KANSAS CITY (AP) – A man convicted of two murders in Kansas City has been resentenced to 79 years in prison.

The Jackson County prosecutor’s office said in a news release that 23-year-old Eria Doss received the new sentenced Friday. Doss was earlier sentenced to four life sentences plus 200 years for the April 2009 deaths of Andrew Eli and Justin Burdreau during a robbery at Eli’s apartment.

A Missouri appeals court last year ordered that he be resentenced because the jury in his trial heard improper evidence about his juvenile records. Last month, jurors recommended 30 years each on two convictions of second-degree murder, 10 years for a first-degree robbery conviction and three years on three counts of armed criminal action.

Two co-defendants are already serving prison sentences.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s new forensic center is taking shape on the Washburn University campus in Topeka.

A “topping out” ceremony to place the final steel beam required for construction on part of the Forensic Science Center was held Wednesday. Exterior construction on the $55 million project is expected to be completed by December.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports the science center is expected to open in October 2015.

The KBI currently uses a lab in the basement of an 86-year-old former junior high school, which has insufficient heating and air conditioning and doesn’t meet standards for a modern forensic laboratory.

Washburn will lease the land and finance the construction with bonds, and then allow the KBI to repay the bonds through rent payments over 20 or 30 years.

DAVID PITT, Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says farmers can begin signing up for new safety net programs next week established in the 2014 farm bill that replace the much-criticized direct payments with government payouts based on risks farmers face.

Vilsack announced the roll-out of the programs on Thursday, and said farmers can sign up as soon as Sept. 29.

The programs can help farmers protect themselves against price drops and from lower revenue in poor crop years.

Payouts this year could be significant since anticipated record corn and soybean harvests have sent commodity prices plummeting. If farmers lose money in the harvest, the programs will enable them to collect significant government payments.

Vilsack expects farmers will take several months to research their options, talk with advisers and use online calculators to determine their best choices.

The farm bill, signed into law in February, provided $6 million to set up local meetings and for the design of online tools and creation of educational materials for farmers to help them choose which program would be best.

Instead of direct payments, farmers of major row crops — mostly corn, soybeans, wheat and rice — can choose between subsidies that pay out when revenue drops or when prices drop. Cotton and dairy supports were overhauled to similarly pay out when farmers have losses.

When I was a youngster my dad used to read two newspapers daily. His newspapers of choice were the Kansas City Star and Denver Post.

Both arrived on the same day and both contained the latest news from that date in history. The doodlebug or jitney brought the two papers from K.C. 358 miles to the east and Denver, 255 miles to our west. We farmed outside the small Sheridan County community of Seguin.

For you younger readers a doodlebug was the common name for a self-propelled railroad car. Doodlebugs sometimes pulled an unpowered trailer car, but were sometimes used singly.

They were popular with some railroads during the first to middle part of the 20th century. Jitneys provided passenger and mail service on lightly used branch lines, often in rural areas with sparse populations.

By operating these two-car trains in northwestern Kansas, the Union Pacific didn’t need to use conventional trains consisting of a locomotive and coaches. Several railroads, mostly small regional and local networks, provided their main passenger services through doodlebugs in a cost cutting effort. This also freed up the UP to use its locomotives for the transportation of wheat, milo, barley and livestock.

Our home was located a little more than a block north of the tracks and from the time I saw my first train I was fascinated by the sound, smoke and the sight of these hulking metal monsters. I couldn’t wait to see them, hear them, count the cars and eventually ride on one of them.

Doodlebugs were considerably quieter than the steam locomotives that carried millions and millions of bushels of grain from the breadbasket of the world where I grew up to hungry mouths across the globe. These two-car trains were typically equipped with a gasoline-powered engine that turned a generator which provided electricity to traction motors, which turned the axles and wheels on the trucks.

The doodlebug that stopped in our little village, population 50 with dogs and cats, usually came mid-morning, about 10:15. Back in those days you could almost set your watch by its arrival.

And that’s how my dad received his two daily papers on the same day. A half century later after the rail lines were torn up and steam engines were a distant memory, my dad subscribed to the Salina Journal. One of his neighbors, Elmer Reitcheck, subscribed to the Hays Daily News. After they’d read their copies they’d swap.

The funny thing about this is that Dad and Elmer were now reading yesterday’s papers. To be more exact, it often took two days to receive their daily papers. That’s right. With all our technology, and lightning quick U.S postal service required two days to deliver a paper 94 and 188 miles.

Talk about old news. You know the old saying, “That’s a heck’uva way to run a railroad.”  Well, I can’t remember how many times I heard my dad say, “bring back the railroads.”

I guess, you could blame part of the demise of today’s papers on transportation and the government, but then both take a beating daily anyway, so back to the story of doodlebugs and those days of yesteryear.

