The 22 women competing to be “Miss Iowa 2018” next week will still be evaluated for their appearances in swimsuits and evening gowns. Changes announced this week to the Miss America competition — like the end of the swimsuit competition — will be in place for the NEXT round of state and local pageants. Racheal Vopatek is president of the Miss Iowa Competition Board. “Swimsuit going away is a big change and I think there are a lot of mixed feelings out there,” Vopatek says. “We’re all still processing it.”

Miss Iowa 2017 Chelsea Dubczak of Urbandale says change was needed because the swimsuit competition tended to focus on the “physique” of the women, but Dubczak disagrees with eliminating it altogether. “There should still be some component that takes into consideration the lifestyle and the fitness of the title holder so that she can be a positive role model and a good representative in all facets of life,” Dubczak says.

The Miss America organization emphasizes it is a scholarship competition, not a beauty pageant. Dubczak says evaluating how well contestants speak and how well educated they are is important — but she says with obesity and chronic diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle on the rise, physical fitness is important, too. “Day in and day out, how do you take care of yourself? How do you show people to respect people and admire your body, not just by how it looks, but by how well it functions?” she says.

For the past year, Dubczak has promoted a “Ladies Who Lift” platform, emphasizing weight lifting and other activities that focus on what a woman’s body is capable of doing rather than what it looks like. The opening round of competition among the women vying to be Miss Iowa 2018 starts next Thursday. A winner will be crowned on Saturday, the 16th.

(Radio Iowa)

Here is the latest Iowa news from The Associated Press at 3:40 a.m. CDT

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — For a Republican Party that celebrates capitalism and the American dream of building wealth, the GOP’s initial line of attack against the new Iowa Democratic nominee for governor appears a bit out of character. Fred Hubbell, a former life insurance executive whose family wealth in Des Moines dates back to the mid-1800s, won the Democratic nomination Tuesday. Gov. Kim Reynolds and party leaders were quick to question how voters could trust a candidate who was born into a rich family.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — An Iowa judge has found that Iowa cannot deny two transgender women Medicaid coverage for sex reassignment surgery declaring the state’s policy denying their care violates the Iowa Constitution and the state’s civil rights law. Carol Ann Beal of northwest Iowa and EerieAnna Good of the Quad Cities in eastern Iowa filed the lawsuit last year after their Medicaid provider and Iowa Department of Human Services denied surgery requests recommended by doctors.

CEDAR FALLS, Iowa (AP) — A state audit has found nearly $7,000 in improper and unsupported payments and undeposited collections at the University of Northern Iowa’s Study Abroad Center. The audit found the problems from July 2011 to June 2014, when the program was run by Yana Cornish. Iowa State Auditor Mary Mosiman says the audit shows $5,768 in payments that did not comply with UNI policies and also found $922 in undeposited collections related to air travel costs that Cornish had paid with university card.

ANKENY, Iowa (AP) — Police in the central Iowa city of Ankeny have identified two people whose bodies were found earlier this week inside a mobile home. Police said in a news release Thursday that autopsies reveal 44-year-old Karen Jayne Edsinga and 45-year-old Lonnie Robert Perry died of gunshot wounds. An autopsy showed Edsinga died of a self-inflicted gunshot and that Perry also died of a gunshot wound. Police say they were unable to determine if Perry’s wound was self-inflicted or at the hands of Edsinga.

The board that governs the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa has approved tuition hikes for the fall semester, but not before one board member blasted the governor and legislators for failing to provide more taxpayer support of the schools.  “The worst state government public attack on our three public universities that I can ever remember.”

That’s Board of Regents member Larry McKibben of Marshalltown, a Republican who served 12 years in the Iowa Senate. “We are taking three great public universities downhill,” he said.

For students who are residents of Iowa, fall semester tuition will be three-point-eight percent higher at Iowa and Iowa State.Tuition rates for U-N-I students who are Iowa residents will go up two-point-eight percent this fall. Late Thursday morning, the Board of Regents unanimously approved those increases, along with tuition hikes for out-of-state students attending the three universities. McKibben was the only member of the board to comment before the vote was taken.

“I’m going to vote for this and I’m going to support it, but I think one of the things I’m trying to say to the State of Iowa and the citizens of Iowa is this: ‘We have to do better in the support of these universities,'” McKibben said. A lack of state government support has made this a “very, very difficult time” at the three public universities, according to McKibben. “Great faculty and staff and researchers at our universites are being picked off by states all over the nation,” McKibben said.

