Prosecutors have dropped charges against a man accused of dumping a southwest Missouri teenager’s body in Truman Lake last year.

Anthony Balbirnie of Springfield was scheduled to go to trial next week on an abandonment of a corpse charge. He was accused of throwing the body of 15-year-old Khighla Parks into the lake in September 2012. Her body was found about two weeks after she was last seen near her home south of Willard in Greene County. No one has been charged in the girl’s death.

Balbirnie is in state prison for violating parole on earlier convictions.

The Morgan County Sheriff’s Department says it is looking for a convicted child molester.

The department says Timothy Register took off his court-ordered GPS bracelet Sunday and he has not been seen since then.

Officials found the GPS unit in Eldon. A search of Register’s Sunrise Beach home found a letter saying he would not return to prison.

County officials say Register is considered to be dangerous.

(AP) — Congress might reach a last-minute deal to avert a federal default and fully reopen the government. But elected officials are likely to return to the same sort of

grinding brinkmanship next year.

House-Senate talks are barely touching the underlying causes of debt-and-spending stalemates that pushed the country close to economic crises in 2011, again last December and again this month.

At best, Congress and the White House will agree to fund the government and raise the limit on federal borrowing for a few months.

They also will set up another bipartisan effort to address the major causes of the federal debt. Those include restricted revenue growth and entitlement benefits that rise automatically.

But advocates see no change in the political dynamics that stymied past bids for big compromises.

The Missouri Highway Patrol says two people have died after their SUV collided with a school bus about 50 miles east of Kansas City.

There were no immediate reports of injuries to students in Tuesday afternoon’s crash on eastbound U.S. 50 near Warrensburg.

The patrol was investigating how the crash occurred. Names of the two people killed were not immediately released.

(AP) In deciding to not be the first in the nation to use the anesthetic propofol for capital punishment, Gov. Jay Nixon left Missouri with dwindling options as it seeks to execute two convicted murderers in the coming months.

Gov. Jay Nixon halted Allen Nicklasson’s Oct. 23 execution following doctor protests along with threats from the anti-death penalty European Union to limit the drug’s export. Nixon ordered the state corrections department to come up with a different lethal injection protocol and instructed Attorney General Chris Koster to ask the state Supreme Court to set a new execution date for Nicklasson.

Other states, including Ohio and Texas, have turned to private compounding pharmacies to prepare new batches of the sedative pentobarbital after large drug manufacturers balked, a move Missouri could follow. It could also seek to administer a different FDA-approved sedative such as midazolam, also an untested execution drug which the state of Florida plans to provide Tuesday night as part of a three-drug mix for William Happ, a house painter convicted in a Fort Lauderdale rape and strangulation.

Another possible scenario for Missouri: months if not years of continued legal challenges. Nicklasson’s lawyer has asked the state Supreme Court to not rule on the request for a date until officials select a new death penalty drug.

“You can’t set an execution date now,” said attorney Jennifer Herndon. “There’s not even a protocol …The state’s request for a new execution date is premature.”

Nicklasson was convicted of the 1994 killing of Excelsior Springs businessman Richard Drummond. A car carrying Nicklasson and two others broke down on Interstate 70 in central Missouri. Drummond, a Vietnam veteran, stopped to help and was then kidnapped, robbed and shot in the woods off the interstate. Another man in the car, Dennis Skillicorn, was executed in 2009.

Another execution is scheduled _ for now _ on Nov. 20. Joseph Franklin was convicted in the 1977 sniper shooting of Gerald Gordon as a crowd dispersed from a bar mitzvah in suburban St. Louis. Two others were wounded. When he confessed 17 years later, Franklin was serving several life sentences in a federal prison for killing two black joggers in Salt Lake City and an interracial couple in Madison, Wis., and bombing a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Koster’s written request to the Missouri Supreme Court asks Nicklasson be executed “soon after” Franklin. A Koster spokeswoman said there were no new developments Tuesday, as did a Department of Corrections official.

Unlike propofol and other more widely available drugs previously used in executions, drugs manufactured by compounding pharmacies aren’t regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration, raising questions among death penalty opponents and public health watchdogs alike. A deadly nationwide meningitis outbreak last year in which 64 people died and 750 others sickened was traced to a tainted steroid custom-made by a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy.

Such businesses also risk public backlash once their identities are revealed. A suburban Houston compounding pharmacy that supplied a special batch of pentobarbital to the Texas prison where an inmate was executed last week asked to have the drug returned after complaining about “a firestorm” of public attention, including hate mail.

“There’s going to be pressure,” said attorney Richard Deiter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. “Everybody in the medical business has their ethical codes _ and the death penalty usually isn’t a part of it.”

In Arkansas, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel recently told a statewide group of local sheriffs that the state’s death penalty system is “completely broken” and called lethal injection a “legal fallacy” given the drug shortage. He suggested the state either overhaul its death penalty laws or abolish it completely.

Missouri altered its execution protocol in April 2012 to include propofol only after it could no longer obtain the other lethal injection drugs it had previously used for a three-drug mix.

The decision to use propofol, the drug best known for contributing to pop star Michael Jackson’s 2009 overdose, quickly prompted a lawsuit filed on behalf of nearly two dozen death row inmates who claimed that using the unproven execution drug could result in pain and suffering for the condemned.

(AP) — Missouri’s decision to not use the anesthetic propofol for capital punishment leaves the state with dwindling options as it seeks to execute two convicted murderers.

Gov. Jay Nixon last week halted what was to have been the first U.S. execution to use propofol following threats from the European Union to limit the drug’s export. Nixon ordered the state corrections department to come up with a different lethal injection protocol.

Missouri could follow states such as Ohio and Texas that have turned to private compounding pharmacies to prepare new drug formularies. Or it could seek to administer another FDA-approved barbiturate.

Convicted murderer Allen Nicklasson’s lawyer has asked the state Supreme Court to not rule on Missouri’s request for a new execution date until it selects a new death penalty drug.

The United States ‘AAA’ credit rating is under review for a downgrade.

Fitch Ratings has placed the United States on Rating Watch Negative on the high risk that US authorities will not raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner before the Treasury exhausts extraordinary measures on 17 Oct.

(AP) — Authorities say a man from West Plains died when he was hit by a train.

The Howell County Sheriff’s office says 33-year-old Joseph Langron died early Tuesday in West Plains.

Langron was walking on the tracks when he was it about 1 a.m. Tuesday.

The sheriff and West Plains police are investigating the death.