A suspicious package caused a brief scare at Collins Road Square about midday on Wednesday. As it turns out, the only threat was a little indigestion. “It’s just the leftovers of somebody’s lunch,” said Marion Police Sgt. John Chipman, describing the soft-sided cooler that triggered a response from the Linn County Sheriff Department’s Bomb [...]

Voting on a possible third New Pioneer Food Co-op wraps up Friday. The cooperative likely will announce on Monday whether members approved moving forward with a third store in the Corridor. A positive vote could bring a store as far north as Cedar Rapids or Marion. General Manager Matt Hartz said roughly 40 percent of [...]

Nick Sanders knew his family didn’t live near the water. Lindsey Miller knew the same about hers. That awareness didn’t matter when the Cedar River crested at over 31 feet in June 2008. “I remember I felt really scared because I didn’t know what was going on,” Miller said. “I didn’t want my house to [...]

  My former colleague, Cindy Hadish, has a great gardening and food blog, HomegrownIowan.com. Over the weekend, she posted coverage of New Pioneer Food Co-op’s ongoing vote on whether to build a third store. Cedar Rapids and Marion are possible locations, and member meetings were held in both cities. Please read the whole post, but this excerpt [...]

On a bright and sunny Monday afternoon, Paul Andreasen prepared hot sandwiches and french fries inside his food trailer for a small group of regulars. One of them was Amy Glick of Tipton, who said she always orders the same thing: the walnut cranberry chicken salad sandwich. “It’s delicious,” she said. Glick was getting lunch [...]

Former Marion High School and Kirkwood Community College basketball guard Kasey Semler said via Facebook Thursday night that he will continue his education and basketball career at Northern Iowa this coming year. Semler is recovering from surgery to repair a torn ACL, suffered late in Kirkwood’s season. He said he will be a walk-on this [...]

After deflecting questions about her plans for months, former state Sen. Swati Dandekar is taking the first steps toward running for an open U.S. House seat in northeast Iowa. The Marion Democrat confirmed today supporters are forming an exploratory committee and she will decide before fall whether she will run for the 1st District seat [...]

Upon hearing word of Swati Dandekar’s 1st District congressional trial balloon, some Democrats failed to swoon. Blogging Iowa City Democrat John Deeth wrote about the former state senator from Marion’s prospects beneath a photo of the flaming Hindenburg: The flames in the photo above are just a Zippo lighter compared to the bridges Dandekar burned [...]

Resilience. The word and its other iterations resonate, a conversational refrain in conversations about Beat for Peace. “The big push of it is, we want to create resilient students and children,” said Paul Corbierè, co-creator of Beat for Peace. “People who are not resilient get taken down and there’s a snowballing effect, where resilient people [...]

Users of County Home Road in Linn County should plan for a detour on Sunday to make way for the first-annual Marion Rotary Marathon for Shoes. The marathon race starts at 7 a.m. and the race course starts and ends at Linn-Mar High School, twice taking marathoners onto County Home Road along the way. Linn [...]