(Creston, Iowa) – The Creston Police Department reports six arrests took place between last Thursday (Oct. 23rd) and Sunday (Oct. 26th). Most recently:

At around 1:20-a.m., Sunday, 18-year-old Adrian Michael Lillie, of Creston, was arrested for Driving Under Suspension – Driving While License Denied, Susp, Cancelled or Revoked. Lillie was transported to and held in, the Union County Jail.

Saturday afternoon, Creston Police arrested 43-year-old Charles Edward Keeton, of Creston. Keeton was arrested on an outstanding warrant for original charges that include two counts of Possession on Controlled Substance – 2nd Offense.

Friday evening, 21-year-old Angel Marie Egginger, of Creston, was arrested for Theft in the 3rd Degree. Egginger was transported to and held at the Union County Jail.

And, authorities said there were three separate arrests in Creston last Thursday:

• 52-year-old Jason Eugene Steiner, of Creston, was arrested (temporarily detained) Thursday evening, but then cited and released from the scene on a promise to appear at his residence. He was charged with Possession of Controlled Substance – 3rd or Subsequent Offense.
• Thursday afternoon, 35-year-old Clinton Earl Humphreys, Jr., of Creston, was arrested (temp. detained) and then cited, for allowing an animal to run at-large. He was released on a promise to appear at his residence.
• And, just before 5-p.m., Thursday, Creston Police arrested 51-year-old Dwain Michael Ripperger, of Afton, for Driving While Barred, and Operating without Interlock. Ripperger was transported and held at the Union County Jail.

(Radio Iowa) – The 100th pheasant season opened Saturday in Iowa for a sport that Iowa D-N-R wildlife biologist Todd Bogenshutz says had a humble start. The first pheasants were released from William Benton’s wild game farm near Cedar Falls in 1901 when a storm wrecked their pen. The bird population continued to grow to a point where the State Conservation Commission got complaints of crops being damaged and started to take action.”Game wardens at the time we’re asking land owners to pick up wild eggs in the field or trap wild pheasants in1925, with 60-thousand eggs and like seven-thousand wild birds that were picked up and delivered to other areas of the state without pheasants,” he says. The state also started the first pheasant hunt.

“Maybe 75-thousand people participated in that first season in 1925. It was 13 counties in north-central Iowa,” Bogenschutz says. “It was a three-day season, you could only hunt from 8:00 a-m to noon, and that was a three rooster bag limit.” Bogenschutz says they didn’t have any survey back then but he guesses around 250-thousand birds were taken. Bogenschutz says there weren’t large mechanized farms with fence row to fence row planting back then, and the landscape was perfect for pheasants to thrive. “Half the ag landscape either being small grains or hay or pasture, and then corn was the major crop,” he says. “The other crops besides the small grains were, you know, people were growing beets and sweet clover for seed, and a lot of things that you don’t see anymore today. But yeah, that combination of small fields and that much grassy cover. obviously grew a lot of pheasants.”

Surveys found hunters taking one million or more birds. Bogenschutz says soybeans started becoming really popular in the 60s and more so in the 70s and that led to a big decline in small grains and hay.  “Like from the mid 1950s to about 1980. And so now we’re kind of a corn soybean rotation instead of a corn old hay rotation, so that has impacts on the number of birds that we could grow,” he says. The farm crisis of the 1980s led to the creation of the Conservation Reserve Program that paid farmers to take less desirable land out of production, creating more grassland. “That was a big boon for pheasants and I on our harvest again approached. You know one-point-two to one and a half million birds,” he says.

Weather has been the other factor that has impacted the pheasant season. Bogenschutz bad winters and springs from. 2007 to about 2011 sent bird numbers way down. “That was a very unique time frame for us there and it really drove our populations down. We’ve kind of been on an upward trend since then and Mother Nature has been relatively cooperative to us,” Bogenschutz says.

The 100th season started Saturday and will run through January.

