Agent Peter Schaffer said the game check and other lost revenue would amount to about a penalty of about $600,000 for the former two-time Pro Bowl player.

In a three-sentence release, the Chiefs said Johnson would be suspended until Monday, Nov. 9 for conduct detrimental to the team. The Chiefs are on their bye week and will not play again until traveling to Jacksonville on Nov. 8.

The Chiefs had been saying for three days that they were “investigating” the situation. Johnson was told to stay away from the team on Tuesday.

Schaffer said he had consulted with the Players Association about the appeal.

“We will be filing an appeal on behalf of Larry tomorrow,” Schaffer told The Associated Press. “While we respect the Chiefs’ ability to try to discipline a player, we disagree and respectfully disagree that the punishment they propose is warranted by the facts or allowable by the collective bargaining agreement. Hopefully, we will be able to work out a mutual and positive resolution with the Chiefs short of a hearing. If we don’t, then this will go to an arbitrator.”

Schaffer said they would try to expedite the matter and get a resolution before the team’s next game on Nov. 8.

In 2007, Johnson signed a five-year contract extension that guaranteed him about $19 million and could be worth as much as $45 million. But because of these latest problems, his future with the Chiefs beyond Nov. 8 may still be cloudy.

Coach Todd Haley and first-year general manager Scott Pioli have repeatedly said they are trying to build a new culture and a new attitude for a struggling franchise, which has sunk to the bottom of the NFL and that disloyalty will not be tolerated.

Johnson, who needs just 75 yards rushing to break the team’s career record, first used the gay slur on his Twitter account in an exchange with one of his followers on Sunday night. Earlier he had posted comments calling Haley’s qualifications into question.

Then in a whispered remark on Monday after telling reporters in the locker room he was not talking, Johnson repeated the slur, according to the Kansas City Star which has posted audio of the alleged comment.

The three-sentence news release issued Wednesday night by the team said only that Johnson, who turns 30 in a few weeks, was suspended for conduct detrimental to the club. The Chiefs said they would have no further comment on Johnson’s status “at this time.”

Johnson wrote the objectionable material on his Twitter account several hours after the Chiefs (1-6) lost 37-7 to San Diego, one of their most lopsided home losses ever.

Johnson issued an apology on Tuesday, almost exactly 12 months after apologizing to the team and its fans and ownership for two incidents in Kansas City nightspots that led to his pleading guilty to disturbing the peace.

Those problems caused him to be benched for three games in 2008 and suspended by commissioner Roger Goodell for an additional game.

Johnson was one of the best running backs in the NFL in 2005 and ‘06, running for more than 1,700 yards each season and earning Pro Bowl honors. But this season, like the Chiefs, he has struggled.

Johnson, a two-time Pro Bowl running back for the Chiefs, apologized Tuesday to his team, fans and the NFL “for the words I used.”

“I regret my actions. The words were used by me in frustration, and they were not appropriate,” he said. “I did not intend to offend anyone, but that is no excuse for what I said.”

Johnson posted the slur on his Twitter account Sunday in a response to another tweet. On Monday, he said it again in refusing to talk with reporters, according to a recording made by the Kansas City Star.

The Chiefs and the NFL are investigating.

A lawyer representing Apple of His Eye Inc. said Monday that the ministry will resume religious leafleting at St. Louis’ PrideFest on June 27-28, following the judge’s ruling.

Ministry members have said they were threatened with arrest by a ranger when they tried to hand out religious fliers at PrideFest in Tower Grove Park in 2006. Some viewed their actions as disruptive and felt they were violating a city ban on leafleting in public parks.

The group’s lawyer, Rick Nelson, said members of the Messianic Jewish organization believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah and were handling out fliers about the Gospel. The literature did not mention homosexuality, he said.

The ministry sued last year, and U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey issued a preliminary order, saying St. Louis can’t totally ban leafleting in public parks.

Autrey made his order permanent last week.

PrideFest organizers did not respond to requests for comment. The two-day festival draws about 80,000 participants and includes a parade, entertainment, food and information booths.

Ashcroft will receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the commencement speech Saturday at Truman State University in the northeast Missouri town of Kirksville. As governor, he signed into law a measure upgrading the school from a regional teacher’s college into a selective, statewide liberal arts campus.

Nearly 300 opponents signed a petition “voicing discontent” with the decision by the Board of Governors of the school, which has close to 6,000 students according to its Web site. A silent protest is planned during Ashcroft’s speech.

Among the issues cited for the protest are Ashcroft’s opposition to gay marriage and his support of expanded interrogation techniques that critics equate with torture while leading the Justice Department after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“He has a history of supporting torture and institutionalized discrimination,” said graduating senior Sally Hertz, a sociology and anthropology major from Nevada, Iowa. “Honorary degrees are supposed to represent the values of our university. I don’t think these are things Truman stands for.”

