Former Agra resident Carolyn Marie Jurey passed away May 9, 2018 at the Colonial Villa Nursing Home in Alma, NE at the age of 78. She was born April 1, 1940 in Modale, IA, the daughter of Francis & Juanita (Swaney) McIntosh. She was a homemaker.
Survivors include her sons, Kelley of Alma, NE, Tony of Phillipsburg & Brian of Ft. Mills, SC; 16 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held Monday, May 14th at 11:00 a.m. in the Norcatur Cemetery, Norcatur, KS with Pastor Lee Bennight officiating.
There will be no visitation, memorial contributions may be made to the American Lung Association.
Doris Elaine Betthauser, 88, loving wife, mother, grandma, great-grandma, and certified nurse’s aide, passed away Wednesday, May 9, 2018.
Doris was born October 26, 1929 in Hays, KS, to Fred and Aethelburga Homburg.
She was preceded in death by her parents; husband, Donald; daughter, Diane; grandson, Danny; and sisters, Ione Buchheister, and Jane Bowyer.
Doris is survived by her sister, Kay (Peter) Enna; son, David (Linda) Betthauser of Derby; daughter, Donna (Dale) Randall of Dexter; grandchildren, Vickie (Ryan) Scroggin, David (Kelly) Betthauser, Donnie Betthauser, Rocky (Darcie) Randall, Dusty (Sara) Randall, Evin (Liz) Hunt, and Teresa Page; 11 great-grandchildren; and 1 great-great grandchild.
Visitation: Saturday, May 12, 2018 from 5 – 8 pm. Rosary: 9:30 am, Monday, May 14 followed by funeral at 10 am; all at Smith Family Mortuary, 1415 N. Rock Rd., Derby, KS. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Good Shepherd Hospice, 7829 E. Rockhill, S-403, Wichita, KS.
TOPEKA – The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has issued a boil water advisory for the Rush County RWD 1 located in Rush County.
Customers should observe the following precautions until further notice:
Boil water for one minute prior to drinking or food preparation or use bottled water.
Dispose of ice cubes and do not use ice from a household automatic icemaker.
Disinfect dishes and other food contact surfaces by immersion for at least one minute in clean tap water that contains one teaspoon of unscented household bleach per gallon of water.
Water used for bathing does not generally need to be boiled. Supervision of children is necessary while bathing so that water is not ingested. Persons with cuts or severe rashes may wish to consult their physicians.
If your tap water appears dirty, flush the water lines by letting the water run until it clears.
The advisory took effect Friday and will remain in effect until the conditions that placed the system at risk of bacterial contamination are resolved. KDHE officials issued the advisory of a positive bacteriological sample.
Regardless of whether the public water supplier or KDHE announced the boil water advisory, only KDHE can issue a cancellation of this advisory following testing at a certified laboratory.
Executives from 10 auto companies will meet with President Donald Trump and cabinet officials on Friday to discuss the administration’s plan to reduce gas mileage and pollution requirements enacted during the Obama administration.
The auto industry wants to relax the standards, but not so much that they provoke a legal fight with California, which has power to impose its own stricter tailpipe pollution limits. Such a fight could bring two mileage standards in the U.S., forcing automakers to engineer and produce two versions of each of their vehicle models, driving up costs.
“The president will hear from the automaker CEOs about the impact of the rulemaking on the auto industry and their efforts to negotiate a ‘National Program’ with the state of California,” Lindsay Walters, deputy White House press secretary, said in a statement.
In testimony before a congressional committee this month, Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said the trade group has urged the Trump administration to find a solution that increases mileage requirements from 2022 to 2025 and includes California in order to keep one national standard.
“The resulting regulatory nightmare would ultimately harm consumers by increasing vehicle costs and restricting consumer choice,” Bainwol said.
If California splits from the federal rule, it likely would be joined by 12 states that follow its standards. Together they make up about 40 percent of U.S. new-vehicle sales.
