Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon says his administration will work quickly and aggressively to land Boeing Co.’s next-generation commercial aircraft.

Boeing is expected to choose a location for producing the 777X by early January. Nixon said Thursday that he met with company leaders in St. Louis. The governor said the meeting was productive.

Nixon says production of the 777X would be a “massive shot in the arm” for Missouri’s economy.

Boeing currently employs about 15,000 people in Missouri.

(AP) – A west-central Missouri man is charged with disposing of a baby’s body by placing it in a bucket that he then filled with concrete.

Cass County authorities said that Matthew Scroggs of Pleasant Hill was charged Thursday with abandonment of a corpse and tampering with a vehicle.

Police had received a tip about the baby before they went to Scroggs’ home in November to investigate reports of drugs and a stolen car.

Officers saw the bucket in the garage during a search for the drugs.

A probable cause statement says Scroggs told investigators that he put the boy’s body in a bucket and filled it with concrete after the child was stillborn in October of 2013.

The results of an autopsy are pending.

(AP) – Missouri will allow health insurance companies to continue offering policies that otherwise would have been cancelled under the terms of the new federal health care law.

Gov. Jay Nixon announced Thursday that the state will let insurers sell individual and small-group policies in 2014 that were to be canceled because they didn’t meet federal coverage requirements taking effect next year.

Nationwide, more than 4 million people who buy their own insurance have gotten received notices because their plans didn’t meet the requirements of the federal law.

Missouri’s decision comes after President Barack Obama recently proposed to allow those customers to keep their existing insurance policies for another year.

(AP) — A school board in one of Kansas’ smallest and poorest districts voted to close an elementary school after three of the board members resigned their positions.

The board of the Unified School District 247, which covers 326 square miles of rural Crawford and Cherokee counties, voted Wednesday night to close the school in McCune, which has 39 students in grades one, two and four. Students in kindergarten, third and fifth grades were bused this year to Weir and Cherokee because the class sizes were too small.

The vote came after three board members resigned. One said he was moving out of the district’s boundaries but the other two cited the decision to close the school in their resignations.

(AP) — A 15-year-old Topeka boy was in stable condition after walking into traffic while talking on his cellphone and being hit by a car.

Police spokesman Lt. Mike Cross says the Hayden High School student was hit around 3:35 p.m. Wednesday after walking in front of a car whose driver didn’t have time to react.

Witnesses told authorities the boy had just pushed the button on a lighted crosswalk and “didn’t even wait a half a second” before stepping into oncoming traffic.

The woman driving the vehicle and three young children in the car weren’t injured.

Cross says there has been a big push against driving while distracted, but pedestrians also are part of the roadway and need to pay attention to what they’re doing.

11:00 a.m.   Kansas State University police have identified the student found dead in a residence hall parking lot on the Manhattan campus Wednesday night as Jordan Blayne Forbit, 18, Elkhart.

The cause of death is still under investigation, but foul play is not suspected. At approximately 10:35 p.m. on Nov. 20, the Kansas State University Police responded to a medical emergency in a residence hall parking lot. Upon arrival they found Forbit deceased in a vehicle.

Forbit was a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. He was a resident of Haymaker Hall. He graduated from Elkhart High School in May.

Housing and dining staff members are working with counseling services to help students and staff affected by Forbit’s death.

5:30 a.m.  Authorities in Manhattan are investigating the death of a K-State student. The male student was found dead in a car on the Manhattan campus about 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday night.

A K-State spokesperson said they don’t expect foul play. No additional details in the case have been released. Stay tuned to Eagle Radio and Check St. Joseph Post for more information as it becomes available.

(AP) — An elderly man from southeast Kansas died after he was hit by a car when he got out of another vehicle that had hit a deer.

The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department says 90-year-old Louis Nicoletti of Columbus was struck Tuesday as he crossed U.S. 160 about three miles east of Columbus. He died later at Freeman Hospital West in Joplin.

Nicoletti was walking across the highway after a car he was riding in had hit a deer. Neither Nicoletti or his wife, who was driving the car, was injured in that accident.

 (AP) A man who stabbed a Kansas City cabdriver at least seven times and stole her taxi was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Twenty-year-old Julian F. Rodriguez pleaded guilty to robbery, armed criminal action and stealing a motor vehicle.

The driver, Shelli Hopkins, said Rodriguez laughed during the attack. The Kansas City Star reports she had to get 70 to 80 stitches, suffers from post-traumatic stress and ran up about $92,000 in medical bills with no insurance after the attack last December.

Police say Hopkins was about to drop Rodriguez off at his destination when he suddenly began stabbing her from the back seat.
He told police that he and a woman went out to eat and to a movie and then had sex in the cab.

More than two months after a woman’s body was found along the banks of the Mississippi River near the northeast Missouri town of Hannibal, her identity remains a mystery.

Marion County Sheriff Jimmy Shinn said that police are no closer to identifying the woman than they were when the body was found in September.

There was some evidence that she toured the Mark Twain Cave two days before the body was found. The cave is south of Hannibal, not far from where the body was discovered.