A Senate subcommittee advanced a measure Tuesday to remove the state requirement to maintain a State Historical Society of Iowa research center in Iowa City — a point of litigation as the state has already moved to close the facility. SSB 3033 strikes the state requirement for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services to maintain […]
Eastern Iowa Community/News
Posted inCommunity/News
ICE legal observer training draws overflow crowd in Iowa City
“We are all here because we want to know what to do when ICE shows up in our communities,” Alejandra Escobar told the hundreds of people gathered for the Community Defense and Legal Observer training session Escucha Mi Voz Iowa (EMV) held in Iowa City on Saturday. Escobar is an organizer with EMV, a nonprofit […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Judge orders release of ICE detainee in Muscatine County Jail who faces capture, torture if deported
A federal judge has ordered the Muscatine County Jail to release an ICE detainee who had been incarcerated for almost a year after a judge ruled in his favor on an asylum request. Court records indicate Jose Yugar-Cruz, 36, entered the United States in July 2024 after fleeing his home country of Bolivia. In court […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘Fear travels fast,’ but didn’t stop hundreds in Iowa City from protesting ICE, remembering Renee Good on Sunday
Despite freezing temperatures on Sunday, hundreds gathered on the University of Iowa Pentacrest and marched to the Ped Mall for a rally in response to the killing Renee Nicole Macklin Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis four days earlier. Good was serving as a legal observer of ICE and Border Patrol agents sent to […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Petition to reverse closure of Iowa City archives rejected as state defends against lawsuit, lawmakers
As 2025 was drawing to close, the Iowa Department of Administrative Services (DAS) finally issued its response to a petition submitted at the end of October that asked the department to reverse its decision to close the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) research center in Iowa City. As expected, DAS rejected the request in […]
Posted inCommunity/News
A fashionable writer from Iowa City inspired silent films and tabloid news
The paths in Hickory Hill Park were covered in leaves, and Oakland Cemetery was full of deer — whole families, plodding in the grass, lying down — when my wife and I began our search. We’ve walked through there so many times, but coming with a mission, it seemed that we’d hardly seen any of […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Your Village: Why is there a truck driving around with a big image of Rep. Miller-Meeks as the Grinch?
Last night I saw a truck with a light-up display of Mariannette Miller-Meeks as a green-faced Grinch. Who did that? –RB, Iowa City The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) did that. The DCCC — pronounced “D triple-C” by political types — announced in an email on Wednesday that it was “launching a new billboard campaign […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Mariannette Miller-Meeks is no longer claiming to be a resident of the district she represents in Congress
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks is no longer claiming to be a resident of the congressional district she represents in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Republican incumbent, now in her third term, has never been a resident, as that term is commonly understood, of Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. When not in Washington D.C., Miller-Meeks lives in […]
Posted inCommunity/News
A cult in Iowa helped hide Yoko Ono’s daughter from her for years: ‘We never talked about my mom and John’
For a pair of prominent anti-war activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had many battles to fight in 1971. Upon their move to America, they faced the ire of bitter (and often racist and misogynistic) Beatles fans, investigations by the FBI, deportation attempts by the Nixon administration and pressure to either manifest or temper the […]
Posted inCommunity/News
The infamous Epstein birthday book includes a cringeworthy Iowa anecdote from 1988
In some cases, the truism “there’s always an Iowa connection” becomes a threat. The Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book,” revealed this summer, is one such case. Amid 238 pages of fawning, friendly and conspiratorial birthday messages to the billionaire rapist and child trafficker written by his rich, powerful cohorts and gathered by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Coe College awarded $1.3 million grant to lead physics research collab with UI, Caltech, CERN and others
Coe College will lead universities in Iowa and across the U.S. in research of “high-level physics” with the aid of a seven-figure federal grant. The Cedar Rapids university announced Thursday in a news release that it received a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics to lead collaborative […]
Posted inStatewide
Historians, unions and legislators fight against the clock to save the Centennial Building and its archive
The sign on the door of the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Centennial Building, where the society’s Iowa City research facility has been located since 1956, let visitors on Wednesday know there were only a few days left to access its remarkable archival collections or even the building itself. The Centennial Building has been open […]
