(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Senator Joni Ernst has met in person with Israel’s top leaders as they respond to terror attacks that started over the weekend. Ernst says Hamas needs to be destroyed.

Ernst spoke by phone with Radio Iowa from Jordan after spending much of today (Tuesday) in Israel.

Ernst, a Republican, and three Democrats from the U-S House met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the leader of the opposition party in Israel. Ernst says having a bipartisan delegation from the U-S meet with Israel’s leaders sends a powerful message.

Ernst, a retired Iowa National Guard officer who did a tour of duty in Iraq, says Hamas chose this weekend to strike knowing it was a major Jewish holiday and there would be many Americans visiting family in Israel. Israel declared war on Sunday.

Ernst left the U-S on Wednesday, originally planning to attend a conference with Israelis, Palestinians and Arab state leaders. Her first stops, though, were in places like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince this week has pledged to stand by Palestine, dealing a blow to efforts to form a diplomatic relationship among the U-S, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Hamas burst through border walls in Saturday’s attacks and has been firing rockets at Israel’s capital this week. Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has repelled thousands of rockets. Ernst says the U-S must provide Israel with additional intelligence as well as munitions to restock the Iron Dome. Ernst, a part of G-O-P leadership in the U-S Senate, says House Republicans must quickly select a new speaker so congress can act.

Ernst is also calling for freezing six billion dollars of Iran’s assets, being held in South Korea, that were part of a prisoner swamp the Biden Administration arranged between the U-S and Iran last month.

Ernst says the sadness and terror in Israel is palpable. One of the Americans Ernst met in Israel had just attended the funeral of his 18-year-old son’s best friend.

Iowa Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks has been in some of the overseas meetings with Ernst, including a visit to Bahrain on Monday, but Miller-Meeks was NOT part of the delegation that visited Israel Tuesday.

ATLANTIC, IOWA — Officials with SWIPCO (The Southwest Iowa Planning Council) welcome three new staff members to the organization.

Chris Parks

Chris Parks has assumed the role of Communications Coordinator, overseeing community outreach, public engagement, and media communications for SWIPCO and SWITA (The Southwest Iowa Transit Agency). Parks is a graduate of Glenwood High School and has a bachelor’s degree in Broadcasting from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He has a wealth of journalism experience as a broadcaster for 16 years at KJAN Radio in Atlantic. Chris lives in Atlantic with his wife Mandy and their two children Carson and Greta.

Julie Hays is a new Transit Scheduler. Julie joins the team that connects area residents to the transportation they need. SWITA serves eight counties in Southwest Iowa with a fleet of 100 vehicles. Transportation provided includes work routes, student transportation, day habilitation routes for disabled individuals, medical transport, and a range of other services.

Julie Hays

To find out more about the transportation services provided by SWITA you can call 712-243-2518 or 1-800-842-8065 or get more information at www.swita.com.

And, SWIPCO welcomes Barb Boggs as a Grants Specialist. She will work with SWIPCO Disaster Recovery Planning to help with citizen claims and surveying for the agency. Barb will help clients navigate through application procedures and ensure the agency is meeting grant regulations.

SWIPCO and the Southwest Iowa Housing Trust Fund operate a wide range of programs including housing repair, down payment assistance, demolition of dilapidated houses, and lead abatement. SWIPCO also provides building inspection services and currently has more than 1,500 rental units in its inspection program. Boggs will assist with all of these programs and will be an asset to the agency.

Barb Boggs

Boggs has lived the majority of her life in Atlantic and graduated from Atlantic High School. She has a varied background with work in financing, a law office, the postal service, and more.

Iowa State University has landed a four-year, 14-million dollar grant to design a national testing facility that will simulate tornadoes and other windstorms, like the powerful derecho that carved a path of destruction across the state in 2020. Professor Partha Sarkar, interim chair of I-S-U’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, is heading up the project.

The grant will support replacing I-S-U’s current Tornado/Microbust Simulator which is nearly 20 years old. It was also designed by Sarkar. That simulator is housed in Howe Hall on the Ames campus and it’s used to research straight-line and rotating winds, aerodynamic testing, flow visualization and more.

The new, larger simulator will be a one-twentieth scale model of the full-scale facility. It would have the capacity to generate 225 mile per hour winds, comparable to a rare E-F-5 tornado. The current simulator can create winds roughly on a par with an E-F-1 tornado at 80 miles an hour.

If the full-size facility is built, it would allow testing a full-scale house or larger scale models of buildings with large footprints, like retail buildings, shopping malls and hospitals. The grant is from the U.S. National Science Foundation.