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Salt Lake City won’t cut lanes on an east-side stretch of 2100 South after an unprecedented volume of public comment overrode arguments for increased safety and bicycle ridership.
City officials had argued that they could reduce crashes by 30 percent between 1700 East and 2300 East during a scheduled repaving by redrawing the lines so that instead of two lanes in each direction, there would be one lane each way and a central turn lane.

Utah Highway Patrol troopers want the public’s help in bringing to justice a man who attacked a woman on Interstate 80.
Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Marissa Cote said the incident occurred about 10:15 p.m. Wednesday on eastbound I-80 near the Lambs Canyon exit in Parleys Canyon.
The woman reportedly had stopped to help the man, but shortly afterward he assaulted her and tried to hold her against her will.
At some point, the woman escaped and called 911.

Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes opposed Utah’s new toughest-in-the-nation drunken-driving bill. But even he is offended by a new satirical ad that attacks it.
That full-page ad in Thursday’s Salt Lake Tribune by the American Beverage Institute (ABI) suggests that senior citizens — it pictured some, including Gov.

The polluter-protection crowd among Utah policymakers runs deep.
I wrote earlier this week about the Legislature tying the hands of Salt Lake City officials, who sought to enforce an anti-idling ordinance.
State lawmakers won’t allow issuing fines until after a third warning, a restriction that became more relevant recently when up to 40 buses left their diesel engines running for hours during a conference at the University of Utah.
The Legislature’s protectionist attitude toward diesels might r...

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The Cache County Attorney’s Office is now investigating the death of a sheriff’s office police dog.
Few details have been released about how the Cache County Sheriff’s Office K-9, Endy, died in early July.
The sheriff said in a press release that the dog died after an “unfortunate incident” on July 3 — but has since released no other information about what happened.
Cache County Attorney James Swink confirmed this week that his office is determining if criminal charges should be filed in the cas...

If a panhandler approaches you on the street, just walk on by.
Giving to panhandlers enables them to continue to be an addict or an alcoholic for one more day.
That’s the message from Salt Lake City and the Downtown Alliance business group, which launched a public awareness campaign Thursday aimed at curbing the sad and irksome practice that is commonplace in the capital city.
Four billboards will go up around downtown with slogans like, “Don’t give money to panhandlers. Help them more by giving...

Federal prosecutors this week filed charges against a former Utah nurse believed to have stolen hospital pain killers and exposed patients to hepatitis C.
Elet Neilson, 50, was indicted Wednesday in U.S.

USA Today readers have rated the LDS Church’s Polynesian Cultural Center as Hawaii’s top must-see attraction.
Located in Laie, Hawaii, the nonprofit center came out on top in the newspaper’s “10Best Readers’ Choice Poll” among 20 sites nominated by travel experts.
The center has earned a reputation for accurate exhibitions of fire knife dancing, fishing, traditional slap dancing and spear throwing. Visitors also walk through six villages culturally typical of the islands of Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, ...

A federal court judge has accepted a settlement agreement that would reduce significantly the time that mentally ill inmates in Utah wait without treatment.
In June, the Disability Law Center entered into a settlement agreement with the Utah Department of Human Services to resolve a class-action lawsuit filed in September 2015 alleging that mentally ill inmates were waiting months in jail without treatment and therefore were denied speedy trials.
On Tuesday, U.S.

A plan to cover the costs of birth control for poor women in Utah would help women and families climb out of poverty by preventing unwanted pregnancies and save taxpayer money and prevent abortions, a state lawmaker working on the proposal said Wednesday.
Utah is one of seven states that don’t offer family planning coverage for low-income residents, but Rep. Ray Ward, a Bountiful Republican who is also a family doctor, told members of a poverty committee that he’s working to change that.
Ward pl...