Trump dominated rural America. Iowa is testing whether Democrats can win them back.

DES MOINES, Iowa (Iowa Capital Dispatch) - Iowa is expected to spend over $1 billion more than it raises in revenues in the current fiscal year, the Revenue Estimating Conference found Friday — but Iowa Department of Management Director Kraig Paulsen said this prediction remains in line with Republicans’ expectations about the initial impacts of income tax cuts. The Revenue Estimating Conference, a three-member panel, met Friday to discuss the state’s expected economic outlook. When the conference last met in March, the members projected state revenues would decline by 9.3% in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026, but that the state would see a 4.4% increase in revenue growth in fiscal year 2027. With the books closed for FY 2026, Iowa saw a 7.1% decrease in revenue compared to the previous year — a drop of just under $635 million. Jennifer Acton, the director of the Fiscal Services division of the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency, said this figure means revenues for the year were $205 million higher than the REC projected.

The boy's mother is frustrated with how the school handled his disappearance. Monday, October 19, 2026 7:39AMThe family of a missing teen with autism is begging for help and answers after he walked out of his school in Reseda. RESEDA, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The family of a missing teen with autism is begging for help after he walked out of his school in Reseda. Junior Saavedra, 18, was last seen at Diane S. Leichman Career Preparatory and Transition Center on Friday. The Los Angeles Police Department has now declared the boy a critical missing person. His mother is frustrated with how the school handled the situation. Now, she is demanding an explanation. Maria Saavedra says the school called her and asked if her son had come home, informing her that he left the school. She said she then went to the school, where they told her he went missing at 11:20 a.m. Saavedra says they didn't call her until 12:59 p.m., and police didn't arrive until 1:20 p.m. "All I want is for him to show up. Please help me. If you’ve seen him, call me, let me know, because I’m so worried about him," Saavedra said in Spanish. "I don’t even know what to think or what to do anymore to get help.

Genevieve Morrison is the editor in chief of The Heights, the independent student newspaper at Boston College. Student journalists at Cornell were the first to report that a former student had filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was raped at a frat party in 2024. Since they did that, professional outlets have taken the story further. The New York Times exclusively obtained documents from the university’s investigation of the incident. CBS broke the news of the Snapchat messages sent on the night of the alleged rape. Traditional outlets do a great job exposing wrongdoing at colleges when they have a reason to look. But someone has to sound the alarm before anyone else knows there’s a fire. A student newspaper is often the sole news organization with reporters on the ground, paying attention, and invested in what happens on a campus. We do important work. But we need the buy-in of other students, readers, and — most of all — administrators to do our jobs well. Private colleges are unusually difficult to report on from the outside. Private schools generally aren’t subject to public records law. As a college journalist myself, I know what that means in practice.

Emma Platoff’s piece about how Austin is attracting Massachusetts residents (“He left Boston for Austin. He’s not the only one,” Oct. 15) left out one important Austin downside: It’s in Texas. If you need an abortion, you don’t want to be in Texas. If you don’t have health insurance, you don’t want to be in Texas. And if you care about the future of this country why would you live in a state that elected Greg Abbott as governor and Ken Paxton as attorney general? Boston has its problems but at least most people here care about protecting human rights. Thomas D’AvanzoSharon

Susan Kohl Malone is an assistant professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. “Spring ahead, fall back” may soon be a thing of the past. In July, the House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, voted to end the twice-a-year ritual. I share this instinct as a nurse and a sleep scientist. Changing clock times is not good for us, but the bill now in the Senate would lock Americans out of sync with the sun. The Sunshine Protection Act would make daylight saving time permanent. That sounds wonderful: more light after work and school, longer evenings. But there’s a catch — making daylight saving time permanent does not create a single additional minute of daylight. The sun does not change when it rises and sets; the clock simply relabels the hours. Permanent daylight saving time would take an hour of light from winter mornings and shift it to the evenings. That trade is the problem, because morning light and evening light are not interchangeable. Our bodies run on internal clocks that are set by the sun, not the clock on the wall. Morning light is the master signal: It resets our internal clocks each day and tells the brain to trigger a surge of cortisol.