The Environmental Protection Agency under Trump has proposed freezing the standards at 2020 levels for the next five years, according to a draft of the proposal obtained by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Delaware. Under the proposal, the fleet of new vehicles would have to average roughly 30 miles per gallon in real-world driving, and that wouldn’t change through at least 2025.
The EPA under Obama proposed standards that gradually would become tougher during that period, rising to 36 mpg in 2025, 10 mpg higher than the current requirement. California and automakers agreed to the rules in 2012, setting a single national fuel economy standard.
Any big change by Trump certainly will bring lawsuits from environmental groups as well as California. Leaks about the Trump EPA plan already have provoked a suit from California and 16 other states.
Automakers have been lobbying the Trump administration to revisit the requirements, saying they’ll have trouble reaching them because people are buying bigger vehicles due to low gas prices.
When the single national standard was adopted six years ago, cars, which get better mileage than trucks and SUVs, made up just under half of U.S. new vehicle sales. By the end of last year, however, trucks and SUVs were close to two-thirds of all sales.
Some environmental groups oppose any reduction in the standards, saying that the ones developed in 2012 allow for changes in consumer buying habits. Reducing the standards, they say, will increase pollution and raise gasoline prices at the pump.
Requirements now are lower for bigger vehicles such as trucks and SUVs, said Luke Tonachel, director of clean vehicles for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The standards automatically adjust to the sales mix of vehicles,” he said.
Environmental groups also say the industry marketed trucks and SUVs to the public because they make bring higher profits than cars.
Daniel Becker of the Safe Climate Campaign, an environmental advocacy group, said the new EPA proposal may go further than the industry wanted, giving it a black eye from the public and creating two mileage requirements.
“The auto companies want the rollbacks, but they don’t want the blame,” Becker said.
California has a unique waiver that allows it to set its own tailpipe emissions standards for vehicles, which it has used to combat smog and, more recently, global warming. Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia have adopted the California standards as their own. Vehicles that get better mileage burn less gas and spew out fewer greenhouse gases.
The Trump administration has discussed ending the California waiver, but the state has pledged to defend it in court.
There may be room for compromise. Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board, has said that there may be a way to recognize the auto industry’s concerns without doing much damage to the standards. She has said the state may go along with new flexibility for the industry in exchange for extending standards to at least 2030.
Auto executives attending the meeting include General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Ford CEO Jim Hackett, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne and Bob Carter, executive vice president of North America for Toyota.
MANHATTAN (AP) — Kansas State plans to reduce its budget by more than $15 million for the upcoming school year.
University officials on Thursday said the 5.27 percent cut will affect administrative offices, colleges and research and extension.
Spokeswoman Jennifer Tidball says the reductions include $6.1 million for administrative units, such as the president and provost offices and Hale Library.
The Manhattan Mercury reports about $6.3 million will affect all the university’s colleges and $3 million will come from Kansas State Research and Extension.
School officials cited declining enrollment as the main reason for the reductions. The university’s enrollment has dropped in each of the last three years. Its September 2017 census counted 22,796 students, nearly 1,000 fewer than in 2016.
By DIANE GASPER-O’BRIEN FHSU University Relations and Marketing
It’s going to be a long weekend for Andrew and Paige Todd with three straight days of big events Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
But it’s a weekend they will cherish for a long time, especially by the time they get to Sunday.
The young family will make the hour trip from Grainfield to Hays Friday evening for Andrew’s graduation from Fort Hays State University, where he will receive his bachelor’s degree in agricultural business.
Early the next morning, they will be back in Hays for Paige’s commencement ceremony at FHSU. She will walk across the stage at Gross Memorial Coliseum accepting her diploma for a bachelor’s in English.
Sunday, there probably won’t be much time for resting at home as Paige celebrates her first Mother’s Day. The Todds’ son, Jeremiah, was born April 9.
This might seem not all that out of the ordinary for a young married couple completing their college educations. But the Todds are not your ordinary young married couple.
