By Robert Gehrke and Lisa Schencker

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 18, 2010 06:07AM

An offer of $140 million in federal money for education and health care is not being met with gratitude by Utah legislative leaders.

Far from it.

Instead, Utah’s Republican leaders are apoplectic that Congress provided the money — aimed at keeping teachers in the classroom and helping with the health care burden of low-income residents — and frustrated that any attempt to reject it may be fruitless.

“I’m truly astonished,” House Speaker David Clark, R-Santa Clara, said Tuesday. “Congress has unequivocally carried out the constitutional responsibilities of this state and this Legislature. … [Congress said] ‘The Utah Constitution doesn’t matter. We’re doing an end-run around this, and we’re going to decide how the money is going to be spent.’ ”

Astonishment! The Republicans are wailing at Obama for not fixing quickly enough the economy they ruined. When he takes action, they cry ‘No.” They block the very solutions necessary because they would rather have the country fail than Obama succeed. We are in a mess, a diabolical mess.

No decision has been made on whether Utah will seek the funds. Legislative leaders are meeting Continue reading…

By JUDY FAHYS

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 18, 2010 10:41AM

Federal regulators may well have the authority after all to decide how a Utah magnesium plant manages its hazardous waste, under a Denver appeals court’s ruling released Tuesday.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out an Oct. 17, 2007, decision by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson that US Magnesium in Tooele County is exempted from the nation’s cradle-to-grave hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).

In short, the appeals court said the Environmental Protection Agency can update its “tentative” interpretation of a regulation into a final one without additional public input. It ordered Benson to reconsider the case.

Is it any wonder we are in an environmental quagmire. Action began on this issue in 2001. The  case was eventually decided by Judge Benson in 2007. Three years later the Appeals Court overturns the decision and orders Benson to reconsider the case, thus it is still unresolved. This is a near total failure of the court system. All this delay has been worth millions to Mag Corp and to New York businessman Ira Rennert, and the public be damned.The corporate polluters are benefited by the slow moving court system and the earth and its inhabitants suffer irreparable damage.

The delay in this decision is far more devastating than the long and tedious process of the death penalty. This needs fixed, and who will fix it? Nobody. This is a horrible condemnation of our justice system.

“Even under the case law US Magnesium asks us to follow, the agency is at liberty to adopt without notice and comment a reasonable interpretation of that ambiguous regulation,” said the opinion written by Judge Neil M. Gorsuch and joined by the two other judges on the appeals panel.

Although neither side has said what it will do next, it is possible the ruling will finally settle the two-decade-old Continue reading…

By Rosemary Winters

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 18, 2010 06:07AM

As a new school year begins, health experts at the University of Utah warned parents Tuesday to keep energy drinks out of their kids’ backpacks.

“How much should the pediatric population drink? None,” said Howard Kadish, chief of pediatric emergency medicine at the U.

Caffeine-charged drinks such as Red Bull, Rockstar, Full Throttle and Who’s Your Daddy have flooded convenience and grocery stores in recent years. The beverages may contain the equivalent of two or three cups of coffee. Among teenagers, they’ve become go-to drinks for parties and late-night studying.

Young people are especially vulnerable to the harmful side effects of caffeine, said Barbara Crouch, a pharmacologist and director of the Utah Poison Control Center. Those who guzzle energy drinks can experience anxiety, heart palpitations, restlessness, sleeplessness, nausea, vomiting and — in extreme cases — heart arrhythmias and seizures.

It’s not a new issue. In 2009, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a paper in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence that called for more accurate labeling of energy Continue reading…

What consumers should know about buying olive oil

By Kathy Stephenson

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 17, 2010 07:05PM

Two decades ago, the only place to buy a bottle of olive oil was a Greek or Italian specialty market.

Today, bottles of this healthy oil are sold everywhere, from local grocery stores to big-box warehouses. Each year, U.S. consumers spend $700 million on olive oil.

But with more choices has come an array of marketing terms such as “extra-virgin,” “cold-pressed,” “light” and “unfiltered.” Taken together, these labels can seem confusing and inconsistent, as in the past the product hasn’t been regulated by the federal government.

Why would we post an article on olive oil? This article is not only about olive oil, but also about the important role that government plays in labeling of food products. It is a prime example of what happens without government supervision.

Currently none of us know the true quality of olive oil. For years I’ve been buying ‘extra virgin’ because the nutritionists have indicated there is an important difference. Now I discover that ‘extra virgin’ may not be what it claims to be, and one thing is for sure, we cannot depend on the integrity of free enterprise corporations. That is the Law of the Jungle that so around here pray to every day.

