Iowa | featured news

A Texas company has been ordered to pay 32 mentally disabled workers $240 million in damages for what government lawyers described as years of around-the-clock abuse.

Federal health officials say at least 16 people in five states have been sickened by salmonella food poisoning linked to ground beef. No one has died, but half were hospitalized. Most of the illnesses have been in Michigan, but a few cases were scattered in Arizona, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Last week, Iowa’s all-male high court upheld the legality of terminating a female employee because her boss found her too attractive.

After inheriting the title of world’s oldest living person less than two weeks ago, Iowa woman Dina Manfredini died at age 115, according to her family. The Italian immigrant, who experienced life in three different centuries, resided at a nursing home in Johnston, Iowa.

In the days since Republicans lost an election many in the party thought was theirs, chatter has been bubbling about what the GOP should do to recover. For Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, it starts with the smallest of actions: abandoning the state's now-infamous straw poll.

President Obama sought to shore up his standing in Midwestern states, including Iowa and Wisconsin, while Mitt Romney fought to secure critical states like Florida and Virginia.

Less than a week before Election Day, President Barack Obama holds a statistically significant lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the battleground of Iowa, while the two candidates are locked in tight races in New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

Unemployment rates fell or held steady last month in nine key swing states at the center of this year's presidential election. Rates dropped in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina. They were unchanged in New Hampshire and Virginia.

Meet Matt Reisetter, a weary and somewhat teed-off Iowa voter. A stay-at-home dad in his mid-30s, he has long since unplugged his two land lines to stop the nonstop calls from campaigns reminding him to vote. But that hasn’t blocked the three to four daily pieces of political mail.

A month before the closing arguments of a campaign traditionally would be made, a steady stream of voters walked into election offices across Iowa on Thursday to cast their ballots.