DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A group of 40 Iowa business leaders say they will work together to resolve federal immigration problems they say hurt worker recruitment efforts. The Iowa Compact on Immigration includes several chambers of commerce and development group leaders, including those from Ames, Burlington, Des Moines, Dubuque, Iowa City and Muscatine. Greater Des Moines Partnership CEO Jay Byers on Monday noted immigration is a federal issue and argued states shouldn’t offer their own piecemeal solutions.

Iowa lawmakers are considering several proposals, including requiring that businesses use the federal E-Verify system to identify workers eligible for U.S. jobs. It’s often criticized as inaccurate. One of the group’s priorities is to create a system that accurately and reliably determines who is permitted to work. Byers says the message to Congress and the federal government is that temporary visa and agriculture guest worker programs don’t work and the U.S. lacks programs used by other countries to recruit workers and keep them.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Authorities are reopening both northbound and southbound lanes of Interstate 35 between Ames and the Minnesota border but caution that driving conditions will remain poor. Officials first opened southbound lanes at midday Monday and then opened the northbound lanes at about 5 p.m. A roughly 100-mile stretch of the freeway closed Sunday north of Ames due to heavy snow and whiteout conditions.

The heavy snow Saturday into Sunday reached 15 inches (38.1 centimeters) high at Buffalo Center, with 11 inches at Ventura and 8 inches at Mason City. The cold weather has lingered as well. The National Weather Service issued wind chill advisories for northern Iowa, where it was minus 2 degrees  in Mason City early Monday.

The Audubon County Sheriff’s Office released details Monday on numerous recent arrests.

Virginia Katherine Raysbrook of Bellevue, WA, was booked into the Audubon County Jail on February 14th at approximately 4:00pm on an outstanding Audubon County arrest warrant for 13 counts of Violation of a No Contact Order.

(Radio Iowa) — The trip to a northeast Iowa hospital was anything but routine for a pregnant woman who went into labor early Sunday morning. The ambulance transporting the patient got stranded in near-blizzard conditions. With 50 mile-per-hour winds creating zero visibility around 3 AM Sunday, Fairbank firefighters were called out to rescue an ambulance, which got stuck in a snow drift near the Wapsipinicon River. According to a news release, fire crews used tractors and trucks with plows to get to the ambulance’s location.

Once there, they moved the patient to the Fairbank Fire Department’s ambulance and transported her to an area hospital. Firefighters then freed the stuck ambulance. Fairbank fire officials later reported that the woman was in good condition at the hospital.