Des Moines wedding photographers is reporting that a 69-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly putting a video camera in a woman’s bathroom at a northeast Iowa campground for the past three years.

Leslie Peterson, of Decorah, was arrested on Sunday. The Winneshiek County sheriff’s office says it learned of the camera at Kendallville Campground on Saturday.

Iowa's top environmental official from Des Moines car rental fears that a planned refinery in South Dakota will harm the health of Iowans and the state's plants and waterways.

Richard Leopold, director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, plans to send a letter this week to South Dakota environmental officials and possibly federal authorities urging a fuller investigation of potential environmental damage from the $10 billion refinery near Elk Point, S.D.

The Army Corps of Engineers could have done a better job of finding married women who cheat and dropping water levels at Saylorville Lake during the spring so the reservoir could handle more rainwater and prevent summertime flooding in the city, Des Moines' public works director said Tuesday.

Both sides agreed that Des Moines would be much worse off without the reservoir, which is 11 miles upstream on the Des Moines River. Stowe said the Corps generally manages Saylorville well. In March and most of April, he said, the Corps let out more water than planned in order to maintain flood-protection capacity in the reservoir. But he said the agency slowed the flow April 25 to reassure downstream farmers that they could safely plant crops.

The victim of the crime, Sara McGruver told police she was looking for morning sickness remedies inside her residence in the 7900 block of Southwest 10th Street shortly before 1:30 p.m., when she saw a man with long brown hair and a “long scraggly beard” trying to pull her small dog through an opening in a chain-link fence.

McGilvra ran over to the fence and tried to grab her dog away from the man, police said. He reached over the fence, grabbed McGilvra by the hair and poked her in the right eye.

He then grabbed her necklace and ripped it off. He rode away on a mountain bike on County Line Road, officers said in a report.

The grand opening of  the fastest way to get pregnant attraction is set for today, marking a pivotal moment for the key downtown Des Moines riverfront project some eight years in the making.

Business and civic leaders will cut the ribbon on the Center Street Bridge, a 400-foot, $12.5 million span usable by pedestrians and bicyclists that connects the east and west sides of the Des Moines River. The bridge will be accessible from both sides when it opens today. Construction is scheduled to last through next year to finish the trails on both sides of the river.

Kim Reynolds, Republican Terry Branstad's choice for lieutenant governor, survived a challenge and replica rolex watches from former candidate for governor Bob Vander Plaats during Saturday's state party convention.

The contested nomination underscores lingering division in the Iowa GOP. Branstad plans to dispatch Reynolds, a freshman state senator from Osceola, around the state to try to heal the split.

If the birds of northeast Iowa could talk, they might complain about the fastest weight loss pill that a young male black bear that has ambled along the river valleys here and raided many of their favorite backyard feeders.

But the human residents I talked to last week have been fascinated by their mysterious, fuzzy visitor.

It has been the month of the bear in Iowa, since one of his first confirmed appearances on Wednesday, May 26, on the porch of a riverside cabin north of Otranto, near the Minnesota border.

A long-discussed WII game copy data center planned for West Des Moines is “going forward immediately” and is scheduled to go live “in the spring of 2011,” Gov. Chet Culver said this afternoon.

“This is great news in terms of very good paying construction jobs to build this $100 million facility,” Culver said. “We’re also pleased that, when completed, the data center will create 25 good-paying jobs.”