Police in Red Oak report a man was arrested Thursday afternoon, on a felony assault charge. 42-year-old Christopher Mickel Mattingly, of Red Oak, was arrested at around 4:20-p.m. on a charge of Domestic Abuse Assault/4th offense, a Class-D Felony. Mattingly was being held without bond, in the Montgomery County Jail.

(Radio Iowa) – By a nearly unanimous vote, the Iowa House has passed a bill that would put new restrictions on food delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash. If the bill becomes law, the companies would face fines if driver are caught eating some of the food they’re supposed to be delivering. Representative Brian Meyer of Des Moines cites a 2019 study that found one in four delivery drivers sample the food.

“That is a pretty alarming number of people stealing fries,” Meyer said, “so I think that it’s important that we have those provisions in there on the food safety.” Restaurants would be required to put food in tamper resistant containers. Delivery drivers would be prohibited from smoking and they could not have kids or pets in the vehicle when food is being delivered. The bill also would force delivery companies to have an agreement with a restaurant before they could advertise and deliver the restaurant’s food. Republican Representative Shannon Lundgren of Peosta owns a restaurant.

“What really isn’t fair is when a national company privates our menus and places them on their website and acts as though they are us,” Lundgren says. “…In January of this year, my menu was pirated and we had to go through some very interesting steps to try to get removed from that website.”

The bill passed the House on a 97 to two vote. A similar bill is eligible for debate in the Senate..

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Senator Joni Ernst says any unused U.S. military weapons and equipment originally intended for use in Afghanistan should be shipped to Ukraine. “I will continue to advocate for already procured programs and capabilities that are programmed, budgeted, contracted, purchased and sitting in containers unused to go to those who need it the most,” Ernst says.

Yesterday (Thursday), the Biden Administration asked congress to approve 10 BILLION dollars more in emergency spending on humanitarian and military aid for Ukraine. Ernst says she’s encouraged by the request, but still reviewing the proposal, which is linked to additional pandemic-related spending. During a speech on the Senate floor yesterday (Thursday), Ernst called for logistical support and medical supplies as well as weapons that were originally purchased for Afghanistan to be sent to Ukraine immediately.

Ernst says the U.S. has an obligation to Ukraine that dates back to 1994. That’s when Ukraine gave up the world’s third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons — weapons abandoned as the Soviet Union fell apart. “The United States intervened,” Ernst says. “In exchange for protection from the greatest super power in the history of the world, Ukraine dismantled and surrendered their nuclear armament entirely. That agreement made the world a safer place.”

Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, Ernst says the U.S. must follow through on that 1994 agreement and provide far more lethal aid to Ukraine.

(Radio Iowa) – A coalition of Iowa cities along U.S. Highway 30 has hired a consultant to study the economic impact of widening the highway to four lanes in congested areas. The U.S. Highway 30 Coalition is hoping a study of traffic flow from DeWitt to the edge of Cedar Rapids and from Ogden to Carroll could convince state officials to add lanes in those areas. Andy Sokolovich is the interim president and C-E-O of the Clinton Regional Development Corporation. He says there’s a lot of truck traffic between Clinton and Cedar Rapids and additional lanes makes sense.

“To insure that these trucks can get to and from at a rapid rate, one,” he says. “Two, lower fuel costs for themselves because they’re traveling at a higher rate of speed — they’re not stopping and idling behind a tractor that’s trying to move from one farm to another. And three, really just to kind of open up the artery of transportation into the city of Clinton and surrounding communities.”

Communities in northern Iowa lobbied for years to make Highway *20* a four-lane expressway from Sioux City to Dubuque. The first four-lane stretch of Highway 20 was completed in 1958 and in 2018 — 60 years later — the project was done. Sokolovich says the state is only considering adding passing lanes every few miles along Highway *30* — and that’s not good enough.

“We’ve seen the economic growth along that project of four-lane Highway 20,” he says, “and we’re looking to see the same economic growth along Highway 30.” The consultant hired by the U.S. Highway Coalition is studying four-lane expansion on a 45 mile stretch from DeWitt to Lisbon and the 44 miles between Carroll and Ogden.

U.S. Route 30 — often called the Lincoln Highway — starts in New York City ends in San Francisco. It enters eastern Iowa at Clinton and exits 330 miles to the west, near Missouri Valley.