From now we will all know to look for the USDA rating label before buying an olive oil.

For the average consumer, it can be difficult to figure out what these terms actually mean, as well as why one bottle of 100 percent extra-virgin olive costs $6, while another costs $20 or more.

The confusion could be ending soon, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently adopted a new set of standards. Companies are encouraged to adopt the USDA’s definitions to help consumers differentiate the best oils from the cheap imposters. The federal agency adopted the new regulations in April, and plans to start enforcing Continue reading…

(This is a blog by Glen Warchol of the Salt Lake Tribune)

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 13, 2010 12:49PM
Utah’s journalism and political communities have been buzzing the last couple weeks with rumors of an impending implosion of the Deseret News. Let me concisely repeat the rumors:

• In the next few weeks, a significant part of the DNews staff will be laid off.

• What remains will leave the Deseret News building in the heart of downtown to be resettled with KSL in the Triad Center.

• The DNews will no longer publish daily, but three days or so a week (it would, of course, continue to exist online with Mormon Times).

The staff at the DNews is so utterly demoralized and terrified that it is impossible to get any of this nailed down on the record. As one DNewser told a Trib colleague: “the stink of fear” permeates the newsroom.

Salt Lake City Weekly’s Josh Loftin, a former DNews editor and reporter, tries to make sense of the weak signal coming from inside the monolith of Mormon Media under new strongman Mark Willes.

Despite the recent de-evolution of the 150-year-old DNews under Editor Joe Cannon (photo above) and Willes from the “Christian Science Monitor of the West” to a LDS faith-promoting publication with a purged political staff, it still remained a player in Utah’s media, particularly in state government coverage.
Newspapers, including The Tribune, have struggled the last few years with declining revenues following the online information revolution, but the DNews also has been buffeted by pressures to publish news with a positive slant and to advance the LDS religion. Such goals are, of course, an anathema to good journalism.

The funny thing is that everyone in the business thought the DNews would outlast the Tribune because of its iconic position in LDS Church history. But all it took was a couple of suits with a management theory.
Full disclosure: Hard to believe, but I was a reporter at the DNews in the 1980s.

By TONY SEMERAD

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 14, 2010 10:26PM

The amount of federal stimulus cash pumped into Utah by the controversial American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has now surpassed the $3 billion mark in spending and as much as another $1.5 billion in tax cuts.

Spending alone — on education, business and student loans, road and infrastructure construction, energy projects, and expansion of existing social welfare programs like jobless assistance and food stamps — has pushed Utah’s benefit from the stimulus to $1,110 per resident, according to data newly compiled by the nonprofit investigative journalism website ProPublica.org.

That puts Utah slightly below the national per capita average of $1,170.

But the Utah stimulus figure is much higher than $3 billion. Almost $1.5 billion more in tax cuts — not part of spending data — has been reaching Utah pocketbooks since 2009, through the stimulus bill’s changes in payroll withholding brackets and relief from the alternative minimum tax for middle-class taxpayers.

So, with a financial boost that large — one likely to be more even than the $3.7 billion the bill originally targeted for Utah — what do taxpayers have to show for the money?

A lot, it turns out.

This is great news—but Republicans will twist it into bad news.Through the eyes of a Republican Obama can do nothing right. Whatever he is doing is wrong. If the stimulus is helping the economy then we are ruining the economy with deficit spending. If the stimulus isn’t working then blame Obama. Whatever the situation — the Party of No can turn it upside down.

“Whenever you get that amount of money infused into the state, it has to have a certain amount of benefit,’’ said John Nixon, budget director for Gov. Gary Herbert, who has helped shape Continue reading…

Here is the full text of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s speech following a vote that clears most major hurdles for the construction of a planned mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero:

by Mayor Michael Bloomberg

“We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We’ve come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever – this is the freest City in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.

Score one for Mayor Bloomberg. On second thought—score TEN!

This speech was eloquent, fair, scholarly, and open minded. It was in the moderate,  inclusive and forthright style of Barack Obama. That these grand words of peace and brotherhood came from the mouth of a Republican is, in this day and age, almost beyond belief. The Republican Party, which has become the party of bigotry, will be disowning the mayor when they read or hear these remarks.

Hats off to Mayor Bloomberg. He got it right! It should go a long way in toning down the vitriolic rhetoric coming from the so-called Christian patriots who don’t have a clue about the rule of law and the constitution.

“Our doors are open to everyone – everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants – by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life and it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.
“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.  ”Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue – and they were turned down.

“In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies – and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion – and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, Continue reading…