(Radio Iowa) – At least one Iowa-based bank is telling its customers they can no longer get rolls or boxes of pennies, and checks that don’t end in a zero or five will have to be deposited or reissued. This follows an order from President Trump that the U-S Treasury stop making pennies. Adam Gregg, president and C-E-O of the Iowa Bankers Association, says the government is expected to quit producing new pennies for circulation in early 2026, but Iowa banks are already feeling the impact. “It’s going to be very difficult — in some cases, in some places — for banks to be able to access the penny, which means it may be difficult for businesses and consumers in those areas to do that,” Gregg says. “What’s tricky about it is, there’s kind of some randomness to when a distribution location may run out.” Gregg says many other countries have gone through this process of eliminating a small form of currency, and while there may be some bumps along the way, he trusts it will eventually lead to a streamlining of cash transactions.

Still, Gregg says the I-B-A and similar organizations in other states are asking banking regulators and Congress to provide more guidance on how the elimination of pennies will work.  “I think there’s going to be uneven access to pennies here for a while as this process plays out,” Gregg says. “I think what the Federal Reserve is finding is that while the decision was made to end production, the way it’s being implemented is restricting its circulation, perhaps more than they intended earlier on because the penny is still legal currency.” Gregg says it makes sense, with an S, to stop making cents, with a C, as one report shows the U-S Treasury lost more than 85-million dollars on penny production last year alone.

“It costs between three-and-a-half to to four cents and make one penny, which of course is only worth one cent,” Gregg says, “so it really does make sense from a government efficiency perspective, from a deployment of resources perspective, to end the production of the penny.” Gregg, who served as Iowa’s lieutenant governor until September of 2024, says businesses across Iowa may soon have to alter their pricing structure, adjusting prices to end in either a zero or a five. “What’s probably going to happen, and you’re going to start to see businesses doing this, they’ll start rounding to the nearest nickel and display some policies,” Gregg says. “This will be for cash transactions only. Frankly, any more, most transactions are happening electronically or with cards, but many people do still choose to use cash.”

A federal study finds only around 16-percent of U-S transactions now rely on cash, the rest are electronic — though some industries still rely on coins, like vending machines and laundromats. Coins have been discontinued in the U-S before, as recently as 2011 with the suspending of production of the dollar coin, and throughout history, as far back as 1857, when Congress ordered the end of the half-cent coin.

(Radio Iowa) – A top leader in the U-S House is urging Iowa Republicans to stay engaged to ensure G-O-P candidates in competitive races win in 2026. All four Iowans serving in the U.S. House today are Republicans — but Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer notes that at this time five years ago, the Iowa delegation was split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats.

“It wasn’t that long ago that didn’t have all of this wonderful red that you see across Iowa…The worst thing you can do is just sit back on your laurels,” Emmer said. “…You win because everybody grabs ahold of the rope and does their part. Everybody’s got to be pulling every day.” Emmer, the assistant majority leader in the U.S. House, was the keynote speaker at a Friday night fundraiser for Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

“It’s great that all of you are in this room, but you’ve got to keep reminding Republicans: ‘Yeah, we hold it all right now, but we could lose it all tomorrow,'” Emmer said. “Republicans have a tendency that when they win they suddenly say, ‘All right, we’ve got it. It’s good,’ and they don’t show up. This time we cannot take that attitude.” Miller-Meeks won in 2020 by just six votes. Last year, her margin of victory was 800 votes.

She says Democrats have already spent two-point-eight MILLION dollars campaigning against her this year. “But we’re still standing. We’re still going and we are never going to give up. We never back down. I’m like the defensive line of the Iowa Hawkeyes,” Miller-Meeks said, to chcers. “Don’t come at me. Don’t after my family. Don’t come after my district.” Miller-Meeks faces a repeat challenge from fellow Republican David Pautsch, who finished 12 points behind Miller-Meeks in the 2024 G-O-P primary.

Three Democrats are running in the district, including Christina Bohannan of Iowa City, who has run against Miller-Meeks twice before.

