Gazette Daily News Briefing, April 30
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Friday, April 30.
All in all the weather is going to be pretty nice again Friday. According to the National Weather Service it will be sunny with a high near 67 degrees. The wind will hover at around 5 to 10 mph. Friday night it should be mostly clear, with a low around 53 degrees.
A Cedar Rapids mother this week filed a lawsuit against a Cedar Rapids police K-9 officer and the city, asserting excessive force was used on her 13-year-old son when he was wrongly attacked by a police dog and arrested in a stolen vehicle incident “simply by virtue of his race and appearance.”
The mother, TonyaMarie Adams, filed an open records petition in November with the police department to get a copy of police body camera recordings and any other audio and video of her son’s arrest last summer. She received video from a body camera recording in response, and shared it with The Gazette after the lawsuit was filed Wednesday.
The lawsuit asserts excessive force was used by officers involved in the arrest, as well as K-9 officer Nathan Trimble and his canine partner; that there was negligence in police canine training, and racial discrimination that amounted to reckless disregard for the rights and safety of others, including 13-year-old A.H., as he is identified in the suit.
In this incident, on Aug. 13 of last year, the teen initially was arrested but after being treated for injuries was released and not charged.
Pointing out that children have been back in Iowa schools for months, Gov. Kim Reynolds’ administration has rejected over $95 million in federal aid intended to increase COVID-19 testing and safely reopen classrooms across the nation.
In an April 23 letter to an official with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, interim director of the Iowa Department of Public Health Kelly Garcia wrote the state will turn aside $95,029,161 it was allocated.
Reynolds was among five Republican governors appearing Thursday night in a televised “Red State Trailblazers” town hall hosted by Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham. On the show, Reynolds touted the law requiring in-person learning and criticized the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden. He and congressional Democrats pushed through the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan this year without the support of Republicans, who said it was too bloated.
“I think he thinks the COVID just started,” Reynolds told the TV audience. “I just returned $95 million because they sent an additional $95 million to the state of Iowa to get our kids back in the classroom by doing surveillance testing. And I said we’ve been in the classroom since August - here’’s your $95 million back.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the nation’s blood supply to critically low levels, and with summer’s typically low donation rates around the corner, blood centers and health care organizations are urging residents to give blood soon.
Canceled blood drives and fewer donors at local blood centers in the pandemic over the past year has left the nation with a severely depleted blood supply. The Mississippi Valley Blood Center, the blood center that supplies many Eastern Iowa hospitals, told the Gazette it’s facing critical strains this week on certain blood types, reporting only a one-day supply of O-negative red cells — the first blood type used by hospitals for traumas and other emergency medical care.
It also reported its lowest supply of other blood types since the pandemic began, including two- to three-day supplies on B-negative and O-positive respectively.
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