DES MOINES, Iowa [KCCI] — Emergency crews responded Friday afternoon to reported problem with an incoming flight at Des Moines International Airport. The report was made at about 1:30 p.m. Friday regarding Allegiant Air flight 2066 from Fort Lauderdale.

Airport officials say an engine failure was reported during descent. Allegiant officials told KCCI the flight “encountered a bird strike” upon landing.

The flight landed safely and noone was injured. Passengers used a ramp to disembark from the aircraft.

(Red Oak, Iowa) –  Officials with the Red Oak Police Department say a woman was arrested on an assault charge, Friday evening. According to the report, 24-year-old Alisha Lynn Seyler, of Elliott, was taken into custody at around 7-p.m. in the 700 block of Highland Avenue, in Red Oak. She faces a charge of Domestic Abuse Assault/1st offense – a Simple Misdemeanor.

Seyler was taken to the Montgomery County Jail and held without bond.

(Harlan, Iowa) – Firefighters from Harlan and Irwin were battling a structure fire late Friday night, in Harlan. According to reports, the blaze occurred at 705 Elm  Street, at around 11:30-p.m. Avoca Fire was requested for mutual aid, as the structure had reached the main part of the residence.

Other agencies assisting at the scene include: The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office; Shelby County Ambulance; Shelby County Emergency Services Association; The Portsmouth, Westphalia and Shelby Fire Departments.

Additional information was not immediately available. (Photos submitted to KJAN by  Harlan resident)

(Jackson County, Iowa) – A collision between two SUV’s Friday afternoon, north of Maquoketa, left one person dead and another injured. According to the Iowa State Patrol, a 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser was traveling north on Hurtsville Road at around 4:30-p.m., when the vehicle crossed the center, divided line, for reasons unknown, and collided head-on with a 2024 Nissan Pathfinder.

One of the vehicles’ occupants died at the scene, the other was transported by air ambulance to the University of Iowa Hospital. The person who died was not wearing a seat belt. The names of the crash victims were not immediately released, and pending notification of family.

The Patrol was assisted at the scene by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, Maquoketa Fire Department, Jackson County Ambulance and Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office.

(Radio Iowa) – A Democrat who represented the Fort Dodge area for 16 years has published a memoir that begins with her childhood during the early years of the civil rights movement and ends with her hopes for the future. Helen Miller was first elected to the Iowa House in 2002 – just three years after she and her husband moved to Fort Dodge. “I had to figure out being a black person with a vastly majority white legislature, how to get things done for my constituents,” Miller says.

Miller was born in 1945 — the day before World War II ended. “There was a racial incident in South Carolina and my mother and father had to leave,” Miller says. “They wound up moving to New Jersey as a result, so race determined where I was literally born.” Miller, who is 79, started writing the book about four years ago, after attending the Okoboji Writers Retreat.

“By the second one I had the idea in my head about what I wanted to do that would make the story interesting and, especially in light of the times that we’re in, relevant,” Miller said. Miller writes about the riots that erupted in her hometown of Newark in 1967 and other milestones in the civil rights movement, including her endorsement of Barack Obama before the 2008 Iowa Caucuses.

Miller, who is an attorney, spearheaded a summit in Waterloo in 2015 that featured bipartisan leaders working on criminal justice reform at the national level.  “There were things that were done because we started paying attention,” Miller says. “And that was a very, very bipartisan effort because, I tell you very honestly, it probably wouldn’t have happened with Koch.” The company was run at the time by brothers Charles and David Koch, prominent Republican donors who supported criminal sentencing reform. After Miller left the legislature in 2019, Republican Governor Kim Reynolds appointed her to chair the Iowa Board of Parole.

The title of Miller’s book is “I Can’t Swim: A Memoir.” Her late husband was a physician in the military and a former commander of the hospital at Langley Air Force Base. He retired from the U-S Air Force in 1999 and the couple moved to Fort Dodge, where he joined a medical practice.

(Radio Iowa) – Our nation’s three most important and revered documents are enclosed in titanium display cases in the rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and they rest on custom-made archival paper created at the University of Iowa. Tim Barrett, the now-retired director of the U-I Center for the Book, says he got the call in 1999 to create the special paper to cradle the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Was that his dream job?

