Salt Lake City | featured news

The ouster of the LGBTQ resource center Encircle from America’s Freedom Festival Fourth of July parade in Provo has produced a wave of criticism against organizers, whose nonprofit receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money.
Social media posts dubbed the exclusion as discrimination, a state senator has launched a petition to block future public funding, and at least one legal expert says violations of the state and federal constitutions may have occurred.
Utah’s largest parade —...

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Monday is the big celebration of the arrival of the Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley 170 years ago.

Colorado City, Ariz. •
It was 8:35 a.m. on a Saturday when Gabriel Owen arrived here with three tons of potatoes and a ton of wheat.
He steered the old Chevy pickup and the flatbed trailer it towed into the parking lot of Meadowayne Dairy — the last grocer here serving members of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But the commodities Owen hauled 300 miles from South Salt Lake weren’t meant to be sold on shelves.
The potatoes and wheat were donations t...

A wildfire threatened houses and burned 900 acres of brush and grass near Grouse Creek in Box Elder County on Saturday afternoon.
The blaze, which was first reported at 1 p.m. also threatened ranches and farm buildings, according to spokesman Jason Curry.
The fire burned up a hill, then split into two directions, according to spokesman Mitch Zundel.

A helicopter crew and several U.S. Forest Service personnel were working early Saturday afternoon to rescue a woman who had crashed her mountain bike near Lake Desolation north of Big Cottonwood Canyon.
Unified Police Det. Chuck Malm said the AirMed helicopter had landed just after 1 p.m., and personnel were working to move the 37-year-old woman to the landing spot. Unified did not have officers or search and rescue personnel on the scene, he said.
Malm said he did not know the extent of the wo...

Ardean Walton Watts — former associate conductor for the Utah Symphony and University of Utah music professor — has died, his family said Saturday. He was 89.

More than 400 kids put on their bike helmets and their game faces at the Gallivan Center on Saturday for the 2017 Strider Cup World Championship bike races. The event drew children — ages two to five — from 13 countries. The kids were on Strider balance bikes, which use foot propulsion to teach children to steer and balance on two wheels.
This story will be updated.

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A Taylorsville man could spent the rest of his life in prison after police said he went on a rampage of Salt Lake County hit-and-runs and then broke into his former boss’s house and attacked him while he slept last year.
Third District Judge Katie Bernards-Goodman earlier this month sentenced Philip Deluca, 34, to an indeterminate term of at least five years and up to life in prison for aggravated burglary, a first-degree felony, court records show.

A Herriman home was destroyed early Saturday morning in a two-alarm blaze that required more than 30 firefighters to snuff out, authorities said.
Someone walking their dog at about 4 a.m. near 15000 S. 5000 West spotted smoke billowing out of their neighbor’s two-story home, Unified Fire spokesman Matthew McFarland said.
The first firefighters on the scene could not see flames, but noticed the home was highly pressurized with smoke, he said. The home, at 14652 S.

Dugway Proving Ground continues to face issues with its accounting and oversight of chemicals, including the deadly nerve agent sarin, according to a recent Department of Defense Inspector General report.
The Army facility in west Utah drew international attention in 2015 for mistakenly shipping live anthrax to labs across the United States and South Korea. An Army investigation at the time found a “complacent atmosphere” at Dugway had helped lead to the scandal.