VINTON — Broken trees still can be found in this town of 5,000, ten months after a storm packing 100-mph winds blew through in the middle of the night. “We estimate that, maybe, 80 percent of our trees were damaged on July 11,” Mayor John Watson said. A gravel lot in town is filled with [...]

INDEPENDENCE — The late afternoon may be one of the few times the Independence Junior/Senior High School isn’t crowded during the school year. “We have the most students that we’ve had in ten or 15 years,” said Jen Sornson, who is in her third year as the school’s principal. “We have over 600 students in this [...]

IOWA CITY — A downtown Iowa City bar was the scene of a protest last night as accusations of “sizeism” continue to be leveled at the business. Jordan Ramos, 21, a junior at the University of Iowa, says on two occasions, she went to The Union Bar in downtown Iowa City with friends and was [...]

Tammy Prohaska usually does not have to worry about her three youngest children as they walk home from school. Yet after an incident on Tuesday evening in her northeast Cedar Rapids neighborhood, Prohaska, a mother of five, is a bit shaken. “Three of my kids walk home together but, today, I’m going to walk over [...]

Tuesday’s NIT win over Dayton brought 13,000 fans to Carver-Hawkeye Arena, national exposure on ESPN and a sense the men’s basketball program is taking steps to return to prominence. “That is our vision that Carver-Hawkeye (Arena) is going to be like this, night in and night out,” said Iowa athletics director Gary Barta. Even while [...]

CORALVILLE — Two Coralville police officers were injured in a fight early Saturday morning with a man investigators say had been a passenger in a car where drugs and a loaded weapon were found. In a news release, Coralville Police Chief Barry Bedford said at approximately 1:58 a.m., the officers pulled over a car in the [...]

MARION — A Cedar Rapids man is facing multiple charges after police said he stabbed two people at a Marion apartment complex and hit another person with a piece of furniture. Marion Police said they were called about 1:40 a.m. Saturday to 1481 Grand Ave., Apt. 5. When officers arrived on the scene, they said they [...]

Tim Bradshaw knows the perception is out there. “We have twelve years of perception we have to educate people about,” the director of the Eastern Iowa Airport said during a February 8th interview at his office. Bradshaw came to Cedar Rapids from Louisville, Kentucky in 2010.  We sat down with him to go into how [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Matt Macke makes sure to keep his cellphone charged and within reach as he waits. He’s ready for the call when he is feeding his horses, and when he and his wife are feeding their four children. He is hoping for a job offer to arrive. Soon. In late May, Iowa National Guard [...]

A brick that flew through a window in the city’s northwest side injured a 13-year-old boy on Sunday afternoon, according to investigators. Cedar Rapids police say that, at about 2 p.m. Sunday, a brick that had been thrown led to “a laceration in the back of the head” during an incident in the 300 block of [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Long before his usual 9 a.m. start, Jim Hanson unlocked the Maid-Rite West’s doors Wednesday and fired up his grills. But that was OK. He asked to feed President Barack Obama during his Cedar Rapids stop. “My wife and I got here at 5, another girl came in at 6:30 and we [...]

After two winters of being stretched along Interstate 35 between Des Moines and Ames, the cable barriers that are now along Interstate 380 through most of Cedar Rapids faced the first test of winter amid Thursday’s all-day snowstorm. “The DOT made a decision a couple of years ago to have these cable median barriers,” said [...]

Once a property owner is out of the busy rental season for the spring and summer, filling the vacancies of the winter is crucial. Angie Morris has two rental properties in Cedar Rapids that she and her husband work to keep occupied.  With a recent vacancy on a single-family house on the northeast side, she [...]

Tyrone White spent much of his Sunday doing what many others enjoyed: Watching the NFL playoffs. White, however, also spent much of this day wondering why his wife would find a resealable bag containing a small rock and a sheet of paper with words that glorify the Ku Klux Klan. Underneath a drawing of a [...]

The launching of a new anti-bullying Web site could offer the opportunity for victims to be able to reach out and report their incidents. On Wednesday, the site http://www.reportbullyingiowa.com went live.  The Des Moines-based Eychaner Foundation is behind the website. Executive Director Michael Bowser says that “regrettably, it is often difficult for students and parents to find [...]

When Kathy Harwood looks outside her home of the past 31 years, what she sees is far from ideal. “I try not to look outside,” said Harwood, who lives at the corner of 18th Street and 6th Avenue SE in Cedar Rapids, at the eastern edge of the Wellington Heights neighborhood. In recent days, someone [...]

When Jayne Tuetken rolled into work on Monday morning, she had already heard about a string of break-ins. “I already knew about three of the other ones before I came in,” said Tuetken. “I just walked up to the door, saw broken glass and called 9-1-1.” Tuetken is the co-owner of the Martelle C-Store, one [...]

Investigators are awaiting the results of a Monday morning autopsy before releasing more information on a death investigation in Evansdale. Over the weekend, Evansdale police and the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office were on the scene of a house in the 500 block of Evans Road. Evansdale Police Chief Randy Weber said his department is [...]

A plaque sits under the fall leaves at Van Allen Hall, one of the few symbols of an afternoon of terror in 1991. “We all remember in our own way,” said Mary Hall Reno.  “I don’t think any Nov. 1 goes by and we don’t think about what happened.” Reno is now the chair of [...]

The superintendent of the Cedar Rapids Community School District knows that, with making any and all ideas public, opinions will follow. “If we didn’t want the community to be informed, we wouldn’t  have it up on the web,” said Dr. Dave Benson, superintendent, referring to the 20-page document that is part of what the district calls “Visualizing [...]