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KJAN News can be heard at five minutes after every hour right after Fox News 24 hours a day!
Keep up-to-date with Fox News Radio, Radio Iowa, Brownfield & the Iowa Agribusiness Networks!
(Radio Iowa) – It won’t likely make Iowans feel any better about paying more than four bucks a gallon for gasoline, but those record high prices aren’t really so high, nor are they records, according to one expert. Herman Quirmbach, a retired economics professor at Iowa State University, says this week’s gasoline prices are indeed more expensive than the previous highest-ever prices dating back to July of 2008, but he says it’s not apples to apples.
“When you’re comparing prices of products over gaps of many years, you have to adjust for the purchasing power of the dollar,” Quirmbach says. “The dollar back in 2008, which was the previous quote-unquote record, that dollar bought a lot more.” Triple-A-Iowa says the statewide average for gas today (Friday) is four-13 a gallon. Earlier this week, the high prices wiped out the previous high price from 2008 of four-02 a gallon. In today’s dollars, Quirmbach says that four-02 would actually be more like five-28 a gallon.
“If you’re going to make comparisons to what was available in the past, you have to do it on a purchasing power adjusted basis,” Quirmbach says. “On that basis, even with the new figure today, we’re more than a dollar short of what the real price, what economists call the ‘real’ price, of gasoline was back in 2008.” Quirmbach, a state senator from Ames and a Democrat, says multiple factors go into the price of gas, even though it’s often reduced to being a political football.
Quirmbach says, “As long as this war is going on in Ukraine, as long as we are limiting the supply of Russian oil to the West, that’s going to create an artificial shortage and when supply exceeds demand, the markets adjust by raising the price.” He agrees with a statement issued by a Triple-A spokesman this week which said, “There are very few things that a president can do to help lower the cost of oil, and this administration tried to do pretty much everything that it can.”
In a Radio Iowa interview on Tuesday, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, placed the blame of high gas prices on the Democrat in the White House, saying: “I think Congress has set a pretty good policy for energy. This president has screwed it up.”
(Radio Iowa) – Starting Memorial Day weekend, visitors will be allowed back on the deck of the retired Navy vessel named for the five Waterloo brothers who died together in World War II. The U-S-S The Sullivans — a floating museum in Buffalo, New York’s harbor — began sinking in April. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown says the ship was listing at 22 degrees.
“The effort to save The Sullivans and the ship is righted and floating,” Brown says. Crews pumped more than half a million gallons of water out of the ship, removed contaminants and began steam cleaning the ship last week. Buffalo’s Naval and Military Park will reopen Memorial Day weekend. Buffalo’s mayor says the emergency response is complete and the U.S.S. The Sullivans is now upright.
The Destroyer USS The Sullivans, via bufflonavalpark.org.
“A critical piece of naval and US military history that we are fortunate to have in our community.” The five Sullivan brothers enlisted in the Navy in early 1942 and asked to serve together. They were killed about 11 months later when a Japanese torpedo struck their ship. The U-S-S The Sullivans was launched in April of 1943 and decommissioned in 1965. The ship was donated to Buffalo’s Naval Park in 1977.
Anthony Titus
Sheriff’s deputies in Page County,Thursday, arrested 39-year-old Anthony David Titus, of Clarinda. He was taken into custody at his residence, on a Page County Warrant for Domestic Abuse Assault. Titus was transported to the Page County Jail and held on $300 bond, pending further court proceedings.
(Atlantic, Iowa) – Atlantic Fire Chief Tom Cappel, Friday, issued a statement with regard to Tuesday’s residential fire at W. 7th and LOCUST Streets. Cappel said the State Fire Marshal and the affected insurance company determined the fire was caused by an over-loaded electrical circuit, and declared accidental. It began at around 3-p.m. Tuesday, in the north third-floor window area.
Cappel said no one was in the apartment at the time. Smoke coming from the roof was observed by a neighbor across the street, who called 9-1-1. The rental property is owned by Pat McCurdy, was home to eight people in five separate apartments.
Atlantic fire was assisted at the scene by firefighters from Griswold, Lewis, Marne and Anita. The Cass County Fire Association and others brought cold, bottled water to the scene. At one point in the afternoon, fire trucks sounded their horns, warning those inside the home to evacuate due to fears the roof would collapse.
(Atlantic, Iowa) – Atlantic Municipal Utilities General Manager Steve Tjepkes, today (Friday), said a common telephone scam is going on in the Atlantic area again: Scammers are calling local individuals and requesting immediate payment for a past due electric bill. If payment is not made immediately, they claim your electric service will be disconnected.
Tjepkes reminds you, “AMU only calls customers during regular office hours 7:00 am to 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday and allows customers at least 24 hours to pay their accounts during regular office hours. If customers have any questions at all about a suspicious call about your utility service, immediately hang up and call AMU directly.”
(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Atlantic Chamber Ambassadors visited with Talya Kamies, Tierney Tanner and Cheryl Malzer-Kamies, owners of Lucy Mae’s Boutique, on Thursday, May 12th, 2022, to celebrate the Grand Opening of their clothing boutique in Atlantic.
The mother/daughter trio shared that their family purchased an acreage six or seven years ago and renovated the farmhouse into a beautiful boutique. They were running the business out of Talya’s home for a few years and are very happy to now have the space to display all the items and have a professional place to take photos of their merchandise. Talya describes the space as a “show room” due to the majority of their business being conducted through Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Photo/info. submitted by the Chamber
Lucy Mae’s Boutique carries a variety of clothing sizes XS-3XL, jewelry, purses, and bags for women of all ages. The boutique will be open on Saturdays from 9AM-12PM to reach those customers that prefer to shop in person.
