Creighton University economist Ernie Goss says the Midwest’s manufacturing sector is lackluster while agriculture and energy are slipping into negative territory. Goss blames too much government regulation for the sluggish productivity he’s seeing in Iowa and across the nine-state region.

“You’ve got this bailing out of solar energy companies, the war on coal, all this,” Goss says. “Now, we’ve got a new regulation that if you make less than $47,400, you’re entitled to overtime. These are really bad interferences from the federal government.” Gasoline prices are starting to creep up in advance of the busy travel holiday just ahead, but Goss says pump prices would have to get a lot higher before there’s an outcry.

“We got accustomed to prices between $3 and $4 a gallon and now we’re seeing it much lower than that, depending on where you buy it,” Goss says. “You’d have to see it approach $3 a gallon to get any negative response from the consumer.” The average price for a gallon of gas in Iowa is $2.25, which is up a nickel since a week ago. The national average is $2.30. Goss says the price hike isn’t big enough to have any impact on Memorial Day weekend travel plans.

“The consumer is doing reasonably well, it’s the businesses, profitablity,” Goss says. “We’re in a profits recession now. Profits are negative. The growth has been negative over the last three quarters.” Goss predicts an interest rate hike this summer of perhaps a-quarter percent. Over the next few months, he says the economy is more likely to move “sideways,” not up or down.

(Radio Iowa)

A U.S. Justice Department official is warning on-line predators are engaging in a new form of extortion. Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Duax: “And ‘Sextortion’ is essentially when the offender gets a compromising image or a compromising piece of information about the victim and then threatens the victim with the disclosure of that information if the victim doesn’t engage in sexually-explicit conduct or send him sexually-explicit images.”

In 2014, a 24-year-old Cedar Rapids man was sentenced to 42 years in prison for coercing a dozen girls between the ages of 12 and 15 into sending him photos via text or Facebook and other online sites. Duax says the man then threatened to post the sexually-explicit images he already had online or send the photos to the girls’ parents and friends if they didn’t continue to send him more pictures.

“As a parent you definitely need to know what your child is using on their device, who they’re communicating with on their device and to try to set forth some ground rules for your children when they’re using those machines,” Duax says. “And it’s not easy, sometimes, to have those discussions, but if you don’t, you run the right of being one of the parents of the kids I just talked to you about.”

Duax says U.S. law enforcement agencies investigated 54-thousand reports of online sexual predators in fiscal year 2015, leading to more than 85-hundred arrests. The Cedar Rapids man who was sentenced in that 2014 “sex-tortion” case kept on threatening one girl even after she sent him a text saying she was considering suicide.

(Radio Iowa)

Police in Red Oak, Wednesday night arrested a man on a Montgomery County warrant for 3rd Degree Harassment. 39-year old Richard Allen Straw, of Red Oak, was arrested at around 8:50-p.m. in the 200 block of W. Washington Avenue. Straw was brought to the Montgomery County Jail and held on a $1,000 cash bond.