Paige will be doing all this celebrating with four of her five senses. Paige, who was born 15 weeks premature back in November of 1994, is legally blind. She can see some colors and shapes but says “everything is blurry.”
That hasn’t stopped the Gove County woman from doing – well, just about anything she has wanted to.
• Graduate from Wheatland/Grinnell High School in Grainfield with honors. Check.
• Earn an associate’s degree from Colby Community College. Check.
• Get married. Check.
Four and a half weeks ago, Paige added giving birth to a healthy baby boy to that list of accomplishments. Saturday, it will be crossing that stage and accepting her diploma, a sign of earning her bachelor’s degree.
For three semesters, Paige lived in Wooster Place apartments and navigated the FHSU campus. Sometimes friends helped her find her way, but most of the time Paige could be seen walking alone with her best friend – a white walking stick. Paige then completed her degree online from home during the final stages of her pregnancy.
Andrew also completed his bachelor’s through FHSU’s Virtual College after receiving his associate’s from Colby Community College. After serving four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, Andrew is back home in Gove County, where he farms and ranches with Paige’s dad, Leon Tuttle, and also works part-time as a rural mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service.
Knowing she would have other responsibilities once her baby arrived, Paige decided to be as active as possible on campus. She took a couple of defensive tactics classes and landed a writing internship. She did editing work for the nursing department and financial aid office.
With her college days behind her, Paige can now concentrate on raising the couple’s son – and continuing her part-time job as a proofreader for the Scott County Record.
Rob Haxton, owner and publisher of the Record, emails Paige stories. Using software specifically for sight impaired, Paige listens to the stories being read aloud, right down to punctuation marks.
“I joke with my staff that we have three sets of eyes to look over everything and she does this without any sight,” Haxton said. “Paige is a very, very good proofreader, a hard worker and very conscientious.”
Paige could write a book on how she improvises in finding ways to accomplish things that sighted people take for granted.
She just might do that, if she has a mind to. She got some good experience in that type of writing this semester in an independent class on blogging under Dr. Cheryl Duffy, professor of English.
Paige’s blogs include the joy of finding apps on an iPhone that a flip phone didn’t offer. However, switching from a flip phone with buttons she could feel to a touch screen posed other issues.
Much like she has done her entire life, Paige figured out a way to solve that problem.
“Anything that she sets her mind to do she is going to do, and she’s going to do it well,” said Duffy, Paige’s advisor who had her in several classes. “She’s good about advocating for herself. She’s going to make it happen.”
One of Paige’s blogs is on the “perks of being visually impaired,” focusing on the positive rather than the negative.
“There definitely are things I can’t do,” she wrote, “or things that could be done better by others. But in this post, I will focus on a few positive things about being legally blind.”
In that blog, Paige points out special skills different than a lot of people possess, such as being literate in Braille and the lack of appearance-based impressions of people. Others are ones some people might take for granted, such as the ability to pay attention to detail and unique conversations.
Paige even jokes that “another perk of being legally blind is that no one has ever asked me to drive during a road trip.”
Another blog is entitled “How I organized my nursery as a first-time blind mom.” She talks about organizing clothing by age, diapers by size and bathing supplies by type. She describes the placement of items, right down to where she has placed the Braille books that she can read to their baby, along with printed books that Dad can read to Jeremiah.
Maybe one day they can read Jeremiah a book his mother wrote.
That wouldn’t surprise Paige’s parents.
“We always told both our girls they could do anything they wanted to,” said Paige’s mom, Donna Tuttle. “It was kind of expected to go to college and get a degree. But it was their decision. Paige has always had high expectations for herself.”
Those expectations have taken on a new meaning for Paige with her responsibilities as a new mother. But raising Jeremiah will be all in a day’s work for Paige.
“There are some things that I probably do slower because I can’t see what I’m doing,” she said. “My husband changes diapers a lot quicker than I do. But I get it done.”