Ashcroft, who turns 67 on Saturday, was attorney general during President George W. Bush’s first term before resigning for health reasons. He spent eight years as Missouri governor and six years as a U.S. senator. He opened a Washington lobbying firm in 2005.

A spokesman for The Ashcroft Group did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

School officials said they selected Ashcroft for the role he played in boosting the prestige of a school previously known as Northeast Missouri State.

“Ashcroft was chosen for the role he played in our university’s history,” said Heidi Templeton, a school spokeswoman. “We are a public university where all are encouraged to think freely and express their opinion.”

History professor Thomas Zoumaras objects to what he calls Ashcroft’s violation of international law covering acceptable interrogation techniques. He also disputed the former governor’s role in transforming Truman State, saying that the school’s former president Charles McClain, who will also receive an honorary degree on Saturday, deserves more of the credit for the school’s elevated stature.

Zoumaras and Hertz said they don’t want opponents to disrupt the graduation ceremony. Among the tactics endorsed for protesters are not clapping, turning their backs while Ashcroft speaks and holding up copies of the half-page protest ad from the school newspaper.

Former Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who died in a plane crash while campaigning against Ashcroft in the 2000 Senate race, also will receive an honorary degree Saturday. Carnahan posthumously defeated Ashcroft, with the challenger’s widow, Jean, taking the seat until a special election two years later.

Yantézia Patrick, University of Missouri student leader

Trend stories are always sketchy. Taking a few strands of information and conjuring some large, grand, unifying theme removes the rough edges and ultimately are written to support some political theory. So I want to be careful here, but is there something going on in the Midwest when it comes to gay rights?. There is the Supreme Court in Iowa unanimously coming to the defense of marriage rights, but look at what is going on at the University of Missouri. Students voted this week to have gender identity included in the school’s non discrimination clause.

Between April 6 and 8, the  Missouri Students Association held a  referendum and with  2,780 students voting, the proposal passed rather easily with 82 percent supporting the addition. This overwhelming majority is due to the groundwork of a coalition of students who based their agenda on two principles: making sure there was strong support from straight allies and stressing that gender identity concerns are important for everyone.

“Gender identity and expression includes the whole community.  It’s a big umbrella term that encompasses everyone,” said Yantézia Patrick, a University of Missouri journalism major and president of the university’s Gamma Rho Lambda chapter.

“Everyone has a gender identity,” said Ashley Price, an biology and sociology major and  vice president of Gamma Rho. “That is one of the things we are trying to emphasize to the community. This is not just about trans students. It is about everyone as a whole and a safety issue.”

Word about the proposal was spread in the tried and true college ways: workshops in classes and dorms and petitioning academic departments (Patrick noted departments were an easy sell). The resistance to the inclusion of gender identity was based on a sense of priorities. In short, the student government had other pressing issues and there were other things MU students had to be concerned about.

“This entire discourse exemplifies everything that is wrong with MU,” wrote Marcus Bowen in a March 9 column. “We have spent countless hours and way too much mental energy trying to change our campus into a wonderful peaches-and-cream utopia. We spend way too much time and energy on transgender diversity clauses and way too little time learning how to make money.”

Bowen’s column brought out the knives but he also made clear “no one deserves to be discriminated against.” His stance simply mirrors what the polls all say. Among the young, there is less discomfort with issues surrounding sexuality.

Ahhh, but here is where it gets interesting. Yes Mizzou students have made their vote clear but for the change to be made the Board of Curators, the people who supervise the institution, must vote for it. It took 8 years, between 1995 to 2003, for the Board to include sexual orientation in its anti-discrimination clause. Price thinks if the university wants to present itself as an intellectual haven then following the students’ lead is the way to go.

“In order to adversitse ourselves as a forward thinking university in the Midwest we need to have policies that reflect that.”

While registering does not offer any specific rights in the city, it could be used as proof of a relationship for anyone wishing to add a partner to their employee health benefits in companies that offer health insurance to domestic partners.

Under the law, a couple must pay a $25 fee to the Department of Public Health and Human Services, which will maintain the registry.

Couples must attest they have lived together for at least 6 months. Each partner must be at least 18 years old and be mentally competent to form a contract. Partners must not be related by blood any closer than would bar a marriage in Missouri. Nor can they be married to any other person.

The registry had the support of Mayor Darwin Hindman who said it shows “that this is an open, receptive community, tolerant community, of everybody. That’s important, I think for our self-respect and for the quality of life that we want to have in our community.”

The measure also had the support of the Columbia Human Rights Commission and a broad number of citizens who packed the council chamber to make impact statements before the vote.

One of them, a retired United Methodist pastor, received a standing ovation from the public gallery when he made an impassioned plea for passage.

