| October 26, 2009 | - Two burglars were arrested in Iowa after police spotted their getaway car and found the suspects inside with their face-masks scribbled on in black permanent marker; a would-be thief was laughed away by staff and patrons when he rushed into a Polish bank shouting, “This is a stick up!” and brandishing a spoon; and a burglar who during his trial rubbed his own excrement on his attorney's hair and face, and flung his feces at jurors was sentenced to 31 years in prison and ordered to pay $129 to replace one juror's briefcase.
| Source 1:
Ananova
Source 2:
Ananova
Source 3:
10News
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| October 8, 2009 | - A Sioux City, Iowa, family found a dead deer dressed in a clown suit and wig on their front porch.
| Source:
AP via msnbc.com
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| April 3, 2009 | - Same-sex marriage was legalized in Sweden, and in Iowa, where the state's supreme court declared that a 1998 ruling limiting marriage to opposite-sex partnerships was unconstitutional. “We are blessed,” said lesbian Kate Ventrum, “to live in Iowa.”
| Source 1:
Reuters
Source 2:
New York Times
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| March 16, 2009 | - The House of Representatives, reacting to a plan by AIG to pay its executives as much as $218 million in bonuses, voted 328 to 93 in favor of a 90-percent tax on executive bonuses at firms that receive $5 billion or more in federal funds. Eighty-five Republicans voted for the bill despite their party's traditional opposition to tax increases. “The American people,” explained Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), “are all watching here.” “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them,” said Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) of the AIG executives, “if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow, and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things--resign, or go commit suicide.”
| Source 1:
Politico
Source 2:
CBCNews.ca
Source 3:
Politico
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| June 22, 2008 | - Water gushed down the Mississippi from last week's floods in Iowa and Illinois, overflowing at least 20 levees above Saint Louis, and the Flood Museum in Fort Madison, Iowa, remained under water. The federal government warned that climate change will make rainstorms less frequent but more intense in years to come.
| Source 1:
WP
Source 2:
NYT
Source 3:
ABC
Source 4:
NYT
Source 5:
NYT
Source 6:
NYT
Source 7:
ABC
Source 8:
NYT
Source 9:
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association
Source 10:
NPR
Source 11:
LAT
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| June 15, 2008 | - Floods forced tens of thousands of Midwesterners from their homes.
| Source:
Reuters
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| May 1, 2008 | - At a town-hall meeting in Iowa, Baptist minister Marty Parrish asked Republican presidential nominee John McCain whether it was true that he had called his wife, Cindy, a “cunt” in 1992. “You know,” McCain replied, “that's the great thing about town-hall meetings, sir, but we really don't, there's people here who don't respect that kind of language. So I'll move on.” Parrish was then escorted from the meeting by the Secret Service and local police.
| Source:
The Huffington Post
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| March 20, 2008 | - An Iowa man with a lengthy and violent criminal record was serving an eight-Sunday church sentence, and
| Source:
Quad-City Times
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| January 29, 2008 | - An Iowa outbreak of the rare lung disease histoplasmosis, a fungal infection often spread by bird or bat droppings, was traced back to a November 29 2007 American Lung Association event at the governor's mansion.
| Source:
Health investigators link lung illness to Terrace Hill
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| January 4, 2008 | -
Obama and Mike Huckabee were the surprise winners of the Iowa
caucuses. “None of this worries me,” said Rudy Giuliani, who came in sixth place in the Republican caucus. “September 11, there were times I was worried.”
| Source:
NYDailyNews.com
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| December 8, 2007 | - A new National Intelligence Estimate by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran ended its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, in contrast to a 2005 report that claimed with “high confidence” that such a program was still active. Former CIA officials explained that at the time the earlier report was written the agency's Iran Task Force had been reduced from nearly a hundred analysts and officers to fewer than a dozen, and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, attempting to explain why the earlier report was not “so wrong,” reminded reporters that Iran is “very good at this business of keeping secrets.” “It is all right,” responded Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “It is enough that you are confessing to your mistakes.” In Iowa,
Democratic candidates debated the Iranian nuclear threat as well as the safety of toys made in China. “My toys,” said Senator Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), “are coming from Iowa.” At a dinner in Des Moines, a reporter summarized the Iranian nuclear report for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who hadn't heard the news. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist preacher, also recalled that he was still learning about the AIDS virus in 1992, when he proposed putting AIDS patients in quarantine.
