Amie Rivers

I’m hiking every state park or other cool hiking place I can think of around my home state, to showcase the natural beauty Iowa has to offer. Follow along here, or on social media using #AmieTakesAHike, to pass along your suggestions and see where I’m headed next. You can’t ask 10 Northeast Iowa hike enthusiasts…

The lone supplier for Iowa’s medical cannabis program announced in June it changed its name. MedPharm Iowa, which has operated growing operations and laboratories for medical cannabidiol in the state since 2018, now goes by Bud & Mary’s as it expands past the Hawkeye State and into markets that are fully legal. “We just needed…

A package of stricter gun control bills aimed at preventing mass shootings such as what happened at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, passed the US House of Representatives on a mostly party-line vote on Wednesday. Cindy Axne, Iowa’s lone Democratic representative, voted for the Protecting Our Kids Act, which passed the Democrat-majority House on a…

Barring some outlandish or criminal behavior while in office, the sitting governor typically backs the sitting legislators in their own party during a primary election. But after her much-touted school voucher bill failed to gain traction in the Iowa Legislature this year, Gov. Kim Reynolds took her ire out at several fellow Republicans in the…

The man who killed two women before turning the gun on himself outside of an Ames church had previously been accused of domestic violence and sexual abuse, and had once been ordered to complete an anger management course, but was still able to legally own and carry firearms in the state. Johnathan Lee Whitlatch, 33,…

Around 390,000 jobs were added in the US in May, according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday. The highest sector adding jobs was leisure and hospitality, which tacked on 84,000 positions, though that’s still well below pre-pandemic levels. That was followed by professional and business services (75,000), transportation…

A major employer in Waterloo is offshoring some of its operations to Mexico to make room for new products, though the company was tight-lipped about potential layoffs. John Deere announced Wednesday to its Tractor and Cab Assembly Operations workers in Waterloo it would move those operations to its John Deere Components plant in Ramos Arizpe…

A lawyer for former President Donald Trump wanted to utilize US Sen. Chuck Grassley in a plan to decertify presidential electors in states that President Joe Biden won, eventually aiming to install Trump instead. The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection released the Dec. 13, 2020, email from attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who Politico said…

I’m hiking every state park or other cool hiking place I can think of around my home state, to showcase the natural beauty Iowa has to offer. Follow along here, or on social media using #AmieTakesAHike, to pass along your suggestions and see where I’m headed next. What’s better than a hike around a lake?…

As he travels the state on his second run at a US Senate seat, Mike Franken is used to meeting fellow military veterans, and getting peppered with a lot of questions about foreign policy. It makes sense: A retired US Navy three-star admiral who served for more than three decades, Franken has extensive military and…