The 7:06-a.m. broadcast news from Ric Hanson.

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(Radio Iowa) – There are some 24-million hogs in the state of Iowa, about eight times more hogs than people, but two hogs that are new residents of the state stand out and could never be mistaken for any of the others. Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines is now home to a pair of Red River hogs from central Africa. The zoo’s Ryan Bickel says these animals are reddish-orange with very long black snouts and curly tufts of hair at the ends of their ears. “These hogs look very different than what we’re used to here in Iowa,” Bickel says. “They’re completely covered with hair and have a rust color to them with a white stripe down their back. Very interesting looking and surprisingly photogenic.”

The pair, named Shallot and Truffle, came from San Diego and now live next to the rhino habitat. Visitors can identify the hogs individually. Shallot, the male, is three years old and has warts on his muzzle, and Truffle, the ten-year-old female, does not. “They love to dig and root, as you would expect any hog to be able to,” Bickel says. “We actually had to take that into thought as we designed their habitat. There’s actually a fence that’s several feet beneath the surface so they can’t dig their way out.” The main predators of these hogs are leopards — and humans. “How the keepers work with them is the same way we would work with an animal such as lion or a giraffe or a rhino,” Bickel says. “We’re never in the exhibit area with them because they could be dangerous. You don’t think of that when you think of a hog but it’s called protective contact.”

The Red River hogs are most active at dawn or dusk and spend their days wallowing in mud to stay cool and to protect from sunburn and bugs. “Their favorite treats are nuts and meal worms,” Bickel says. “At the zoo, they have a diet of special formulated grains, fruits, vegetables, bugs, eggs, hay and alfalfa, which is similar to what they’d have in the wild.” These creatures grow to between 40 and 50 inches in length and may weigh up to 285 pounds. They’re the only African hog that is fully covered in hair and have no bare skin showing. Zoo officials hope the pair will breed and have piglets.

A man from Promise City, Iowa, died Sunday afternoon, after he was struck by a car in south central Iowa’s Wayne County. According to the Iowa State Patrol, the accident happened at around 12:57-p.m., on Highway 2 in Promise City.

Authorities say a 2018 Kia Forte driven by 25-year-old Page Marie Mitchell, of Seymour, was traveling east on Highway 2 at the same time 67-year-old David Ray Curtis was walking southbound across the highway, just east of Center Street. Once Mitchell saw Curtis crossing the street, she tried to avoid hitting him by braking and swerving to the left, but was unable to avoid striking him with her vehicle.

Curtis was transported by Wayne County Ambulance to the Wayne County Hospital, where he died from his injuries.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Marrow Donor Program, based at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, is marking the 40th year since the first marrow transplant from an unrelated donor there in 1981. Program manager, Colleen Reardon, says they provide a new lease on life for patients. “We treat leukemia, lymphomas, aplastic anemia, sickle cell, all sorts of cancers of the blood-making factory,” Reardon says. More than 900 Iowans have stepped up to donate and save the lives of strangers across the world. She says we each have two sets of tissue types we inherit from our mother and father. Only one in four of our brothers or sisters are usually compatible donors — which is why there’s a need for unrelated donors.

“In society as we have less and less children, as families have less and less children, the need for unrelated donors is only growing,” she says. You can donate via bone marrow or through stems cells — which she says is the most common type of donation. Reardon says technology has led to a lot of changes in 40 years that have helped the process and they can now find a match with a simple cheek swab. She says donors are still needed until research finds new cures. “As science progresses, there are other methods that the researchers are looking at to cure cancer and cure leukemia. And so we will see what the future holds there,” according to Reardon. “But into the foreseeable future, we still need healthy Iowans to step up.”

Reardon says the best way to donate is to go search for “Be the Match” online and sign up on the donor registry. She says survival rates from marrow transplants have increased since they began. “When I first started, the long-term success was 30-35 percent. Today it is well over 70 percent. So, we’ve had tremendous strides in survival rates with unrelated transplants,” Reardon says. She says it is a life-saving experience for those who receive a donation — and a life-changing situation for those who donate. “Our donors are quite amazed when they think that they share their tissue type with somebody they don’t know. They may not share their tissue type with their brothers or sisters probably not their parents — but there is somebody out there — and only they can help them. It’s a really humbling situation.”

Student organizations across the state also hold sign-up events for donors. Reardon says they’ve seen patients who have multiple matches and others who have none, and that’s why it is important to continue signing people up for the donor registry.

It’s been over four days since a fire at a water pumping station near Shelby left more than 1,500 people in Shelby, Pottawattamie and Harrison Counties without clean running water. Volunteers distributed donated bottled water all weekend and on Monday, emergency management stepped up their efforts going door to door delivering bottled water to residents in the village of Corely.

Shelby County Emergency Management Coordinator Alex Londo tells KETV, that bottled water was donated by HyVee and Fareway. Early Friday morning, a fire knocked out a pump in a rural water transfer station. Residents in five rural communities were placed on emergency water shortage status. A smaller pump is slowly feeding the water towers, according to Londo, but a boil order remains in effect until further notice.

