The former president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau has been honored by another state agriculture group.

The Nebraska Corn Growers Association gave Keith Olsen its Golden Ear award to recognize everything he has done for agriculture.

Olsen, of Grant, led the Farm Bureau for nine years before deciding to step down last year.

The Corn Growers’ Carl Sousek says Olsen had an extremely positive impact on agriculture during the time that he served the state.

Olsen’s family farms in Perkins County and raises wheat, cord and dry peas.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The question surfaces each time a mass murder unfolds: Will this one change the political calculus in Washington against tougher gun control?

The answer was “no” after the Virginia Tech killings, the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords, the Colorado movie-theater attack, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shootings, and more.

But now?

The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., stands as a possible tipping point after Washington’s decade-long aversion even to talking about stricter gun laws.

President Barack Obama says it’s time for the country to come together and “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

It remains to be seen whether Sandy Hook will break the usual cycle of universal shock fading into political reality.

What do YOU think? Is Gun Control the answer? Or is the problem deeper than that? Let us know!

 

[poll id=”55″]

Backers of new laws that legalized marijuana in Washington and Colorado were cautiously optimistic after President Barack Obama said Uncle Sam wouldn’t pursue pot users in those states.

Following the November votes in Washington and Colorado the Justice Department reiterated that marijuana remains illegal under federal law, but had been vague about what its specific response would be.

In a Barbara Walters interview airing Friday on ABC, President Barack Obama said: “It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view” to focus on drug use in states where it is now legal.

Marijuana activists were relieved at Obama’s comments, but had questions about how regulation will work. They said even if individual users aren’t charged with crimes, marijuana producers and sellers could be subject to prosecution, civil forfeiture and other legal roadblocks.

The company that owns a luxury jet that crashed and killed Mexican pop superstar Jenni Rivera is under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

It has had two planes seized by the agency this year.

DEA spokeswoman Lisa Webb Johnson confirms the planes owned by Las Vegas-based Starwood Management were seized in Texas and Arizona. She declined to discuss details.

The man widely believed to be behind the aviation company is an ex-convict named Christian Esquino who has a long and checkered legal past, including convictions for fraud, one as part of a sweeping drug investigation in Florida in the late 1980s.

The 43-year-old California-born Rivera died when the plane she was traveling in nose-dived into the ground while flying in Mexico Sunday morning.

 

A California appellate court has upheld a Santa Barbara judge’s order saying the Boy Scouts of America must surrender decades of confidential files detailing alleged child sex abuse.

A Scouts spokesman told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that the organization will appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

A lawsuit alleges that a local Scouts official tried to keep a boy’s mother from reporting his 2007 abuse by a volunteer leader to police. The youth group denies the allegations.

In January, a Santa Barbara judge ordered all files since 1991 be turned over to the boy’s lawyers, but not the public.

The order involves different files than those made public in October by order of the Oregon Supreme Court. Those files ranged from 1959 to 1985.

New forecasting methods are helping Nebraska officials anticipate when they are at risk of a water shortage in the Republican River basin.

Regulators with the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources say the techniques they’ve used have evolved since 2007, when a state law was passed to require closer scrutiny of river flows and water storage in reservoirs.

The computer models are crucial to helping Nebraska stay in compliance with the Republican River Compact, a legally binding water-sharing agreement with Colorado and Kansas.

Nebraska Department of Natural Resources deputy director Jim Schneider says that, without the model, state regulators would have to be overly conservative with water usage in years when water is more abundant.

The forecast is predicting that Nebraska will face a water shortage next year.

Denver police say four people were set on fire during an attack at a home in the northwest part of the city.

Police spokesman Sonny Jackson says two men showed up at the front door at about 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Some words were exchanged, and a woman who answered the door was sprayed with a flammable liquid from a pump bug sprayer and set afire. Three other adults in the home also were sprayed with flammable liquid and set afire.

The woman suffered serious injuries and was transported to a hospital, while the other three suffered minor injuries.

Jackson says the matter is under investigation and a motive had not yet been determined.

The Denver Post reports the suspects were still at large.

The U.S. Geological Survey says a large earthquake has struck in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California and Mexico.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.4, was recorded at 2:36 a.m. (1036 GMT) Friday, 163 miles (262 kilometers) south southwest of the California city of Avalon and 167 miles west southwest of Rosarito, Mexico.

It was at the relatively shallow depth of 6.3 miles (10.1 kilometers).

No tsunami warning has been issued.

Anti-virus software founder John McAfee is holed up in Miami after weeks of evading Belizean authorities who want to question him in a homicide.

Shortly after McAfee arrived Wednesday evening on a flight from Guatemala, he announced on his website that he had alighted at a hotel in the city’s swank South Beach neighborhood.

McAfee was deported from the Central American country after sneaking in illegally. He crossed the border from Belize, where police want to question him in connection with the death of a U.S. expatriate who lived near him on an island off Belize’s coast.

McAfee says he did not kill the neighbor and feared his own life would be in danger if he turned himself in to Belizean authorities. He has not been charged with a crime.