(Radio Iowa) — Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says extending the 600-dollars per week unemployment benefit is one of the bigger sticking points in negotiations over the latest COVID-19 relief package in Congress. While an earlier pandemic relief bill passed unanimously, compromise is slow with this one, according to Grassley, and the federal jobless payments are a key issue. “Well, we’ve got some people that think they ought to continue $600 even to the end of 2021,” Grassley says. “Then, we’ve got some that think that at four months, with the economy turning around, that we shouldn’t do anything.”

At recent town hall meetings in Iowa, Grassley says he heard from business owners in a range of professions, including in turkey processing, ethanol production and in physical therapy clinics. The chorus is always the same, he says, that they can’t get workers to come back as unemployment pays more than returning to the job. Grassley says, “When you pay people more not to work than to work, and at $600, it’s about two-thirds of the unemployed people getting more not working than working, there’s not an incentive to go back to work.”

In recent weeks, a top Democrat said the extended jobless benefits didn’t need to be 600-dollars a week, so Grassley says his fellow Republicans suggested lowering the benefit to 200-dollars, but that didn’t fly in negotiations either. “It’s a bad government policy and we have to take some guilt for it being in place in the first place,” Grassley says. “We wanted to help people that had dire need but you can’t discourage people from going back to work.”

Under the plan, Grassley says the federal government is essentially “out-competing private employers for workers.” There’s also disagreement over the second round of stimulus checks to most taxpayers. Some suggested one-time checks of between one-thousand and 12-hundred dollars, while Democrats suggested checks of up to two-thousand dollars — per month — but that proposal has no chance of passage.

More State and area news from KJAN News Director Ric Hanson.

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Members of the Walnut City Council will meet during a regular session 5-p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6th at the Walnut Community Center. (You may also join the meeting electronically at https://www.gotomeet.me/WalnutCityCouncil1/august-6-2020-city-council-mtg, or dial-in by phone to 1-408-650-3123, and using access code 401-177-605).

Among the matters on the agenda for their meeting, is:

• Information from Donna Dostal, w/regard to the Pottawattamie County Community Foundation.
• Discussion pertaining to the Walnut Community & Fitness Center, including: Practices – Jr. High & Little League.
• Discussion about the Sesquicentennial Celebration, Fire Dept. matters, and a FY 2020-21 Budget Amendment.
• Following the Budget discussion, the Walnut City Council will act on an expected Motion to Amend the FY2020-21 Budget by $62,000 in the Sewer Fund, with the Public Hearing set for 5-p.m. Sept. 3rd.
• The Council will also hold Zoning discussion, including: the possible appointment of a Zoning Administrator; New building permit application(s), and a Demolition Permit Fee.

(Radio Iowa) — A scientist who helped to build the atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people during World War Two went on to become one of the world’s greatest builders of cathedral pipe organs. That man is the basis for a new work of historical fiction by author Stephen Kiernan, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Kiernan says his book, “Universe of Two,” follows the life of Charlie Fish.

Stephan Kiernan

“Like many of the young men who were drawn in to work on the Manhattan Project, he had no idea what he was being recruited for,” Kiernan says. “When he discovered his job was to help build an atomic weapon and that, in fact, he was to going to build the trigger, he felt a lot of moral misgivings. He wasn’t totally opposed to the bomb but he had a lot of conflict in his conscience about this.”

Set during the 1940s, the book revolves around a love story between a young musician and her brilliant mathematician sweetheart who finds himself a civilian employee of the military in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In our current time of a global pandemic, where social media posts can quickly become volatile, Kiernan says the novel might be a welcome avenue for readers to explore a bygone era. “There are three guys working on the atomic bomb together who have very different ideas about what it ought to be and how it ought to be used and the way that they debate it is, they sit around a campfire and drink beers together and talk about it every day,” Kiernan says. “I think that is an incredibly refreshing contrast with how we conduct our civic dialogue today.”

Months of research went into the book on an array of topics, like how pipe organs function, the soldering of electronics, and the physics and destructive capabilities of a nuclear weapon. During his research, Kiernan met two Japanese people who survived the bombings and he says his studies took several unexpected turns. “A lot of the scientists working on the bomb didn’t want it to be used and they certainly didn’t want it to be used on people. Hundreds of them signed petitions to President Roosevelt and then to President Truman saying, ‘Don’t use this on people,'” Kiernan says. “That was a total surprise to me. I thought they were all kind of gung ho for it.”