For anyone attending Saturday’s graduation, watch for Paige walking across the stage Saturday. She will be the barely 5-foot tall woman marching proudly with a white walking stick, head held high. Afterward in the crowd, she will be holding a month-old baby.
Congratulations, Paige Todd, and Happy Mother’s Day!
The 2nd annual Nicodemus Chautauqua will be held on Saturday, May 26, starting at noon under the big tent in Nicodemus. There will be free food and refreshments for all. The big tent will house visitors and performers and keep you cool under what might be a hot day. Todd Tomar has organized the ‘Nicodemus Old New Timers Band”. They will provide period musical entertainment between performances.
Performers will include stories and history of Nicodemus past. Leroy Walz who portrays, Nicodemus newspaper editor, Lightfoot, will quarrel with Phil Martin portraying W.R. Hill, editor and town organizer. Daniel Moore, portraying postmaster Zach Fletcher, will describe in detail the settler’s response to Native Americans who arrived in the town in the winter of 1878.
Emma and Liam were the most frequently chosen baby names for 2017.
For the fourth year in a row, Emma was the top girl’s name according to the annual list of the most popular baby names released by the Social Security Administration on Friday. Liam pushed last year’s champ, Noah, to second to claim the top spot.
The Social Security Administration releases the 1,000 most popular baby names each year. They trumpeted the name reveals Friday with a Facebook Live announcement. The agency uses the announcement to draw traffic to its website, where workers can begin tracking their benefits long before retirement.
When it came to girls’ names, Emma was followed by Olivia, Ava, Isabella and Sophia.
For the boys, Liam and Noah were followed by William, James and Logan.
Other trends last year included a rise in the use of Melania for a girl, likely influenced by first lady Melania Trump.
TOPEKA — Kansas will make law enforcement body camera footage more accessible to the families of suspects killed by officers and the state will be required to release basic information about child abuse deaths under a new state law.
Gov. Jeff Colyer signed a single bill Thursday containing the new policies on child abuse deaths and body camera footage. The changes take effect July 1. He also signed a bill that will increase penalties for political candidates filing late campaign finance reports and issued an executive order requiring more transparency from state agencies in providing information to people seeking government jobs.
Both the Republican governor and top lawmakers had declared that government transparency would be a major issue during the GOP-controlled Legislature’s annual session, which ended last week. But their record was mixed: Four major bills passed while more than a dozen died, most without even a committee hearing.
Still, Colyer and backers of the bills he signed view them as significant progress. Colyer had a news conference surrounded by legislators, transparency advocates and the family of a man killed by a sheriff’s deputy in October in the small south-central Kansas town of Sun City.
“The process will continue forward,” Colyer said, promising that transparency will remain a “watchword for us.”
The body camera footage policy was a response to the inconsistent access given to families in several cases. The law will require agencies to allow the families of suspects killed by officers to see the footage within 20 days of a request.
The governor and the state Department for Children and Families pushed for more disclosure on child abuse deaths after child homicides in recent years. The new law will not only require the DCF to release the names and ages of children killed and the dates of their deaths, but a summary of abuse reports received by the agency and how it responded.
Colyer previously signed other legislation requiring lobbyists to disclose more information about their attempts to influence executive branch agencies, including government contracting decisions. He also signed a bill requiring the state to compile reports on assets seized by law enforcement agencies.
But the Legislature rejected or ignored bills that would have made its lawmaking more transparent to the public by providing more information about bills’ sponsors, requiring committees to take recorded votes and requiring audio broadcasts of all committee meetings. Lawmakers did nothing to end the much-criticized “gut and go” tactic, in which a bill is stripped of its contents in favor of language from an unrelated proposal.
And the state’s new policy on body camera footage was a compromise between law enforcement groups and transparency advocates that doesn’t mean greater access for news organizations or the general public.
“This is really just a first step,” said Kent Cornish, president of the Kansas Association of Broadcasters. “This summer, we hope to get together to come back with a bill next year that also opens the video up to the public.”
