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Local News Highlights: Daily Briefing

Morning must reads for Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Good Tuesday morning from Salt Lake City. Today is the 192nd day of the year. There are 173 days remaining in 2017.

John Curtis has a lead in the race for the GOP nomination in the 3rd CD, but most voters are undecided. Tanner Ainge wants to focus on deficit reduction if he's elected to Congress. Donald Trump Jr. was told damaging information about Hillary Clinton was part of a Russian government effort to help his father's campaign.

The clock:

• 14 days until ballots for the August primary are mailed to voters (7/25/2017)
• 35 days until the 2017 Utah primary election (8/15/2017)
• 119 days until the 2017 election (11/7/2017)
• 195 days until the opening day of the 2018 Utah Legislature (1/22/2018)
• 240 days until the final day of the 2018 Utah Legislature (3/8/2018)
• 483 days until the 2018 midterm elections (11/6/2018)
• 1,211 days until the 2020 presidential election (11/3/2020)

Today's political TL; DR -

• NEW POLL: Provo Mayor John Curtis has a 17-point lead over Chris Herrod and a 19-point lead over Tanner Ainge in the 3rd Congressional District primary race, but nearly half of GOP voters there are still undecided [Utah Policy].
  
  
• Tanner Ainge says he wants to focus on entitlement reform and reducing the federal debt if he wins the special election in the 3rd CD this fall [Utah Policy].
  
  
• Speaker Greg Hughes says something needs to be done about the homeless crisis in downtown Salt Lake City, but he's short on specifics [Tribune].
  
  
• President Donald Trump has nominated Utahn Randall Quarles to be the Fed vice chair of supervision. He would become the top official in charge of regulating banks. The position was created by Congress in 2010 but never filled during the Obama administration [Wall Street Journal].
  
  
• A judge rules that the Mountain Accord is subject to Utah's open-meeting laws, which will allow a lawsuit by residents and landowners to move ahead [Tribune].
  
  
• A lawsuit against the state claims the Utah Highway Patrol and Utah Department of Transportation were playing favorites among the companies that they use to clean up heavy-duty towing operations. The lawsuit also alleges a UHP trooper sexually harassed one of the towing company's employees [Deseret News].
  
  
• Health care advocates are concerned about a proposed 60-month lifetime limit on Medicaid benefits for certain recipients [Deseret News, Tribune].
  
  
• A new study says Provo is the second-best run city in the nation [Daily Herald].
  
  
• The Utah Transit Authority has begun live streaming board meetings [Deseret News].

National headlines:

• BOMBSHELL! Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who was offering potentially damaging information against Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was told in an email that the information was part of a Russian government effort to help his father's campaign [New York Times]. 
  
  
• The Senate is set to try again on healthcare, but time is running out before the scheduled August recess [Reuters]. 
  
  
• A health care plan pushed by Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee has the potential to destabilize health insurance markets [Politico].
  
  
• The number of uninsured adults in the U.S. has grown to 11.7% [Gallup].
  
  
• President Trump's voter fraud task force may be set to propose changes to the U.S. National Voter Registration Act, which would likely touch off a partisan battle over voting rights [USA Today].
  
  
• Climate change could wreak unimaginable havoc by the end of the century. Here are just a few things humanity could be facing very soon [New York Magazine].
  
  
• Sen. Mike Lee says Donald Trump is, indeed, a conservative [Politico].

On this day in history:

• 1533 - England's King Henry VIII was excommunicated.
  
  
• 1798 - The U.S. Marine Corps was created by an act of Congress.
  
  
• 1804 - Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a pistol duel near Weehawken, N.J.
  
  
• 1960 - "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was published.
  
  
• 1979 - The abandoned U.S. space station Skylab returned to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia.
  
  
• 1995 - The United States normalized relations with Vietnam.

Today At Utah Policy

Ainge says entitlement reform, cutting spending should be top priorities for Congress By Bryan Schott, Managing Editor Tanner Ainge says he skipped the traditional delegate/convention route to get on the Republican primary ballot for one simple reason. Gathering signatures to secure a place in the primary gave him a chance at political survival....

Poll: 3rd District GOP race still up for grabs By Bryan Schott, Managing Editor Provo Mayor John Curtis has a lead over his Republican rivals in the race for the GOP nomination in the 3rd Congressional District, but the race is still up for grabs with about a month to go before the primary election....

Policy News

Fox Files: 'There's an app for that' 2017 marks the ten year anniversary of the iPhone. Remember the ubiquitous Apple slogan from the iPhone's early days, "there's an app for that"? Even though you may not have heard the slogan for a while, it is as true as it has ever been....

Utah Drone Summit The Utah Drone Summit (UDS2017) and National Drone Races will be held at the Salt Palace Convention Center and at the Ogden/Hinckley Airport....

Wise Words

Success

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." Albert Einstein

Lighter Side

Unplanned

"A birth control pill has been recalled due to a packaging error that puts placebo pills at the beginning of the pack rather than at the end. So pick up a pack today at Unplanned Parenthood." Seth Meyers