“I and my coworkers were all more immediately focused on, ‘Okay, they want us to go ahead and do this. Now, we actually have to do it and we can’t mess up. This is kind of a big deal,'” Barrett says, laughing. “Rather than letting it go to our heads, we really focused on making the paper and getting it to the National Archives.” The center on the Iowa City campus had developed a sterling reputation for being able to create special types of handmade paper from pure American-grown, textile-quality cotton using a custom-built press.

There was just one problem: “Most of the paper we made was smaller than what they needed. They needed 36-by-36-inch sheets and we didn’t have a press to squeeze out the water from the damp sheets,” Barrett says, “so we had to construct a larger press and build other pieces of equipment to be ready to go into production.” It took a few months to assemble and perfect using everything, and then it was just a matter of minutes to create the paper, which took another day to press and dry. In all, they shipped a few dozen sheets of the additive-free paper to the National Archives, and it should be good for many decades to come.

Photo from the National Archives

The highly-fortified cases were designed with aluminum plates as a base for the precious documents, which were written some two-and-a-half centuries ago on vellum, a parchment made from animal skin. “They wanted the paper in there to provide a lighter background to help illuminate, to help show off the parchment documents, to provide a cushion against the perforated aluminum plate,” Barrett says, “and also to provide a relative humidity buffer within the encasement.” The U-I Center for the Book is dedicated to preserving arts that date back centuries, like bookbinding, letterpress printing, and making paper by hand.

Barrett says it was a tremendous honor to be chosen for this project by the National Archives, which hosts more than a million visitors every year.”I’ve been there several times and it’s well worth a visit because the lighting is subdued and there’s an atmosphere of real reverence,” Barrett says. “You can wait your turn in line and walk up there and get your face literally within inches of these very important pieces of American history.” He says all residents of the state, when they go to see the Declaration of Independence and the other documents, should feel a sense of gratification.

Tim Barrett (UI photo)

“The most important thing for me, and I think for any Iowan who goes to the National Archives Rotunda, once you get in there and you get up close to those documents, if you move your head off to the side a little bit, underneath them all, you can see this white piece of paper and you know, that was made in the state of Iowa,” Barrett says, “and that’s something to be really proud of.” And by the way, the masterminded theft of the Declaration of Independence depicted in the 2004 film “National Treasure” starring Nicolas Cage? Barrett says rest assured, it’ll never happen.

https://uicb.uiowa.edu/

DES MOINES, Iowa (IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH) – Amid allegations of “gamesmanship” and forum shopping, a federal judge has blocked, at least for now, President Donald Trump’s attempt to move his lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and its pollster out of federal court and into state court.

Noting that Trump recently filed an appeal on one specific issue within the federal lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger found that because the president’s appeal had conferred jurisdiction of the case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, he must first dismiss that appeal before voluntarily dismissing the underlying lawsuit.

For now, that means the president and his lawyers are pursuing the same legal case against the newspaper and pollster Ann Selzer in both state court and federal court.

The lawsuit was initiated in December 2024 when Trump sued the Register, its parent company, Gannett, and the Register’s former pollster, J. Ann Selzer, in Polk County District Court. The president alleged the newspaper’s Iowa Poll, which was published shortly before the Nov. 5 election, deliberately overstated support for the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, by 16 percentage points.

Trump argued the poll amounted to “brazen election interference” and violated Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act — claims the defendants have denied.

Attorneys for the president later expanded the lawsuit, adding claims by U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican who narrowly won reelection in the state’s 1st Congressional District, and by Brad Zaun, a former Republican state senator from Urbandale, who lost his bid for reelection.

At the defendants’ request, the case was transferred to federal court. However, a legal dispute soon arose over whether federal court was the proper forum for the case given the fact that Miller-Meeks and Zaun, like the defendants, are based in Iowa.

On May 23, 2025, a federal judge denied Trump’s motion to remand the case from federal court back to state court. In that decision, the court allowed the president to file an appeal on the issue but also ordered Trump to file an amended complaint removing Miller-Meeks and Zaun from the case, eliminating any claims that were exclusive to the two Iowa-resident plaintiffs.