ADEL, Iowa (AP) – The adoptive parents of a 16-year-old who weighed only 56 pounds when she died have been charged with another crime in Iowa: first-degree murder.  Court records show a Dallas County judge on Tuesday approved the prosecution’s request to bring more charges against Misty and Marc Ray. They’re the adoptive parents of 16-year-old Sabrina Ray. She was found dead May 12 inside the Perry home she shared with Marc and Misty Ray and her siblings.

Marc and Misty Ray already have pleaded not guilty to charges of child endangerment causing death, child endangerment causing serious injury and neglect. Police say preliminary autopsy results show Sabrina Ray was severely malnourished. A trial isn’t expected until next year.

A new report estimates 186-thousand middle class Iowa households will pay more taxes under plans that are pending in the U.S. Senate. Mike Owen of the Iowa Policy Project says half of the tax cuts would go to the top one percent of wealthy Iowans.
“Under that analysis those tax cuts to the top one percent would average $50,000 in 2018 alone,” Owen says.

That analysis of the Iowa impact comes from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A senate committee is scheduled to vote soon on a federal spending plan that will lay the groundwork for tax cuts. Seth Hanlon, a tax policy advisor to President Obama, is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “I think what we’re seeing is massive tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” Hanlon says, “and mystery meat for the middle class.”

ReShonda Young is a small business owner from Waterloo whose “Popcorn Heaven” outlets now operate in five locations. She says the business tax cuts proposed by Republicans won’t lower her taxes. “It will not help small businesses,” Young says. “In fact, the budget cuts will hurt small businesses like mine and make us less able to compete with the large corporations that take advantage of unfair loopholes.”

Young is urging Senator Chuck Grassley to vote against the budget plan coming up for a vote in the Senate Budget Committee that sets a framework for the G-O-P’s tax cuts. Republicans say they’re aiming for tax cuts that will stimulate economic growth. The G-O-P also argues it’s impossible to determine the full impact of the party’s tax cut package yet because the details are still being worked out.

(Radio Iowa)

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller says his office has reached a price reduction agreement with a leading manufacturer of naloxone, a lifesaving opioid antidote. Miller, at a news conference Wednesday morning at a Des Moines fire station, said the deal involves California-based drug maker Amphastar. “They have agreed to provide, to all public entities, a six dollar rebate for any doses in the state of Iowa,” Miller said.

The two-year agreement took affect this week. A typical dose of naloxone can cost between $23 and $48. “In the kind of volume we’re thinking about, a $6 rebate will make some significance,” Miller said.

There are more than 900 EMS providers in Iowa. Police officers often administer doses of naloxone too, as they often encounter Iowans who’ve overdosed on heroin or prescription painkillers. Dale Woolery is with the Governor’s Office of Drug Control Policy. “For instance, I’ve been told in Dubuque, so far this year, the law enforcement officers there alone…they’ve had one save a month,” Woolery said. “So, about 10 saves so far this year – those are lives.”

Prices for various brands of naloxone have risen dramatically in recent years along with the increase in heroin and opioid abuse. The Iowa Department of Public Health reports 180 people died in the state last year from opioid-related causes.

(Radio Iowa)

A musical act that defies genre will make its first-ever stop in Iowa next week, bringing an Iowa native home with his high-energy acoustic band. Jared Hall is the keyboardist for Velvet Caravan, a five-member act that was assembled in Savannah, Georgia, from a wide array of musicians — hailing from as far away as Boston, Austin, Venezuela and Slovenia. “We started just kind of molding all of our sounds together playing in this little restaurant in Savannah,” Hall says, “and it’s amazing how it all just started to work.”

The 40-year-old Hall, a native of Atlantic, says it’s the diversity in their backgrounds that makes their sound so strong and unusual. Their influences include: southern rock, classical, jazz, gypsy, Latin and honkytonk. “We began composing and writing our own material and next thing you know, we had what I like to describe as just this gumbo of great sounds,” Hall says, laughing. “To be funny, we kind of describe it as European Redneck Music.”

The quintet features the musicians on: guitar, violin, standup bass, percussion and keyboards. The eclectic sound often draws a very unusual collection of people in the audience, he says, from grey-haired seniors tapping their feet to break-dancing high schoolers. “We see a lot of young people who are really into that kind of music,” Hall says. “There’s a big resurgence right now for gypsy-jazz, gypsy-swing kind of stuff. We see that all the way from someone who might appreciate jazz music, we see jazz fans out there, we see classical music fans out there. We even have quite a little hipster following going on.” (Here’s a snippet of their sound):

Velvet Caravan’s first Iowa show is scheduled for October 12th at the Temple Theater in Des Moines.