The book is being released today (Tuesday), the same week as the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kiernan’s last book dealt with the D-Day invasion, the massive Allied push to win the war in Europe, which had a more definitive focus than the first use of atomic weapons.  “This is an opportunity for us to reflect on something that’s a little less clear cut in terms of the right and wrong of it. This book doesn’t take a strong stance one way or another but there are characters within it who argue for and against the bomb and I think that’s a good way for people to be thinking about it,” Kiernan says. “Even with everything that’s going on in the world right now, it’s never a bad idea to reflect on history and what we can learn from it.”

A former newspaper reporter, Kiernan is 60 and lives in Vermont. This is his sixth book and his fourth novel.

(On the web at www.stephenpkiernan.com)

The Creston Police Department says a local business, The Bookwyrm at 210 N Maple, reported Monday afternoon that sometime between midnight and 3-a.m., Monday, someone vandalized a pop machine at the business. The damage was estimated at $25. And, 45-year old John Neely, of Creston, was arrested late Monday morning in the 500 block of W. Buckeye. Neely was charged with Driving While Suspended. He was subsequently released from the Union County Jail on a $300 bond.

(Radio Iowa) — Two central Iowa school boards are resisting the governor’s order that districts begin the school year with in-person instruction. The Waukee School Board and the district’s superintendent issued a written statement last (Monday) night. It included what was described as “a reminder” to Governor Reynolds and other state officials that state law gives local school officials the power to establish rules for the governance of their own districts. Waukee Superintendent Brad Buck served as former Republican Governor Terry Branstad’s state education director for nearly two years.

Earlier this summer, the Urbandale School District had permission to continue operating its year-round elementary school online, but state officials notified the district students would have to return to the classroom this Friday. Urbandale’s school board voted last (Monday) night to continue online classes at the elementary school until at least August 25th. The board will meet again on August 10th to discuss its “Return to Learn” plans for all students in the Urbandale district.

Governor Kim Reynolds announced last week state education officials will only grant waivers from in-person instruction to school districts in communities where at least 15 percent of residents have tested positive for Covid-19 AND at least 10 percent of students are absent. The statement from Waukee school officials said they will not follow that guidance, but instead will follow other “sources of expertise which indicate more reasonable” standards that should trigger temporary suspension of in-person classes and a shift to distance learning.

The area’s latest and/or top news stories at 7:06-a.m. From KJAN News Director Ric Hanson.

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(Radio Iowa) – Students at the three state schools are starting to move back into the dorms for the beginning of the Fall semester. There are usually no tests given in the first weeks — but Iowa State University COVID-19 health coordinator Kristen Obbink says that has changed this year. “Our students moving into our residence halls and campus apartments will first be getting a COVID-19 test at Lied (Lead) Recreation Center,” Obbink says. She says the testing is being conducted by Iowa State’s public health and command teams.

University of Northern Iowa students have also started moving in and University of Iowa students will start at the end of the week. Those schools won’t be testing students. I-S-U Student Health Center director Erin Baldwin says they felt it was necessary to know where they stand. “Testing is just one element of our strategy, so we felt like since we have a large group of students who are moving into our residence halls it was important to have that testing as we introduce our students to congregate housing,” Baldwin says, “realizing that it is a point in time with testing and it is just one part of the strategy.”

The housing will be limited to two roommates, and they will alternate the move-in times. Associate Director of Campus Life, Pete Englin, says they have a plan for dealing with positive tests. “The first roommate moves in gets their test results — they’re negative. The second roommate comes in gets test results — and it might be positive. The positive person would go to isolation and then the other roommate would go to quarantine, ” according to Englin. “And then we’ve secured a moving team that actually moves whatever the student wants to take with them to either isolation or quarantine. And then when they are cleared to return to their permanent assignment — the moving team would help them move too.”

Englin says they are keeping things very flexible for parents and students who change their minds. He says anyone can cancel their room contract through August 17th without any penalty to give them the choice to do what they want to do. Health Center Director Baldwin says they plan to release testing numbers — much like the Iowa Department of Public Health has on the positive tests. But she says they do not have a threshold number for positive tests. “We do not have any specific drop points where we are going to say ‘yep we are done,'” Baldwin says.

Baldwin says they do have plans in place to deal with what they see in the numbers. “With our main goal of trying to intervene and mitigate those things early — so that we can have the biggest impact on public health — with the lowest amount of impact on our overall university operations,” according to Baldwin. “We’ve really tried to provide a really flexible plan that can be tailored to the situation at hand as we continue to monitor those things over the course of the semester.”

Englin says many of the college kids have been doing the things that college kids do and the measures they are taking at I-S-U will actually be safer for them.

A traffic stop a little before 2-p.m. Monday, in Stanton, resulted in the arrest of a man from southeastern Iowa. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office reports 23-year old Dean Robert Whaley, Jr. from Russell, was taken into custody for Driving While Barred, and Fraudulent use of license plates. His bond was set at $650.