Salt Lake County | featured news

Utah’s weather through the remainder of this week will be a lot like Congress.
The forecast declares it will be hot, like the debate in the Capitol, with intermittent thunderstorms hinting at long-awaited relief, but like our lawmakers once more ending in sweltering deadlock.
The difference is we mere proletarians can’t take extended breaks from our mid-summer misery.

Aided by thunderstorms and showers, crews on Wednesday were tightening their stranglehold on southern Utah’s nearly month-old Brian Head Fire.
The blaze, sparked June 17 by a weed-burning project gone wrong, was at 71,673 acres and 85 percent containment as of dawn Wednesday.

Each time another Russian boot has dropped, President Donald Trump has had the luxury of plausible deniability.
Well, maybe there were meetings with top advisers, he could claim, but there was no evidence anyone on his campaign knew the Russians were working to help get him elected.
That facade collapsed Tuesday, with the release of Donald Trump Jr.'s emails showing he knowingly conspired to receive promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that was being provided at the behest of the Russian government...

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Provo • The first congressional debate in the race to replace former Rep. Jason Chaffetz was as civil and courteous as an afternoon tea party.
No one interrupted. Not one candidate offered a rebuttal. There were no raised voices. And they all politely agreed on rigorously conservative policies.
The role of federal government? It should be limited.
Tax increases? There shouldn’t be any.
What about Obamacare?

Orem • When school starts for her three children each fall, Marci LeMonnier said Tuesday, she is asked by administrators to donate supplies like copy paper to compensate for strained budgets.
It’s a shame, the Provo resident said, that Utah’s last-in-the-nation school spending doesn’t allow for even basic office supplies.
“We claim to love and cherish our children,” she said, “but we are not willing to fund their education.”
LeMonnier was among about 50 Utahns who met at Orem Elementary School t...

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The Salt Lake City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved Danny Walz to lead the Redevelopment Agency, ending a second search for Justin Belliveau’s successor with much less drama than the first.
Walz, who has served for nearly 13 years as Midvale’s Redevelopment Agency (RDA) director, told council members Tuesday that he interned with Salt Lake City’s RDA — with “no idea what a redevelopment agency did or how it worked” — and worked his way up to senior project manager.
Now he’s president of t...

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While crossing a Mt. Timpanogos snowfield Saturday, emergency-response volunteer Talon Kohler slipped and tumbled 100 yards before dropping another 30 feet into a rock- and ice-filled chasm.
Kohler was working with the Timpanogos Emergency Response Team (TERT), checking conditions along the Aspen Grove Trail, when he fell at about 5:20 p.m.
At first light the next morning, a Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) helicopter crew scooped Kohler off the mountain, using a cable hoist.

A Utah mother charged with child abuse after her 12-year-old son was found severely malnourished has waived a hearing where prosecutors would have presented the evidence against her.
The Spectrum newspaper in St. George reports a lawyer for Brandy K. Jaynes, 36, said Tuesday that she’ll enter a plea at her next court appearance.
Defense attorney Edward Flint tells the newspaper prosecutors haven’t offered her a plea deal, so the case may go to trial.
The boy weighed just 30 pounds when he was fo...

The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is considering a new rule that would allow some farmers to grow limited varieties of cannabis for research purposes.
The rule, given initial approval Tuesday by the state’s Agricultural Advisory Board, would allow anyone with a permit to grow industrial hemp, cannabis plants that contains only small quantities of THC, the psychoactive compound associated with marijuana.
Under the rule, to obtain a growing permit, producers would have to submit a resear...

Wildlife officials euthanized a black bear after it bit a camper in eastern Utah on July 4.
The man had been camping without a tent in Desolation Canyon and woke up with his head in the bear’s mouth, according to Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) spokeswoman Robin Cahoon.
He was on a rafting trip with seven others, and the campers drove away the bear, Cahoon said. He suffered minor injuries and drove himself out of the canyon to get medical attention.