Gazette Daily News Podcast, February 5 and February 6
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Saturday, February 5, and Sunday, February 6.
We are warming our way back toward freezing again. That sounds counterintuitive, but trust me, it will feel better.
According to the National Weather Service it will be mostly sunny Saturday in the Cedar Rapids area with a high near 28. It will be moderately windy, but that wind should die down by late Saturday, which will be partly cloudy with a low around 17 degrees.
On Sunday it will be mostly sunny, with a high near 32 degrees. On Sunday night it will be partly cloudy, with a low around 5. It will drop back in the 20s on Monday but I am seeing forecasts for highs in the 40s after that.
The final curtain has fallen on the Old Creamery Theatre.
The not-for-profit professional troupe, founded in Garrison in 1971 and relocated in the former Amana Colonies Welcome Center in 1988, intended to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2021.
Instead, the pandemic pause pushed those plans to 2022 — but now, unable to financially sustain its operations, the theater is permanently closing. On Thursday, it returned the building to the Amana Society.
“It’s not a surprise,” Peter Teahen, president of the theater's board of trustees, told The Gazette. “We’ve gone almost two years now, coming up in March, with no productions. We ran out of money.”
Iowa men’s basketball head coach Fran McCaffery will miss Sunday’s game against Minnesota after testing positive for COVID-19, the athletic department said in a news release Friday.
Assistant coach Billy Taylor will serve as acting head coach for the game. Taylor has been a head coach at Lehigh, Ball State and Division-II Belmont Abbey.
Taylor will lead the Hawkeyes against a Minnesota team that has lost seven of its last eight games.
The U.S. secretary of defense said in a letter to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds that the federal Department of Defense has the authority to require all service members — including those in the Iowa National Guard — to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Reynolds, in a statement, said she “strongly” disagrees with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, calling it “unconscionable” to dismiss soldiers who refuse to be vaccinated.
Roughly one in five Iowa Guard members is not vaccinated, an Iowa National Guard spokeswoman said Friday.
Austin’s letter, dated Jan. 27, was in response to a Dec. 14 letter from Reynolds and four other Republican governors.
Nearly a year after the Board of Regents approved spending another $10 to $15 million to replace dozens of damaged or at-risk windows in the University of Iowa’s $392.7 million Stead Family Children’s Hospital, work has yet to begin.
In response to questions The Gazette asked last October, UI officials this week said a timeline for the Children’s Hospital window replacement still “has not been established.”
When UIHC first went to regents last April asking to spend millions on the damaged windows, officials reported knowing about affected windows on levels four and five and on a connector bridge with the John Pappajohn Pavilion.
UI official now say they’ve established a timeline for “the first project to replace the connector bridge” that starts work in September and wraps in June 2023. The delay, they said, is “due to long glass fabrication lead times.”
Officials told The Gazette their budget hasn’t changed, even as the hospital continued to investigate and identify more windows needing a temporary protective film prior to replacement.
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Support for this news update was provided by New Pioneer Food Co-op. Celebrating 50 years as Eastern Iowa’s destination for locally and responsibly sourced groceries with stores in Iowa City, Coralville and Cedar Rapids; and online through Co-op Cart at newpi.coop.
