Gazette Daily News Briefing, Labor Day Weekend
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Labor Day Weekend.
Your Labor Day weather forecast is fairly simple as forecasts go: it is going to be sunny and pleasant all three days.
According to the National Weather Service the last remnants of rainy Friday will fade away Saturday morning in the form of some lingering patchy fog. After that it will start cloudy, but become gradually sunny, in the Cedar Rapids area with a high near 76 degrees. The low is predicted to be 55 degrees. On Sunday it will be sunny with a high near 82 degrees and a light wind. On Labor Day it will be sunny again, with a high near 82 degrees. Another trend for the weekend will be that each successive day will have slightly warmer nights, and slightly calmer winds.
Collins Aerospace will lay off 37 employees in Cedar Rapids on Oct. 1, according to a notice filed with the state this week. Collins is the largest private employer in the area.
The layoffs will be in Collins Aerospace’s Cedar Rapids-based Mission Systems unit.
The notice of layoffs comes about a month after Collins Aerospace boasted “much, much better” second quarter results than anticipated during its parent company Raytheon Technologies’ quarterly earnings call.
It will be Collins Aerospace’s fourth mass layoff in Iowa since last September. About 180 employees in Cedar Rapids, Decorah and Bellevue have been affected.
Just days after the state approved a hard-fought certificate for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to erect a new facility in North Liberty, the Iowa the Board of Regents has called a special meeting to consider giving the go-ahead to start construction as soon as next month.
The UIHC proposal includes more than the $230 million, 300,000-square-foot hospital that dozens of smaller community health care providers had opposed. Documents made public Friday show an additional 169,000-squre-foot academic, research and clinics building that will bring the North Liberty campus’ footprint to 469,000 square feet.
The additional Building will drive the project’s total projected cost to $395 million — more than UI Health Care’s relatively-new 14-story Stead Family Children’s Hospital total cost after its budget ballooned to $392.7 million.
Late on Sept. 10, 2020, an Iowa City police officer went to the Delta Delta Delta sorority and took a report of a sexual assault the woman said had occurred five days earlier during a party at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity — or FIJI, according to search warrant documents.
Officers never arrested or filed charges against the students alleged to have committed the assault. And earlier this week, an online petition began circulating spelling out the attack and demanding justice.
The petition, which as of Friday had nearly 109,000 signatures, accuse Iowa City police of gathering evidence of a planned drugging and assault — including DNA, videos and photos — but failing to file charges or prosecute.
This week, days of protests broke out on the University of Iowa campus over the alleged incident and a lack of criminal charges since then. The Johnson County Attorney’s Office and Iowa City Police Department indicated after the protests that they are looking into the incident more closely, but no formal changes have been made, yet.
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