I took one of my first train rides on a doodlebug. I also accompanied my dad to see our relatives in Denver by way of the Rock Island Rocket.

That was nearly 60 years ago and the 250-mile trip on this streamliner took less than three hours. We literally flew across the plains traveling at speeds of 90 miles-per-hour in this red and silver rocket. It takes four hours to cover this same distance traveling on Interstate 70 today.

For my sixth birthday, I asked my parents for a train trip from Seguin to Oakley – about 50 miles. They obliged by buying me a ticket on the doodlebug. This slowpoke traveled half the speed of the Rocket – maybe less, but I enjoyed every minute.

During part of the trip the engineer allowed me to put my hand on the huge silver, metal throttle and as I told my friends later, “I drove the doodlebug part of the way to Oakley.”

Bet I couldn’t get anywhere near a train throttle or computer-operated engine room today. SOPs (standard operating procedure), rules and regulations being what they are.

Maybe I really didn’t go on this train ride across the High Plains back in the mid ‘50s. Maybe this story is all a dream. Something I thought up to fill this column.

Don’t count on it. It was real. It was a birthday I’ll always remember.

Who knows, maybe one day trains will once again play a vital role in transportation on both coasts. One thing is certain, they won’t carry newspapers anymore.

John Schlageck is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – During an interview with Shannon Bream that aired last night on Fox News’s “Special Report with Bret Baier,” U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) questioned why the Obama Administration forces Americans to disclose race and ethnicity when purchasing a firearm. Last week, Blunt, who co-chairs the Senate Law Enforcement Caucus, sent a letter demanding answers to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

By Bryan Thompson
Kansas Public Radio

The regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency says climate change is already happening.

Karl Brooks, administrator for the EPA’s Region 7, which includes Kansas, says the best way to minimize climate change is to implement the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

“Carbon emissions from the power sector are the largest, single, uncontrolled source of greenhouse gas pollutants in America right now,” Brooks said. “Our obligation to regulate those pollutants is clear. The Supreme Court announced that nearly six years ago.”

The EPA still hasn’t finalized its plan to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. The proposed rules would require existing power plants in Kansas to cut carbon emissions by 23 percent by 2030. New power plants would have to keep their carbon emissions below a set level — one that would be impossible for coal-burning plants to meet without using carbon capture and storage.

Brooks said America can meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets and maintain a reliable supply of electric power through innovation, efficiency and competition.

“This country is in a better position to compete and win globally by moving toward a lower-carbon economy, because that’s what markets want, that’s what investors reward, that’s what customers prefer,” he said.

According to Brooks, the Clean Power Plan puts a premium on flexibility at the state level and allows states to work together to meet their emissions reduction goals. The EPA has received more than 750,000 comments from the public on the Clean Power Plan. The deadline for submitting comments has been pushed back to Dec. 1.

Brooks said Kansas utilities and state officials worked with EPA staff during the summer to create a strategy to comply with the Clean Power Plan.

“At this stage, the state of Kansas is actively involved, working on what Kansas’ approach to the Clean Power Plan will look like over the course of the next year or two,” he said.

The most controversial issue Kansas faces is the planned expansion of a coal-fired power plant near Holcomb, in southwest Kansas.

Backers of the expansion insist it should be classified as an existing plant, because of all the planning that has gone into it the past nine years. Environmentalists oppose that classification, because no actual construction has taken place.

The EPA had proposed classifying that plant and a handful of others as “transitional,” which might have allowed it to be regulated as an existing plant. The agency has since abandoned that idea. However, the agency has not decided how to classify the Sunflower Electric expansion.

The EPA and state officials are working through the legal aspects of that question. Brooks said he doesn’t know what the timetable for a decision might be.

Regardless of how the Holcomb expansion is classified, Brooks said agricultural states like Kansas have much at stake in the Clean Power Plan, as climate change is already causing more extreme weather of all types.

“The nation’s leading scientists have identified weather unpredictability — more floods, lasting longer, higher temperatures extending longer through the summer growing season, and in the winter as well — as major factors that are already observable,” he said. “They’ve already been documented. We’re focused on this because it really affects the way that we produce the food here in the heartland. Inaction is not a good option for us.”

JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Eric Holder’s planned resignation has some civil rights leaders wondering what will happen to his initiatives once the first black attorney general leaves office.

He has gotten high praise from the civil rights community for his work. But the Justice Department has not said if there will be federal charges in high-profile cases such as the shootings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Missouri.

Holder has also been the public face of initiatives such as protecting voting rights, ending racial profiling and easing tension between police and minority communities.

Activists say Holder’s departure will leave them with a lot to calculate.