(Lee County, Iowa) – Two adults and three children were injured during a rollover accident Sunday morning, east of Swisher, in eastern Iowa. All of injured, including the driver, were from Union Grove, Alabama.  The Iowa State Patrol reports a car driven by 29-year-old Amanda N. Hufnagle, was traveling north on Highway 27 (The Avenue of the Saints) at around 9-a.m., when the car drifted onto the left shoulder of the road. Hufnagle over-corrected, causing the car to slid across the northbound lanes before it entered the east ditch. The vehicle then rolled-over and came to rest on its wheels,

A juvenile passenger in the car  was ejected from the vehicle. The injured included the driver, 32-year-old Nathan T. Oden, an 11, five and 3-year old juveniles. All were transported by ambulance to the hospital in Fort Madison.

The crash remained under investigation.

(Pottawattamie County, Iowa) – An adult and a child were struck and killed by a pickup struck as they stood in the median off of Interstate 880 Sunday night. The Iowa State Patrol reports 27-year-old Til Baswa and a 2-year-old, both from Des Moines, were in the median because their SUV had struck a deer and became disabled in the middle of the roadway.

27-year-old Brody Barrier, of Neola, was traveling eastbound on I-880 in a pickup truck at around 7-p.m., when he saw the disabled SUV in the traveled portion of the road and swerved to avoid hitting it. When he took evasive action, his pickup truck entered the median and struck the two pedestrians before coming to rest in the median.

Baswa and the juvenile died at the scene. The driver of the SUV (which was not hit), was not injured. He was identified as 47-year-old Om Neupane, of Des Moines.

The Patrol was assisted at the accident site by the Pott. County Sheriff’s Office and Iowa DOT personnel.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – Sheriff’s officials in Montgomery County report a traffic stop late Saturday night near Villisca, resulted an arrest. Authorities say 54-year-old Pedro Quintanilla-Flores, of Lenox, was taken into custody at around 10:10-pm near Highway 71 and 250th Street, for Driving While Barred – An Aggravated Misdemeanor. Quintanilla-Flores was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $2,000 bond.

(Clarinda, Iowa) – The Page County Sheriff’s Office reports the Page County Communications Center received a call a little after 8-pm Friday, about a person who allegedly fired a shotgun at his neighbor. Deputies from the Page County Sheriff’s Office, Adams County Sheriff’s Office, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, Taylor County Sheriff’s Office, Fremont County Sheriff’s Office, Clarinda Police Department, Red Oak Police Department, Iowa State Patrol and Clarinda Regional Health Center EMS responded to the scene at 112 2nd Street in Hepburn, Iowa.

Pictured: Michael Lee Rose Sr (Fremont County Sheriff’s Office photo)

After a short standoff Michael Lee Rose Sr. was taken into custody. He was transported to the Page County Jail where he was booked in. Lee was charged with two-counts possession of offense weapon by a prohibited person, intimidation with a dangerous weapon, going armed with intent, and possession of a short- barreled shotgun.

“A charge is merely an accusation and that the defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.”

(Radio Iowa) – Iowans are being warned about a new type of scam that might sound like Halloween fun, but it’s actually the first step toward having your identity stolen. Khesha Duncan, with the Better Business Bureau, says what’s known as “ghost tapping” can be frightening — to your personal finances.

“It’s actually a type of scamming that takes advantage of tap-to-pay credit cards and mobile wallets,” Duncan says. “Scammers will purchase a tap machine. If someone doesn’t have an RFID wallet or sleeve for protection, it will allow that person to just bump into you and scan your credit card.” Duncan says ghost tap scammers can use these portable machines to steal your credit card information, often in crowded places.

“Like festivals or flea markets or even concerts,” she says. “They want to get in places where they can bump into people, and it’s very, very scary. You’re much more vulnerable, so you need to be very careful about that.” As technology advances, so do the criminals, and Duncan says Iowans need to be vigilant with their personal financial data.

“If you’re in a high traffic area, even in the store, you might consider just going ahead and inserting your card or using the swipe feature for your card,” she says. A little caution can go a long way in avoiding a costly scam, Duncan says. She recommends using the Better Business Bureau’s Scam Tracker, a free tool that helps Iowans spot and report suspicious activity.

https://www.bbb.org/scamtracker