“These, my brothers and sisters, are the last group that has not yet been given what is their right,” Rev. Dick Blount told the council. “That’s all we’re asking for. We’re not trying to make the issue complex.”

Officials refused to give details on who the person was or how the students at Normandy High School might have been exposed, but the district is consulting with national AIDS organizations as it tries to minimize the fallout and prevent the infection – and misinformation – from spreading.

“There’s potential for stigma for all students regardless of whether they’re positive or negative,” Normandy School District spokesman Doug Hochstedler said Thursday. “The board wants to be sure all children are fully educated.”

A teacher in a neighboring district singled out a girl who dates someone at Normandy High and instructed her to get tested, Hochstedler said. A competing school’s football team initially balked at playing Normandy’s 8-0 team.

Jasmine Lane, a 16-year-old sophomore, said her boyfriend from a neighboring high school broke up with her on learning of the news – after she bought them tickets to homecoming.

“I cried so hard,” she said.

Hochstedler said that as far as he knows, no other district has had to handle a similar situation. Students at the school of 1,300 are being tested, and the district is getting advice on the best ways to support kids in crisis.

Sophomore Tevin Baldwin said that many of his classmates in this working-class city of about 5,000 residents want to transfer out of the district, which encompasses other towns.

“Nobody knows what’s going on,” he said. The district declined to respond to his assertion.

Marcus Holman, a 14-year-old freshman, said he never imagined HIV would become such a widespread threat at school.

“I’m just trying to pass, get to the next grade, safely,” he said.

Normandy Superintendent Stanton Lawrence agreed that students remain focused on learning, despite concerns and distraction. There’s no hysteria or panic, and school is running routinely, he said.

“They recognize this situation is what it is, and doesn’t mean school is over,” he said. “Their concern is heightened, but we have to face it and do the responsible thing.”

The St. Louis County Health Department said last week that a positive HIV test raised concern that students at Normandy might have been exposed. The department is not saying whether the infected person was a student or connected with the school, only that the person indicated as many as 50 students may have been exposed.

The Health Department also will not say how any exposure might have occurred. Health Department spokesman Craig LeFebvre has said the possibilities include sexual activity, intravenous drug use, piercings and tattoos.

Hochstedler said the district doesn’t know the person’s identity, or even whether he or she is a student.

“We do know there was some potential exposure between that person and students,” he said. “We don’t know the individual or the route of transmission.”

The district learned Oct. 9 of the potential exposure and within a business day worked out with the Health Department how to release the information and handle testing, he said.

“They took a very proactive stance,” he said. “There’s no precedent for this.”

Students are being tested at six stations in the high school gymnasium, one class at a time. Only representatives from the Health Department are with the students, who are offered educational materials and a chance to ask questions before they are given an opportunity to be tested with a mouth swab, Hochstedler said. They may decline.

They exit through a separate door, and no one in the school would know who did or did not get tested.

“It’s entirely up to the student,” he said. “There’s a lot of stigma associated with this.”

The district will never know whether or how many of its students tested positive, he said.

“Once they’re tested,” he said, “it’s an issue between the department and the child and his family.”

So far, the district has met twice with parents and begun to ask ministers in the community to stress the importance of responsible behavior, Lawrence said.

Students in grades four through 12 already take classes that discuss the consequences of risky behavior, including HIV, he said.

Claire McCaskill campaigning at a diner for the U.S. Senate seat from Missouri that she won in November 2006.

If rumors are true that Barack Obama is considering women other than Hillary Clinton for his running mate, Claire McCaskill must almost certainly be on that list, though she is too savvy not to know that confirming that one is under consideration is a breach of the unwritten rules concerning possible vice-presidential candidates.

The first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from Missouri when she defeated right-wing Republican Jim Talent in November 2006, McCaskill is one of the Democratic presidential nominee’s most prominent female supporters. McCaskill was also one of Obama’s first Senate colleagues to endorse him, and at a time — in mid-January — when more members of the Senate had endorsed Clinton. “This has not been an easy decision for me, McCaskill said at the time, because so many women in Missouri and elsewhere were backing Clinton for the nomination.

McCaskill’s support may have been pivotal in Obama’s victory in the hard-fought Missouri primary, which he won by a margin of only 1.4%. In fact, the contest was so close that the Associated Press initially called Missouri for Clinton, later in the evening having to reverse itself and declare Obama the victor.

Missouri is a medium-size state, but those 11 electoral votes could prove decisive in determining the outcome of the presidential election this year. The Show Me State has gone for the winner in every presidential election since 1956, making it one of the few true bellwether states in the country. If Missouri’s status as a potentially pivotal swing state in November recommends McCaskill as a possible running mate.

McCaskill’s ability to win a closely fought Senate contest in November 2006 against a formidable opponent in a state that is part Northern, part Southern, mildly Midwestern and at the same time Southwestern, further recommends her as a possible vice-presidential nominee. A church-going Roman Catholic, McCaskill could help with that pivotal constituency.

