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Demetrio Jackson was desperate for medical help when the paramedics arrived. The 43-year-old was surrounded by police who arrested him after responding to a trespassing call in a Wisconsin parking lot. Officers had shocked him with a Taser and pinned him as he pleaded that he couldn't breathe. Now he sat on the ground with hands cuffed behind his back and took in oxygen through a mask. Then, officers moved Jackson to his side so a medic could inject him with a potent knockout drug. "It's just going to calm you down," an officer assured...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An oil spill in a creek in northeastern Kansas this week is the largest for an onshore crude pipeline in more than nine years and by far the biggest in the history of the Keystone pipeline, according to federal data. Canada-based TC Energy on Thursday estimated the spill on the Keystone system at about 14,000 barrels, or 588,000 gallons. It said the affected pipeline segment had been "isolated," the oil had been contained at the site with booms, or barriers, and environmental monitoring had been set up, including a...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — An Iowa jury on Wednesday acquitted a journalist who was pepper-sprayed and arrested by police while covering a protest, in a case that critics have derided as an attack on press freedoms and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury found Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri and her ex-boyfriend Spenser Robnett not guilty on misdemeanor charges of failure to disperse and interference with official acts. The Des Moines verdict is an embarrassing outcome for the o...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — An Iowa journalist recounted getting pepper-sprayed and arrested while covering a protest for racial justice last year, testifying in her own defense Tuesday at her trial on charges stemming from the incident. Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri told jurors she was running away from a scene where riot police had shot tear gas and were advancing to disperse protesters outside a mall in Des Moines, Iowa. She said that after she rounded the corner of a Verizon store, she saw an officer charging at her and put her h...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — An Iowa journalist faces trial Monday on charges stemming from her coverage of a protest against racial injustice, a case that prosecutors have pursued despite international condemnation from free press advocates who say she was just doing her job. The case of Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri, who was pepper sprayed and arrested while reporting on a clash between protesters and police, will highlight an aggressive response by Iowa authorities against those who organized and attended protests that erupted l...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Investigators on Wednesday arrested a long-haul trucker from Iowa who they say is linked by DNA evidence to the killings of three women whose bodies were dumped in Wyoming and Tennessee in the early 1990s. Police arrested Clark Perry Baldwin, 58, at his home in Waterloo, Iowa, on murder charges filed in Wyoming and Tennessee in the deaths of the women, including two who were pregnant. Investigators said they were looking into whether Baldwin could be responsible for other unsolved slayings. Baldwin was arrested after i...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Tyson Foods suspended operations Wednesday at an Iowa plant that is critical to the nation's pork supply but was blamed for fueling a massive coronavirus outbreak in the region. The Arkansas-based company said the closure of the plant in Waterloo would deny a vital market to hog farmers and further disrupt U.S. meat supply. Tyson had kept the facility, its largest pork plant, open in recent days over the objections of alarmed local officials. The plant can process 19,500 hogs per day, accounting for 3.9% of U.S. pork p...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Two of the first three states to vote in the Democratic presidential race will use new mobile apps to gather results from thousands of caucus sites — technology intended to make counting easier but that raises concerns of hacking or glitches. Democratic Party activists in Iowa and Nevada will use programs downloaded to their personal phones to report the results of caucus gatherings to the state headquarters. That data will then be used to announce the unofficial winners. Paper records will later be used to certify the...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A Missouri farmer blamed for running the largest organic food fraud scheme in U.S. history has died by suicide, weeks before he was to report to federal prison to begin serving a 10-year term, a coroner said Tuesday. Police officers found Randy Constant dead in a vehicle in his garage at his home in Chillicothe, Missouri on Monday evening, hours after federal investigators held a news conference in Iowa to highlight the prison sentence he had received. Livingston County Coroner Scott Lindley said he concluded that C...
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — A judge on Friday sentenced the mastermind of the largest known organic food fraud scheme in U.S. history to 10 years in prison, saying he cheated thousands of customers into buying products they didn't want. U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams said Randy Constant orchestrated a massive fraud that did "extreme and incalculable damage" to consumers and shook public confidence in the nation's organic food industry. Williams said that, between 2010 and 2017, consumers nationwide were fooled into paying extra to buy p...
A Michigan college student says pro-Trump agitators recruited him to falsely claim he was raped by Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, then published the smear without his permission. Hunter Kelly, a 21-year-old gay Trump supporter, said conservative activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman sought to use him for the "despicable scheme" they concocted to blunt Buttigieg's momentum and help the president's reelection bid. The incident may offer a glimpse into disinformation tactics, powered by fake social media accounts and partisan...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A Missouri farmer and businessman ripped off consumers nationwide by falsely marketing more than $140 million worth of corn, soybeans and wheat as certified organic grains, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. The long-running fraud scheme outlined in court documents by prosecutors in Iowa is one of the largest uncovered in the fast-growing organic farming industry. The victims included food companies and their customers who paid higher prices because they thought they were buying grains that had been grown using environme...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — The man who will serve at least temporarily as the nation's top law enforcement official is a relatively inexperienced Republican Party loyalist from Iowa who has called for limiting special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Matthew G. Whitaker, 49, will become the nation's acting attorney general following the forced resignation of Jeff Sessions. President Donald Trump announced the appointment Wednesday, saying on Twitter that Whitaker "will serve our Country well" and that a permanent attorney general will be n...
