program after Congress gave Treasury temporary access to the file for three years as part of the 2021 appropriations bill.

Meanwhile, the SSA has been making unusual updates to the file itself, adding and removing records, and complicating its use. For instance, the Trump administration in April moved to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead and cancel their Social Security numbers to crack down on immigrants who had been temporarily allowed to live in the U.S. under programs started during the Biden administration.

Prosecutors have charged a man with first-degree assault, saying he attempted to use deadly force against two St. Paul officers by pointing a loaded gun at them. The officers fired their guns, shooting the man in his leg.

Elliot Samuels Vaughn, 32, of Minneapolis, was treated at the hospital and is now jailed.

The incident began at 5:39 a.m. Saturday when a tracker on a Buick Envista showed it was taken from a vehicle rental company’s parking garage in Minneapolis. A manager discovered the theft Sunday and noted two other vehicles were stolen from the same location around the same time.

The manufacturer, General Motors, was able to track the Buick and officers learned it was in St. Paul.

On Sunday afternoon, officers followed the Buick south on U.S. 52. The vehicle exited and got back onto U.S. 52, heading north. As the vehicle approached the exit ramp to Interstate 94 west off U.S. 52, officers had GM remotely slow and stop the Buick about 3:15 p.m.

Elliot Samuels Vaughn (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Squad video showed the Buick stopped, and the driver and passenger doors opened. A man identified as Vaughn exited the driver’s seat and a woman got out of the passenger seat, according to the criminal complaint. Officers drove behind Vaughn as he ran.

An officer radioed that Vaughn was reaching into his pants. He “had a handgun in his right hand that he transferred to his left hand as he ran,” the complaint said. “Vaughn extended his left arm behind him and pointed the handgun directly at the two officers inside the squad.”

Officer fired their service weapons, Vaughn was hit in the right thigh and fell to the ground. Police found an empty holster on Vaughn and a handgun nearby; it had a round in its chamber and a magazine full of ammunition, the complaint said.

Police put a tourniquet on Vaughn’s leg before he was transported to the hospital.

He declined to speak with investigators. An attorney wasn’t listed for him in the court file as of Tuesday morning.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office charged Vaughn with two counts of first-degree assault, saying he attempted to use deadly force against two officers; two counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and one count of motor vehicle theft.

The woman who police said was in the vehicle was charged Tuesday with drug possession.

An officer working at the European Christmas Market at the nearby Union Depot responded to the shooting scene. Witnesses reported the woman who ran from the vehicle was on the other side of the barrier on the south side of the ramp to the highway.

The officer jumped over the barrier and saw the woman, identified as a 37-year-old from Blaine. She was taken into custody.

Witnesses described the woman dropping items. An officer found a purse behind a barrier. Inside there was an electronic scale, a clear container with suspected methamphetamine crystals, a torn $100 bill, gift cards and miscellaneous jewelry.

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PARIS (AP) — A freight lift rose up on its crane Tuesday toward the Louvre Museum — but this time it wasn’t jewel thieves. It was workers installing security bars on the window used to break into the Paris landmark’s Apollo Gallery in October’s stunning heist.

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The world’s most-visited museum is slowly coming to terms with security failings exposed by the theft, while investigators hunt for missing crown jewels worth $102 million.

With the Louvre closed Tuesday, maintenance workers in security helmets and high-visibility vests mounted a freight lift to a second-floor balcony to secure new metal bars outside a now-infamous window.

The sight mirrored what happened Oct. 19, when a team of thieves posing as workers used a similar lift, then sliced through the window to enter the gallery. They grabbed tiaras, emerald earrings, a sapphire necklace and other treasures, and eight minutes later they were gone.

All four suspected thieves have been arrested and charged. But the jewels haven’t been found.

Samuel Lasnel of maintenance lift company Grima-Nacelles said he and his crew arrived before dawn Tuesday to carry out the high-profile window-securing operation.

“We have already worked at the Louvre — on the interior, on the exterior, inside and outside the pyramid — we’ve been here several times,” he told The Associated Press. “The Louvre knows us well.”

The Louvre didn’t publicly comment about Tuesday’s security operation.