(Ames, Iowa)  – An SUV that was traveling at a high-rate of speed and passing other vehicles on the left shoulder of I-35 northbound in Ames, Thursday, crossed both lanes of traffic before flipping multiple times and coming to rest in the east ditch. The Iowa State Patrol reports the driver of the 2018 Ford Explorer, 29-year-old Zackery Coltin Harker, of North Bend, Oregon, was injured. The accident happened near mile marker 118, at around 4:20-p.m.

Harker – who was wearing a seat belt – was transported by the Iowa State Patrol to the Story County Medical Center. The crash remains under investigation.

(Radio Iowa) – A man from Mississippi who’s a former Navy pilot has been charged with vandalizing the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s holiday display in the Iowa Capitol. The Iowa Department of Public Safety says 35-year-old Michael Cassidy of Lauderdale, Mississippi was arrested, charged with criminal mischief in the fourth degree and released. The Satanic Temple of Iowa announced early Thursday that the statue in its Iowa Capitol display had been damaged beyond repair. According to a conservative website called The Sentinel, Cassidy beheaded the statue.

Cassidy is quoted on the site saying he did so to awaken Christians to the anti-Christian values that are being mainstreamed. The founder of Turning Point U-S-A, a conservative youth organization, has pledged 10-thousand dollars to support a legal defense fund for Cassidy.

The Satanic Temple of Iowa had planned to take down its display today (Friday), but will leave what’s left in the Iowa Capitol for a few more days.

(Radio Iowa) – The governors of Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas are assessing flood prevention efforts in the Missouri River corridor — and finding progress. Governor Kim Reynolds says levee maintenance and making structures as flood resilient as possible are key. “Instead of waiting for that disaster to hit like in 2019, and then we have no money…and then we have a bunch of money come in and then we’re fixing the same highway structures, the same ag impact that we did prior to that.” Reynolds and the governors of the other three states met yesterday (Thursday) in Omaha. Reynolds says the design and structural performance of 900 miles of Missouri River levees are being evaluated.

“Then grants will be available to the different levee districts to get the levees where they need to be,” Reynolds says. Reynolds says nearly all the levee districts lack the resources to make significant improvements and government funding is necessary. Reynolds and the other Missouri River governors began meeting in the midst of the devastating floods of 2019 and Reynolds says their main frustration at the time was the pace of the response from federal agencies.

“We tend to study things to death instead of moving forward and getting things done,” Reynolds says, “and we’ve seen a lot of progress since that first meeting in 2019 and the way that we’re doing things.” In the spring of 2019, melting snow and rainfall combined to cause the Missouri River to jump its banks and quickly flood vast swaths of western Iowa.

(Radio Iowa) – The head of a conservative law firm is asking the Iowa Supreme Court to find that State Auditor Rob Sand, a Democrat, has violated the state’s public records law. Alan Ostergren, chief counsel of the Kirkwood Institute, asked the auditor for emails related to Sand’s since discredited claim that the governor improperly used federal COVID-19 funds for a public service announcement. Ostergren appeared before the Iowa Supreme Court yesterday (Thursday).  “Who audits the auditor?” Ostergren asked. “Do we have in our law that the auditor is just above examination to make sure he is discharging his duties correctly?”

A district court judge dismissed the case last year, saying the emails could be kept confidential because they’re part of an audit or examination. Iowa Supreme Court Justice Dana Oxley says state law protects information received in an audit.  “For me, that’s really the issue, is how do we decide whether or not something is within an audit when we’ve got an affidavit from the auditor that says this information was received, they identify the dates, they identify specific audit reports and audits that are ongoing,” Oxley said.

Ostergren has been seeking an email chain that includes comments from State Auditor Sand, an Associated Press reporter and a blogger. Sand has said he denied the request because it would chip away at his ability to protect whistleblowers and save taxpayers money.