Red Oak Police, Saturday, arrested a Shenandoah woman on a warrant for Simple Assault. 21-year old Alexis Cheyenne Straw was taken into custody at around 2:40-p.m. in the 1000 block of E. Coolbaugh Street. She was brought to the Montgomery County Jail and held on a $300 bond.

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Officials in Iowa City are reminding residents to compost their fall pumpkins and leftover Halloween jack-o-lanterns instead of trashing them. To do this, residents are asked to put pumpkins with yard waste collection, which is composted.

Officials say to compost, remove any candles or lights from inside pumpkins and place them in the organics container, or in a brown paper yard waste bag. Then set it at the curb for normal collection. Residents are limited to 50 pounds per cart or bag.

Residents who do not receive curbside services can take pumpkins at no cost to the City’s compost facility located at the Iowa City Landfill and Recycling Center.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Nebraskans and Iowans are being reminded to set their clocks back an hour before going to bed tonight (Saturday). Standard time returns this weekend at 2 a.m. Sunday. The change means most Americans will get an extra hour of rest, but those working overnight shifts might toil an hour longer. It also means some will forget to change their clocks, and show up early for church or other events on Sunday.
Daylight time returns to Nebraska and Iowa in March. Not everyone in the United States makes the switch from standard time. The exceptions are Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

(Radio Iowa) — Seven Iowa communities are ranked among the “50 Best Mid-Size Cities to Live In,” according to U-S-A Today, and one northwest Iowa city is in the top ten. Attributes include things like safe streets, available jobs, transportation options and cultural attractions. Le Mars is listed as number-seven and Mayor Dick Kirchoff calls it a “high honor” for the community. He says the report specifically mentions affordable housing rates as a major factor for Le Mars’ high ranking. Kirchoff says, “Housing is particularly inexpensive with the typical household spending about $8,124 a year, about 4,000 less than the average annual housing cost nationwide.”

The mayor predicts Le Mars’ high ranking may help with the town’s economic development plans, though he says their biggest obstacle is finding people to fill jobs. “One of our challenges is to get enough workforce personnel, particularly our industries, for them to be able to expand and do what they want to,” Kirchoff says.

Hand-in-hand with workforce shortage issues are housing shortage issues, and the mayor says they’re working on that. “Just within this last year, we were fortunate enough to find developers and our local builders to put up 91 apartments or townhouses,” he says, “and we built about 19 or 20 brand new homes here in town.”

Most of those new dwellings are already filled, he says, with 85-percent of the residents being new in town. Other Iowa cities on the U-S-A Today “Best” list include: Carroll at #11, Johnston at #22, Pella at #23, Spencer at #29, North Liberty at #39 and Storm Lake at #47. Overall, the top three towns listed are: Perryton, Texas at #3, Mandan, North Dakota at #2, and West University Place, Texas at #1.

Republican Congressman Steve King is disputing his Democratic opponent J.D. Scholten’s assertion that King’s views on many issues, including immigration, are out-of-step with fourth district voters. “He is the antithesis of the values of this district,” King says, “and I happen to embody them and that’s a matter of record, not a matter of conjecture or opinion.”

Earlier Friday, Scholten said King’s stand on immigration is “10 miles down the road” from most Democrats and Republicans. “First thing I thought when I heard that was: ‘There’s Steve King…standing right shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump, who by the way borrowed my immigration policy when he came to Iowa to run for president,” King says. “…We sat at his desk in the Oval Office just a couple of weeks ago and agreed how we were going to move them.”

And King — who has sponsored bills in congress that would end “birthright citizenship” — points to Trump’s recent comment that he’d issue an executive order to end citizenship for babies born to parents who are in the country illegally. Scholten also has said the VISA guest worker program must be revamped so businesses, like the pork processing plants in northwest Iowa, can hire more workers. King says the border must be secured before those kind of issues are discussed in congress.

“The employers, they knew what the demographics were when they built these places,” King says. “I want to help them as much as I can, but they invested their capital and they shouldn’t be coming to congress saying, ‘Oh, whoops. I need cheap labor. Please change the laws.'” King says his evaluation indicates there are more than 100 million people already here who could or should be working.

“We need to put more Americans back to work. They’re sitting there right now, drawing down welfare checks. We’re borrowing money from China to pay people not to work and I’ll say short-term, narrow-minded people just want to take a look at how do we solve this problem in the here and now, real quick and real cheap,” King says. “You know, one thing that’s happening today is this tight labor supply is moving wages and benefits up. That’s a good thing because it broadens our middle class.”

King, who is recovering from laryngitis, spoke by phone with a reporter from Radio Iowa, Friday afternoon.