Emergency management is leaving extra water at distribution sites in communities. Arrangements are also being made for any livestock producers to fill tanks, especially as temperatures begin to rise. Londo said emergency management is meeting daily with rural water and state officials about the emergency, but it could be days or even weeks before full water capacity is restored.

(Radio Iowa) – Economists from Drake and Iowa State say researchers are on unfamiliar ground as they evaluate how the economy has been affected by the pandemic. I-S-U economist Peter Orazem says after the recession hit in 2008, it took seven years to return to pre-recession employment rates, but this recession is nothing like that.  “This will be the strangest recession we’ve ever had,” Orazem says. “We’re expected within two years of the initiation of the recession to return to the unemployment rates that we had at the beginning and we had a very strong labor market as of February, 2020.”

Drake University economist Bill Boal says there’s no data yet to confirm why so many dropped out of the labor market when the pandemic struck and haven’t returned once businesses reopened. “The labor market is surely the most peculiar thing we’ve seen in my lifetime,” Boal says. “…Why were there so many people sitting on the sideline all of a sudden?” Wage expectations, particularly among blue collar workers, have gone up as pandemic closures ended.

While the overall savings rate has soared, Boal says it’s primarily been among those who had jobs during the pandemic. Orazem warns if consumers start spending what they’ve saved, inflation may rise. “What you hope is that it’s not going to all enter the marketplace at once and you’re going to get this very large surge in customer demand or consumer demand,” Orazem says.

Orazem and Boal made their comments this weekend on the “Iowa Press” program on Iowa P-B-S.

Adair County Sheriff Jeff Vandewater, Monday evening, reported three arrests. On July 2nd, at around 1:20-a.m., 28-year-old Kevin William Wessel, of Greenfield, was arrested for OWI/1st offense. His Breath Alcohol Content tested at .203%. Wessel was released on later that morning on a $1,000 cash/surety bond.

On June 29th at around 1:50-p.m., 38-year-old Christopher Anthony Ford, of Greenfield, was arrested on an Adair County Felony warrant charging him with two counts of Enticing a Minor under the age of 16, for sexual purposes. Ford was released July 1st on a $10,000 cash/surety bond.

And, on June 26th, 41-year-old Nicholas Arthur Hardisty, of Orient, was arrested on an outside agency warrant.

(Radio Iowa) – The northwest Iowa town of Lytton hopes to set a world record on July 26th. Lytton, with a population of around 300, will be the first stop on day two of this year’s RAGBRAI route, as thousands of bicyclists make their way from Sac City to Fort Dodge. Scott Matter, co-chair of Lytton’s RAGBRAI committee, says they’ve done the research with the Guiness Book of World Records team.

“We want to have the largest ever goat yoga class. The current record is 500 people and 115 goats and our goal is to get 800 people and 160 goats, I think,” Matter says, “so that should be a lot of fun to watch.” There will also be hay bale challenge, to see how far someone can toss a square bale. Lytton’s theme for the day is “A Slice of Heaven” — fully leaning into the most popular food item on RAGBRAI routes.

“We like to say it’s the pie capital of America,” Matter says. “We have a group of people in town…who have come together to bake hundreds of pies…and our goal is to raise money for the fire station from all of that.”

Matter, who is formerly of Lytton, now lives in Des Moines and was among the crew who rode the RAGBRAI route Inspection Tour in mid-June.

(Radio Iowa) – July is the last month of what has already been a record-setting fiscal year for the Iowa Lottery. Lottery C-E-O Matt Strawn says people found lottery games a safe thing to do in the pandemic — with scratch tickets leading the way. “It will be a record year for scratch tickets sales, as the Iowa Lottery is on pace to sell 300 million dollars of scratch tickets for the first time in its history,” Strawn says.

Speaking during the recent Lottery Board meeting, Strawn talked about the impact of scratch ticket sales on the bottom line.”Through May, scratch tickets sales were slightly over 290 million dollars. This represents 69-point-seven percent of all lottery sales thus far,” Strawn says.  The sale of national lotto games did come back some after suffering during the pandemic. Strawn says big jackpots in Powerball and Mega Millions that exceeded 700 million dollars earlier this year allowed their sales to rebound in this fiscal year after an historic low performance in the previous fiscal year.

Strawn says the lotto games have not returned to previous levels. “Powerball and Mega Millions sales are collectively 29-point-eight percent ahead of last year’s performance through May,” according to Strawn. “However, despite that year-over-year improvement, both national jackpot lotto games continue to underperform their historic averages.”  Strawn says the poor performance of the lotto games is cause for concern.  He says the national lotto games are the ones that produce the strongest revenue margins for the Iowa Lottery.

Strawn says efforts are being made to bolster the national lotto games with things like expanding the number of weekly drawings.