McCaskill just turned 55 on July 24, which makes her eight years old than Obama, who only turned 47 today — a difference in age that could be productive, as the Missourian would be just old enough to give an Obama/McCaskill ticket some ‘gravitas’ without being too old to undermine the contrast with the 72-year-old John McCain.

But if there is much to recommend McCaskill as a potential vice-presidential nominee, there are a few factors that could weigh against her as the putative Democratic nominee considers his choice of running mate.

First, the fact that Missouri has a Republican governor means that McCaskill’s election as vice-president could potentially result in the replacement of the state’s only Democratic U.S. senator with a second Republican to join Christopher ‘Kit’ Bond in the Senate in 2009. Given the importance for a President Obama of having as large a Democratic majority in the Senate as possible, the potential for reducing that Senate majority could prove to be an important factor weighing against the choice of McCaskill as running mate.

Second, McCaskill’s gender could prove as much a disadvantage in the veepstakes as an advantage. For one thing, there are many who believe that the the fact that the putative Democratic presidential nominee is African American (or, to be more precise, biracial) makes for a compelling argument to have a white man on the ticket; those who are of the same mind on this question think that having a person of color as nominee is enough history in the making for the American electorate to absorb in one presidential election.

“While there had been speculation that Obama might seek to mend fences by tapping another woman for the role, this seems increasingly unlikely — and it’s not clear that even if it did happen that it would help with Clinton loyalists, especially since the most-often named women all endorsed Obama in the primaries, earning the resentment of many leaders of women’s organizations,” David Paul Kuhn wrote on Politico.com yesterday.

“If he picked Claire McCaskill or [Janet] Napolitano [or Kathleen] Sebelius, I think it would annoy women,” Geraldine Ferraro is quoted by Kuhn as saying. Not that Ferraro necessarily speaks for all women, but it is an oft-heard sentiment in certain circles.

McCaskill earned a 90% rating for 2007 from Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which makes her one of the most ‘liberal’ members of the U.S. Senate. Given the importance of the Obama campaign in appealing to independents, moderates, and even Republicans as a different kind of Democrat, McCaskill’s Senate voting record could actually weigh against her in the councils of the senior advisors to the Democratic nominee.

When she ran for the Senate in 2006, McCaskill defied the Missouri Catholic Conference on the issue of embryonic stem cell research, which the Conference adamantly opposes. In 2007, McCaskill got a 100% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America, 71% from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and 73% from the League of Conservation Voters. The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law gave McCaskill a grade of B.

McCaskill’s position on same-sex marriage is essentially the same as Obama’s: she does not support full marriage equality for same-sex couples but instead supports civil unions; and like Obama, McCaskill opposes the federal marriage amendment that would write discrimination into the U.S. Constitution. McCaskill also opposed the 2004 state constitutional amendment that 70% of Missourians voted for which excludes LGBT people from civil marriage under state law.

McCaskill voted for the inclusive federal hate crimes bill, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 (also know as the Matthew Shepard Act), which passed the Senate (60-39) in September 2007.

Whether or not the junior senator from Missouri is on the list being kept by the junior senator from illinois, at the very least, McCaskill has become increasingly prominent as an Obama surrogate, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has noted. And her ability to offer savvy political advice on reaching out to rural voters in Missouri and elsewhere has made McCaskill a valued advisor in the inner circle of Obama’s most trusted supporters. Even if Obama does not pick McCaskill as his running mate, if the Illinoisan is elected to the highest office in the land, the possibility of a cabinet appointment for his neighbor from Missouri is not at all a distant one.

(Jackson County, Missouri) An LGBT group said Tuesday it is considering legal action alleging that its members were kicked out of a campground because they are gay.

Pride Revolutions had rented about a dozen campsites at Longview Lake campground last weekend, but members say they were harassed by other campers almost as soon as they began arriving Friday night.

On Saturday, the group alleges, Jackson County park rangers told them to leave.

“We’re human beings like everyone else, and we just wanted to get together with our friends and have a nice weekend,” an unidentified member of Pride Revolutions told television station KCTV. “We weren’t trying to cause any trouble.”

A spokesperson for Jackson County Parks and Recreation told the station that the campers were asked to leave because they were drinking alcohol, had dogs without leashes and committed other campground violations.

The gay camper interviewed by the station, however, said that only one member of their group violated the rules, not all of them.

“This shouldn’t be tolerated. It’s 2008. This is ridiculous,” she told KCTV.

County officials later issued a statement saying a review of the incident was being undertaken to “ensure that all of our staff met the high standards and expectations we set for them in terms of friendliness, respect and professionalism.”

The statement noted that Jackson County was the first local government in the state to establish domestic partner registry and domestic partner benefits.