The former legislator predicts state support of higher education will be a “major item” debated in the fall campaign. “I understand political talk, because I spent the time doing it, but there’s a difference between talking the talk and walking the walk,” McKibben said. “…If we are going to have economic growth, we have to have economic growth with the great students that come through our universities that stay in Iowa.”

McKibben predicts more Iowa, Iowa State and U-N-I graduates will take jobs out-of-state to pay off the student debt that’s growing because of increased tuition costs. And McKibben warns there will more significant tuition hikes in the future if the governor and legislators do not boost state support of the three universities.

(Radio Iowa)

Iowans are being warned about a couple of new scams that target Facebook users. Jim Hegarty, with the Better Business Bureau in Omaha/Council Bluffs, says to be very wary if you get a message that appears to be from the founder of the social media giant. “First, people are contacted by people claiming to be Mark Zuckerburg or other senior executives, telling them they’ve won a Facebook lottery,” Hegarty says. “Victims are told some fees are needed to deliver the money and victims who pay are told there are more fees needed for clarification.”

There is no Facebook lottery. While getting a message from Zuckerburg should send up a red flag for most of us, we would tend to be much more trusting if the message is from someone we know. That’s the hinge of the other new scam. “Victims hear from a Facebook friend, telling them that the friend has won a large amount of money and saying they saw the victim’s name on a list of winners,” Hegarty says. “Of course, these contacts do not come from actual friends though that gives these a strong aura of credibility.”

That “friend” tells the victim to contact a third party to get their winnings, and again, there’s a fee for getting the cash prize but it never arrives. An elderly couple from Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, was drawn into a lottery scheme and recently came forward. Both were in their 80s and were showing signs of early dementia. Several con artists piled onto the couple over two years.

“They were on the hook with scammers that were working them from one end of the country to the other,” Hagerty says. “All kinds of reasons why they could never deliver the winnings. Over the course of those two years, they sent over $150,000 in wire transfers. They ended up losing essentially everything. Their life savings were gone.”

Nationwide last year, the BBB took 150-thousand complaints from consumers reporting scams. The estimated loss to victims is 117-million dollars, but Hegarty says that amount could be ten times higher as many people don’t report being ripped off.

(Radio Iowa)

SOME of the 20-thousand thousand residents and businesses in southwest Iowa that have been without drinking water for the past six days may get clean water in their taps this weekend. New “membranes” used to filter water supplied by the Southern Iowa Rural Water Association have been installed. Dan McIntosh, the utility’s general manager, says the water treatment system got back up and running at 11:30-p.m., Wednesday.

“We are producing good water at the treatment plant, but as of this (Thursday) morning that water hadn’t even left the treatment plant property because we had to fill up the clear wells and everything,” McIntosh says, “but hopefully this morning, sometime today, we’ll be getting good water into the Creston area.” The two water towers in the city of Creston are being drained to make room for the clean water.

“We’ve got the east tower drained and so the minute we get good water, we’ll start filling that because we didn’t want to mix good and bad water…When we’ve got water in it, we’ll get water flowing out to the west tower. We’ll take it out of service and fill it with good water,” McIntosh says. “And then, after that, you’re probably going to see a lot of flushing because once we have our towers filled with good water, the City of Creston can start flushing the city.”

McIntosh isn’t sure how long that will take, but he indicated it will probably be sometime this weekend. He says they will know when clean water has made its way through the system.  “We’re able to tell the good water from the bad water, basically, with fluoride,” McIntosh says. “We shut off the fluoride when this first happened.”

Fluoride is now being added to the “clean” water that’s been sent into the system. Water samples will be flown to a lab in Storm Lake to determine when each water tower in the system is providing clean water that may be used for drinking, cooking and brushing teeth. McIntosh is asking customers in Creston not to over-use water once the all clear is given.

“Such as washing the car or watering the lawn or whatever because the treatment plant is only at half capacity,” McIntosh says. “We need all the water we can to take to the other communities so we can get them off this drinking water advisory, too.”

While Creston is the largest community on the system, customers in nine counties are waiting, too. A few restaurants and bars closed during the outage, while many limited their food offerings. Casey’s stores in the area quit making pizza, for example. Businesses like the egg processing plant in Lenox that must have potable water to operate have had to furlough workers and wait for service to be restored.

(Radio Iowa)