POSTED // Apr 17,2013 - January 2013 catapulted Utah onto the world stage—for all the wrong reasons. An oppressive smog extended from Provo, across Salt Lake City, and north to Logan. Only driving up to Park City afforded escape.

POSTED // Apr 17,2013 - In 1999, Andy Swapp bought a small farm outside Milford, in central Utah. When he plowed a field, the tail end of the Santa Ana winds, he says, picked up the topsoil and “sand-blasted the paint off the side of the barn.”

POSTED // Apr 3,2013 - In his first weeks as principal at West Lake Junior High, Ike Spencer learned that student gang members controlled a certain hallway, preventing other kids from using it.

POSTED // Mar 20,2013 - A student resolution under discussion by the University of Utah’s student government argues that fossil-fuel-driven climate change results in 400,000 deaths globally every year. The resolution’s critics argue that billions are kept warm and fed because of fossil fuels.

POSTED // Feb 28,2013 - Paul Payne was 16 the first time he was locked up. Payne was being held in a juvenile detention center for a spree of car break-ins in his hometown of Colorado Springs, Colo.

POSTED // Feb 20,2013 - In late 2012, Palmer DePaulis, executive director of the Department of Human Services, decided to retire after 20 years in high-profile positions for the state.

POSTED // Feb 6,2013 - In late December 2011, Weber County Attorney Dee Smith received a call from Steve Olsen, chair of the Weber Democratic Party.

POSTED // Jan 30,2013 - “What’s the good word?” Fourth Street Clinic physician assistant Joel Hunt asks Calvin Davis in the lobby of the Sunrise Metro public-housing complex.

POSTED // Jan 23,2013 - Before Kristine Biggs took Morgan County deputies on a high-speed chase in November 2012, Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings hadn’t had much trouble in ruling the seven officer-involved shootings that had landed on his desk

POSTED // Jan 2,2013 - Ana Canenguez wanted to kill herself when she was 7 years old. But, even on tiptoes, she couldn’t quite reach a tin of rat poison on a shelf at the back of a street-corner shack where she lived in Santa Elena, El Salvador.