| Source 1:
WP
Source 2:
White House
Source 3:
LAT
Source 4:
NYT
Source 5:
WP
Source 6:
LAT
Source 7:
Politico
Source 8:
AP via Yahoo
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| October 1, 2007 | - In Iowa,
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson continued to attest to the existence of WMDs in Iraq. “We can't forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, [Saddam Hussein] clearly had had WMD,” he said; Thompson ended his speech by asking for applause.
| Source:
MSNBC
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| August 31, 2007 | -
Gay marriage was legal in Iowa for four hours.
| Source:
NY Times
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| August 12, 2007 | - A straw poll of Iowa
Republicans lent an aura of viability to the presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee but caused Tommy Thompson to drop out of the race.
| Source:
New York Times
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| May 29, 2007 | -
Scientists in Des Moines, Iowa, talked to apes, who responded by pointing to lexigrams.
| Source:
ABCNews
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| April 3, 2007 | - In Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Hillary Clinton accused President George W. Bush of “vetoing the will of the American people.”
| Source:
New York Times
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| February 24, 2006 | - In Iowa a sex offender refused to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet because he belongs to a church that believes electricity can cause people to disobey God.
| Source:
UPI
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| November 10, 2005 | - An Iowa judge ruled that a security guard be given unemployment benefits after he was fired for seeing ghosts.
| Source:
CNews
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| September 22, 2005 | - A Des Moines, Iowa, high school teacher was in trouble for confronting the students who toilet-papered his house with a sword.
| Source:
The Iowa Channel
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| June 30, 2005 | - Lightning struck a sleeping child's mattress in Kansas, sparked a wildfire in Alaska's interior, shocked a boy in New Hampshire through his video-game controller, killed both a golfer and a prisoner in Ohio, and struck the offices of the National Weather Service in Iowa.
| Source 1:
Source 2:
KTUU.com
Source 3:
The Boston Channel
Source 4:
WBNSTV
Source 5:
TheIowaChannel.com
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| March 30, 2004 | - It was reported that the U.S. government's main laboratory for mad-cow testing, which is located in an Iowa strip mall, is not secure enough to store dangerous pathogens.
| Source: Reuters
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| January 31, 2004 | - Officials in Iowa were thinking about joining the Matrix.
| Source: Associated Press
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| January 22, 2004 | - Howard Dean decided to tone down his campaign persona after the media became alarmed at his "nutty" Iowa concession speech.
| Source: New York Times
|
| January 20, 2004 | - President George W. Bush made his State of the Union address just one day after the Iowa caucuses and appealed to voters to reelect him so that he could continue to wage war on terror.
| Source: Associated Press
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| January 20, 2004 | - Senator John Kerry won the Iowa caucuses.
| Source: Reuters
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| December 20, 2003 | - It was reported that the omnibus spending bill passed by the House of Representatives this month includes $23 billion in "earmarks" such as $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa and $225,000 to repair a swimming pool in Sparks, Nevada. Jim Gibbons, a Republican representative, explained that the funding came about because he felt guilty for clogging up that pool with tadpoles when he was a boy. "Look," Gibbons said in defense of his earmark, "this is the standard practice the United States Congress has had for decades." Gibbons said he did not view such projects "as pork."
| Source: New York Times
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| February 25, 2003 | -
David Miller, a Republican state senator from Iowa, called for a creation of a “Commission on the Status of Men” to figure out what has gone wrong for the American male.
| |
| 0, 2000 | - A man in Iowa punched another man, who was ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie.
| Source:
AP via Google
|