FORT DODGE, Iowa (AP) — A Roman Catholic diocese acknowledged Wednesday that it concealed for decades a priest's admission that he sexually abused dozens of Iowa boys — a silence that may have put other children in danger. The Rev. Jerome Coyle, now 85, was stripped of his parish assignments in the 1980s but never defrocked. And it was not until this week, after The Associated Press inquired about him, that he was publicly identified by the church as an admitted pedophile, even though the Diocese of Sioux City had been aware of his conduct for...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Three Nebraska farmers will plead guilty to knowingly marketing non-organic corn and soybeans as certified organic as part of a lengthy, multi-million-dollar fraud scheme, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday. Tom Brennan, his son James Brennan and family friend Michael Potter have each agreed to plead guilty to one count of wire fraud. Their plea hearings are scheduled for Friday in federal court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Prosecutors allege that the three conspired with the owner of a large Iowa-based company to dupe c...
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — A defense lawyer says three Nebraska farmers charged in an organic grain fraud scheme were working under a Missouri businessman who marketed ordinary corn and soybeans as organic. Tom Brennan, James Brennan and Michael Potter pleaded guilty Friday afternoon in federal court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to wire fraud. Prosecutors say each received $2.5 million from 2010 to 2017 from sales of corn and soybeans falsely marketed as certified organic. Potter's attorney Clarence Mock says the scheme was led by Randy Constant, p...
Shortly after last year's shooting massacre on the Las Vegas strip, Ohio Gov. John Kasich convened a working group to explore possible reforms to state gun laws. A Republican, Kasich appointed panel members who supported the Second Amendment and came from across the political spectrum. Their work accelerated after the Valentine's Day slaughter at a high school in Parkland, Florida. They eventually produced a legislative package that included what Kasich called "sensible changes that should keep people safer." The legislation was introduced by...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — The mother of a missing Iowa college student pleaded Thursday with anyone who may know the whereabouts of her daughter, and begged for any potential kidnapper to let her go, noting the reward for her safe return had ballooned to $172,000 Laura Calderwood said during a news conference that she believes her daughter, 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, is alive but has potentially been kidnapped. She also announced the new reward amount, which spiked from $2,000 offered earlier this week after donations poured in from across t...
They are the "good guys with guns" the National Rifle Association says are needed to protect students from shooters: a school police officer, a teacher who moonlights in law enforcement, a veteran sheriff. Yet in a span of 48 hours in March, the three were responsible for gun safety lapses that put students in danger. The school police officer accidentally fired his gun in his Virginia office, sending a bullet through a wall into a middle school classroom. The teacher was demonstrating firearm safety in California when he mistakenly put a...
They are the "good guys with guns" the National Rifle Association says are needed to protect students from shooters: a school police officer, a teacher who moonlights in law enforcement, a veteran sheriff. Yet in a span of 48 hours in March, the three were responsible for gun safety lapses that put students in danger. The school police officer accidentally fired his gun in his Virginia office, sending a bullet through a wall into a middle school classroom. The teacher was demonstrating firearm safety in California when he mistakenly put a...
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Officers at Iowa's maximum-security prison use radios with alarms that do not work well during emergencies and poorly trained dogs that can attack staff rather than inmates, according to a regulatory agency that recently warned of serious safety problems there. The radios used at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison fail to bring timely assistance to correctional officers under attack by inmates, including during two assaults last fall in which their shortcomings slowed or prevented emergency responses, the Iowa O...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The suspected Austin bomber called himself a "psychopath" in a recorded confession and said he felt no remorse for deadly explosions that killed two people and terrorized the city, a U.S. congressman said Saturday. Investigators are still looking into what motivated 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, but the recording he left on his cell phone shows that he was a "sick individual," U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul said. "He did refer to himself as a psychopath. He did not show any remorse, in fact questioning himself for why he d...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — After the first package exploded on an Austin doorstep, police assured the public that there was no wider threat, no signs of terrorism. The idea of a serial bomber striking random strangers never came up. The March 2 blast killed Anthony Stephan House, a 39-year-old man with a background in finance and an 8-year-old daughter. Investigators didn't rule out that House may have mishandled homemade explosives. Hours later, in an interrogation room, detectives told one of House's neighbors their main theory: The deadly p...
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The warnings around Nikolas Cruz seemed to flash like neon signs: expelled from school, fighting with classmates, a fascination with weapons and hurting animals, disturbing images and comments posted to social media, previous mental health treatment. In Florida, that wasn't enough for relatives, authorities or his schools to request a judicial order barring him from possessing guns. Only five states have laws enabling family members, guardians or police to ask judges to temporarily strip gun rights from people who s...
Lawmakers and others in Democratic-leaning states have been howling over the past year about actions by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans that they say have undermined states' rights. That includes promoting concealed carry legislation and attacking sanctuary status for immigrants to this week's decisions on legalized marijuana and offshore oil drilling. But it wasn't too long ago that the shoe was on the other foot, with Republican states pushing back against the Obama administration's intrusions on issues such as...
