Polk County News

A popular state park in Cedar Rapids will be closed this Memorial weekend due to flooding but it's a much different story here in Polk County.

After four and a half days of broad and exhaustive search efforts to find Kathlynn Shepard, law enforcement is scaling back and narrowing their focus on terrain that is more difficult to navigate.

A Polk County jury has convicted a Mississippi man of first-degree murder in the death of a Des Moines woman whose body was found in her apartment.

Hundreds paying at least $75 a person will hear the governor give the keynote speech at the Polk County Republican Party fundraiser in West Des Moines.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is gearing up for re-election next year, his third race in four years.

The Polk County Health Department and other local agencies, including a county emergency management team, are holding the preparedness drill Thursday morning at a post office in Des Moines.

Prosecutors have dropped a vehicular homicide charge against an Ankeny man accused in a crash that killed two children, saying the man is not mentally competent to stand trial and likely never will be.

A Polk County K-9 unit went after a Des Moines man Thursday night. The dog latched onto him, biting him three times.

People living in two Des Moines apartment buildings can now move forward with a class-action lawsuit over a bedbug problem.

The Iowa Supreme Court is ruling on a lawsuit filed by residents of 2 Des Moines apartment buildings who say their buildings were infested with bedbugs.

Authorities have identified the body of a man found in a farm field in central Iowa.

Polk County Sheriff's Sgt. Jana Abens says the body was found Thursday in a rural area about seven miles southeast of Cambridge, near the Polk and Story county line.

Walker says he fired his gun twice into the air to break up the fight. Des Moines police also arrested 18-year old Craig D'Shon Hunt after police say he threw a knife toward them during the incident.

Johnston police say school officials have removed an unloaded handgun from a second grade student who arrived at school with the gun concealed.

Burial will follow in the Indianola I.O.O.F. Cemetery. Hilda was born Dec. 15, 1914, in Warren County to Vance and Georgia Rodgers.

A Polk County judge Friday agreed to review the tape of a closed-door meeting held by the Des Moines School Board in regards to former Superintendent Nancy Sebring 's controversial departure.

Married same-sex couples have the same rights as married heterosexuals to have both parents listed on the birth certificates of their newborn children, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled this morning.

Two separate Des Moines murders are unsolved and another open case is being investigated as a homicide.

Two 15-year-olds accused of carjacking a Des Moines man and violently beating him will stay in a juvenile detention facility as they await a judge's decision on whether to try the two in adult court, a Polk County judge ruled at a hearing Thursday.

Remember that clever, acronymic T-shirt some smart alec thought up in the 1980s to insult Iowans: Iowa - Idiots Out Wandering Around? As mean as it was, we'd be liars if we tried to argue that Iowa doesn't have its fair share of just that.