Lucy Mae’s Boutique is located at 54166 598th Street, Atlantic.
(Radio Iowa) – An intense dust storm hit northwest Iowa in the Little Rock area late yesterday (Thursday), causing a temporary black out due to the amount of dust in the air. The word to describe this weather phenomenon was first used in the United States in 1972. “It is pronounced huh-BOOB.” That’s Meteorologist Allan Curtis of the National Weather Service office in Johnston. Fifty years ago, Arizona scientists began using the word to describe the dust storms that swept through the Phoenix area. The National Weather Service uses the term, but Curtis says most Iowans probably haven’t heard it because haboobs are most common in dry, arid regions in the southwest U.S. and western plains.
“Areas where typically in large parts of the year they’re very dry, but they can also get very strong storms that can produce extreme winds,” Curtis says. “…It’s quite rare to get it into what you would call the Corn Belt region just because we’re generally not that dry and even when we are dry, we have corn in the ground, soybeans and whatnot and so there’s less opportunity to kick up that much dust.”
An example of a Haboob dust storm
In the 1930s, the “Dust Bowl” did extreme damage to parts of the Great Plains as clouds of dust swept through the countryside. Curtis says it’s hard to tell with 100 percent certainty if those storms were haboobs, but it’s likely many were. “Given all the stories that we know that have been told from the Dust Bowl and what we are able to glean from that, it was clearly an extremely dry decade, not a lot of things growing, so there was going to be ample opportunity for dry dirt, dust, other types of debris to be picked up and carried around.”
A combination of conditions in northwest Iowa yesterday — a strong thunderstorm with high winds approaching dry, barren cropland — produced the atmosphere for a haboob. Nick Stewart, a meteorologist for K-G-A-N in Cedar Rapids, captured last night’s haboob on camera and posted video of it on Twitter.
(Radio Iowa) – More than three-thousand people have signed an online petition, calling for a north-central Iowa high school senior to be allowed to cross the stage for graduation. The South Hardin School District refused to accept Jaidyn Teske as a graduate due to a technicality with her freshman year homeschool credits, according to a petition made by her older brother. Dr. Adam Sellmer, the district’s superintendent, referred to the requirements needed in order to graduate high school at South Hardin. After a petition was circulated in support of Teske, community members questioned why she can’t walk at graduation.
Sellmer noted that every year there are students who do not meet the district’s graduation requirements for a variety of reasons. While those students are not allowed to participate in the actual commencement ceremony, the district still makes every effort to recognize them in different ways throughout their senior year. As far as how colleges handle the process of accepting applicants with outside credits compared to high schools, Sellmer noted its two different sets of requirements. Teske is set to play volleyball at Northwestern College in Orange City this fall.
(Radio Iowa) – If you see green cans of Busch Light for sale, it’s part of a fundraiser sponsored by John Deere and Anheuser-Busch for Farm Rescue. It’s an organization that plants and harvests crops for farmers who’ve had a major illness, injury or natural disaster. Matt Blaylock, a manager at Deere for fundraising events like this, says the limited edition beer cans feature a Deere tractor – the 8RX model with tracks instead of wheels. “It represents modern agriculture, agriculture in the Midwest, in the areas in which we are,” he says, “and also gives more to the general public, lets them see the technology and how modern agriculture is done.”
Deere has supported Farm Rescue since it was founded in 2005. Blaylock says the group has helped more than 850 farm families in need in the past 16 years. “When you’ve got planting to be done or harvesting to be done and in a lot of farm families there’s a main person and if they have an illness or something goes wrong you only have a small window to go ahead and get a crop in the ground,” Blaylock says.
Several retired Deere employees from the Quad Cities are now helping Farm Rescue plant crops for farmers in North Dakota and western Iowa. Deere and Anheuser-Busch will each donate one dollar for each case of Busch Light sold, up to a total of 200,000 dollars.
(Radio Iowa) – About 90 northeast Iowa veterans were flown from Waterloo to the nation’s capitol and back earlier this week and the Midwest Honor Flight organization has a flight scheduled out of Sioux Falls tomorrow (Saturday). “We’ll have the honor to fly 83 veterans out to Washington, D.C.” That’s Midwest Honor Flight President Aaron Van Beek. He says the trip will cost about $150,000. “We estimate it costs about $753 for every veteran that we take along. Now this does not cost the veteran anything, of course, to travel on a day of honor with an Honor Flight,” he says. “Travel expenses for the plane ride, the busing in D.C., their meals — that’s all included in that $753 that we’re fundraising for constantly.”
The Sioux City Muskateers held jersey auctions to raise some of the money for this weekend’s flight. Each veteran on a flight is accompanied by a family member or volunteer who pays their own way. Van Beek says those guardians are an integral part of each Honor Flight. “We do require mandatory training,” Van Beek says. “This is required by the Honor Flight Network, as well as for insurance, but all of our guardians are trained as well as our crew on the proper usage of wheelchairs, how to care for our veterans for the day and just, ultimately, how to take in the experience alongside a veteran.”
Van Beek started the Midwest Honor Flight chapter in Sioux Center in March of 2017, when he was still in college. “I’ll be honest that I did not even imagine that we would do more than two or three flights,” Van Beek says. “We’ve now since taken over 730 veterans over eight different flights.” Van Beek has quit his third-grade teaching job to work full time in organizing flights — for the waiting ist of 850 veterans from northwest Iowa, South Dakota and southwest Minnesota.