AP Top Kansas News at 5:45 a.m. CDT

Monday, April 20, 2009

Soldier from Topeka dies in Afghanistan

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- A soldier from Topeka has died while serving in Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom.

The Department of Defense announced Sunday that Pfc. Richard A. Dewater died Wednesday from wounds caused by an improvised explosive device. The 21-year-old Dewater was on a dismounted patrol near Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infant Division in Fort Hood, Texas.

------ Analysis: Kan. forecast sets up tough choice

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- The new fiscal forecast for state government appears to be pushing legislators toward a difficult choice: cutting education funding or increasing taxes.

The forecast issued last week slashed revenue projections for the rest of the state's current fiscal year and for fiscal 2010, which begins July 1. Officials now project that the budget legislators have approved for the next fiscal year will result in a $328 million deficit.

The state constitution prohibits a deficit, which means the $13 billion spending plan must be revised, or more revenues must be raised, or both. Legislators return April 29 from their annual spring break with the budget the most pressing issue.

The size of the deficit makes funding for both public schools and higher education a target, because together they consume more than two-thirds of the state's general tax revenues. But any such effort is likely to meet with fierce opposition.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and fellow Democrats are backing a series of proposals that they contend will raise revenues without a general tax increase. There's some debate about some of the items, and even if legislators adopted all of them, it still wouldn't eliminate the projected deficit.

"We know this is probably going to be the toughest set of budget negotiations that the state has seen and probably one of the toughest economic challenges in a generation," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Kevin Yoder, an Overland Park Republican.

------ Government frustrated by reluctant deportee

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) -- The government is asking a federal court for permission to sedate a Kenyan who has been in the U.S. for 13 years on an expired student visa, and then send him back to Nairobi.

But David Kihuha says he would rather stay in the federal prison in Leavenworth than go back to Kenya and face possible violence there.

The former Olathe resident has spent the last 20 months behind bars, and is currently segregated in a federal holding facility where he is confined to his cell for up to 24 hours a day. He is being held on felony charges of refusing to leave.

Immigration agents tried twice last year to deport the 36-year-old, but he bit, spit and covered himself in his own excrement, according to government records. He also chewed up a head covering known as a "spit mask."

"I told them I did not want to go," Kihuha told The Kansas City Star in a phone interview from his cell. "I told them to take me back to jail."

The government noted to the court that commercial pilots "will not accept a violent, feces-besmeared passenger."

------ Fort Scott hosts 'Sendler' premier

FORT SCOTT, Kan. (AP) -- One of the children Irena Sendler worked to save from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II was among the 400 people attending the premier of a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie about Sendler.

Renata Zajdman, one of about 2,500 Jewish children Sendler helped rescue in Poland in the 1940s, saw the film, "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," last week at its world premier in Fort Scott.

Zajdman said she still feels Sendler's influence.

"Her goodness during a time of evil, effects how I view the world today," Zajdman said. "She worked in a time when murder was legal and rescue was a crime."

The movie, which was scheduled to air Sunday night, is based on Sendler's life. Sendler, a social worker in Poland during World War II, led an effort to smuggle more than 2,500 of Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. The children were given new identities and placed with Polish families and in convents.

Sendler kept a hidden record of their birth names and where they were placed buried in jars with the hope that they would someday be reunited with their own families.

------ Kan. Farmers: Cuba policy shift long overdue,0859

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) -- Jeff Crist still remembers it vividly -- hundreds of miles of rusting railroad track once used to haul sugarcane to processing plants, enveloped by barren land that once produced this Cuban crop.

It looked as if it had been years since the landscape had produced much of anything.

"There was evidence of dairies and poultry farms," Crist said of infrastructure that has been decaying amid the decades-long regime of Fidel Castro and a U.S. trade embargo nearly as old. "It could be such a productive country in terms of production agriculture. But it's fallen into such disrepair. It'll be hard to get it going again."

Crist, a retired Garden City farmer who still has agriculture interests, made the trip in 2003, part of a handful of state agriculture producers who toured Cuba's rural vistas with Kansas State University agriculture economist Barry Flinchbaugh.

He's been curious whether he'd see trade sanctions dissolved in his lifetime -- something he says would help Kansas' agriculture economy.

Now he might.

------ Scrutiny grows on company tax breaks to gain jobs

The time-honored swap of millions of dollars in tax breaks for the promise of thousands of jobs is under more scrutiny as states slash spending to shore up their budgets.

Missouri lawmakers pushing for caps on state tax credits to businesses are holding up Gov. Jay Nixon's proposal to reward more companies that hire employees at a decent wage with health benefits.

"All states are now buying jobs, you have to be in it," said Missouri Sen. Brad Lager. "But we only have a handful of tax credits that have caps."

Last year Missouri spent $170 million on historic preservation tax credits, which are not capped -- slightly more than the state paid out for all of its 19 community colleges.

Ohio is banking on expanding tax breaks for companies that create or keep jobs. New Jersey wants to reward companies with $3,000 for each new employee hired.

Florida, facing a roughly $6 billion budget gap in the coming year, intends to offer loans to small businesses that show potential for expansion.