Gazette Daily News Podcast, July 22

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This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Thursday, July 22.

The chance for rain has passed, but what remains is heat and humidity. According to the National Weather Service, it will be mostly sunny and humid Thursday with a high near 89 degrees. Adding to this will be hazy skies Thursday night and Friday morning as the smoke from several west coast wildfires is reaching midwestern states.

A teenage girl who took advanced classes and played on her high school basketball team was found dead this week with a bullet wound in a crashed car she had borrowed while visiting her older sister in Cedar Rapids.

Cedar Rapids police on Wednesday identified Tyliyah Whitis, 15, of Peoria, Ill, as the teen who was discovered Tuesday morning in the one-car crash outside the Hawthorne Hills apartment complex in the 2200 block of C Street SW. Police said Whitis had been shot at least once and the vehicle had sustained significant damage.

Cedar Rapids public safety spokesperson Greg Buelow said the cause and manner of death has not yet been determined — that will come from the State Medical Examiner’s Office following an autopsy. But police are investigating the death as a homicide.

Whitis’s sister, T’yanna Nesby, told the Gazette that Whitis was a straight A student back in Peoria, who worked two jobs and wanted to one day start her own business.

Forty Iowans, including some from the Cedar Rapids area, had to undergo treatment for rabies after they were potentially in contact with a rabid bat at a zoo in Omaha.

More than 180 individuals were advised to receive the rabies post-exposure prophylaxis, which contains the rabies vaccine, after a wild bat was found near a person attending one of the Henry Doorly Zoo’s multiple overnight campouts at the aquarium earlier this month.

A total of 186 overnight campers, including youth and adult groups, were contacted by the Nebraska public health department, the Omaha World-Herald reported.

Public health officials in Nebraska recommended all campers who stayed at the zoo overnight June 29, June 30, July 2 and July 3 receive the treatment.

As it promised, University of Iowa Health Care plans to reward more than 12,000 employees it required over the last year to either forfeit raises, absorb pay cuts, shed earned vacation time or take unpaid leave to ease its budget woes in the worst throes of COVID-19.

The one-time lump sum payments — coming Sept. 1 if approved next week by the Board of Regents — will vary in amount depending on the eligible worker’s base salary as of June 30, 2021, according to documents made public this week.

In total, UIHC expects to pay out $26.6 million to over 12,000 eligible employees based on a projected hospital operating margin of over 7 percent for the budget year that ended June 30.

Luka Garza has been selected as the 2020-21 Big Ten Jesse Owens Male Athlete of the Year, the league announced Wednesday.

Garza is the fifth Hawkeye chosen as the male winner in the past 35 years, joining wrestlers Brent Metcalf (2008), Barry Davis (1985) and Ed Banach (1983), as well as football player Chuck Long (1986).

Minnesota senior diver Sarah Bacon was recognized as the Female Athlete of the Year.