In Topeka, the father of 30-year-old Dominique White didn’t see footage from his son’s fatal Sept. 28 shooting by two officers for more than two months. In the Sun City incident, 42-year-old Steven Myers died after a deputy shot him with a bean-bag round at close range, and the Barber County sheriff’s department released the footage publicly after Myers’ widow went to court.
Myers’ widow, Kristina, told reporters after Colyer’s news conference that family members experienced “absolute anguish” waiting to see what the footage showed.
WICHITA — U.S. farmers are expected to harvest their smallest winter wheat crop in more than a decade amid an ongoing drought that has devastated fields across the nation’s breadbasket and a global surplus of the grain that has depressed prices, according to government report released Thursday.
The National Agricultural Statistics Service forecast the size of the nation’s 2018 wheat crop at 1.19 billion bushels. If realized, that would be down 6 percent from the previous year.
The last time the nation’s farmers harvested such a small wheat crop was in 2002, when U.S. production fell to 1.137 billion bushels, said Marsha Boswell, spokeswoman for the industry group Kansas Wheat.
“It is not a surprise that production is down, the market is not really telling people to plant wheat. There is a surplus of wheat in the world,” Boswell said.
Not only are projected U.S. wheat yields down to an average 48 bushels per acre, but the agency is also forecasting that just 24.8 million acres of wheat will be harvested — a record low harvested acreage for the United States, according to the report.
Kansas remained the nation’s top winter wheat producer even in a dry year like this one, with the government estimating that state’s growers will bring in 270.1 million bushels. That’s compared to the 333.6 million bushels harvested last year in Kansas.
The government’s estimate for Kansas is a bit more optimistic than the 243.3 million bushels that participants in the Wheat Quality Council’s winter wheat tour had predicted earlier this month, although both had estimated average statewide yields of 37 bushels per acre. The difference is because tour participants anticipate Kansas farmers will abandon more acres before harvest.
Lane County grower Vance Ehmke said his farm in west central Kansas — where he grows about 2,500 acres of certified wheat seed — has gotten less than 2 inches of rain since October, far less than the 7 inches that would be normal for that period. His neighbor this week plowed up a half section of wheat that was so poor it would not be worth cutting.
“It is just incredibly dry out there,” Ehmke said. “Farmers have a well-deserved reputation for whining, but this time we are not kidding.”
Winter wheat is planted in the fall and typically harvested beginning in June in Kansas. Drought conditions have plagued this year’s crop, and it remains to be seen whether the state will get enough moisture in the coming weeks to fill out the heads of wheat. Much of the wheat across Kansas is just ankle-high, and crop development is two to three weeks late.
“I have no idea what to expect, but we continue daily to reduce our expectations so whatever we get we wouldn’t be disappointed,” Ehmke said.
The report noted drought conditions were prevalent across most of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
Behind Kansas, the second largest winter wheat crop this year is expected to come out of Washington with a forecast production there of 118.8 million bushels of wheat. Colorado production trails third with 83.6 million bushels.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — Authorities are investigating a homicide in Kansas City, Kansas.
Police say in a news release that the officers were responding to a shots fired call late Thursday when they found a sports utility vehicle in a wooded area. The release says the victim was found inside dead from an apparent gunshot wound.
No other details were immediately released, including the man’s name. Authorities are urging anyone with information to come forward.
WICHITA (AP) — Authorities say a 36-year-old man is charged with traveling from Texas to Kansas to have sex with a 15-year-old girl and later bringing the girl back to Texas with him.
The U.S. attorney’s office says Juan Carlos Carmona was charged Thursday with two federal counts. It wasn’t immediately known whether he had an attorney.
The complaint says the investigation began May 16 when the Hutchinson, Kansas, teen was reported missing. Investigators say they found that in April 2018 Carmona drove from Texas to Hutchinson, where he rented a hotel room and had sex with the girl.
The complaint says that after returning to Texas, Carmona came back to Kansas in May. He is accused of picking up the girl and driving her to Houston, where the two had sex.
