Access Utah

According to NPR, the Defense Department estimates there are about 19,000 sexual assaults in the military per year, but according to Pentagon statistics, only a small fraction of these cases go to court-martial. Last fall, nineteen current and former members of the U. S. military filed a lawsuit alleging that they were sexually assaulted while serving. They claim that even though reform has been p...

Poet, playwright and Logan native May Swenson would have been 100 this year and USU scholars have organized a centennial celebration, including readings by A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor and former Utah Poet Laureate, and current University of Utah English Professor, Katherine Coles, on April 25 at 7:00 p.m. in the Morgan Theater of the USU Chase Fine Arts Center. (The reading is f...

Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to author David Gessner about his latest article "How Vernal Utah Grew to Love Big Oil" in the March 2013 issue of One Earth magazine.

Eva Kor is a Holocaust survivor and victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Mengele was given the name “Angel of Death,” because of his position as a SS physician in charge of selecting which new prisoners of the camp would be killed or selected for forced labor. Kor and her sister launched a search for other twins who survived Mengele’s experiments and located 122...

Moab resident Steph Davis is a superstar in the climbing community. But when her husband made a controversial climb of Delicate Arch, the media fallout and the toll on her marriage left her without a partner or an income. Accompanied by her beloved dog, Fletch, she set off in search of a new identity and discovered sky diving. Though falling out of an airplane is antithetical to a climber’s contro...

When nine Vietnamese women arrived at Virginia Sudbury’s law office in Pago Pago, American Samoa she wasn’t sure she would take the case. She ended up as lead plaintiff attorney in precedent-setting case which drew international attention to issues of involuntary servitude and human trafficking in far-flung U. S. territories. Virginia Sudbury now lives in Utah, and is author of a new book: “Sweats...

We’ll address issues in Higher Education on Tuesday’s Access Utah. How did Utah’s colleges and universities fare at the Utah legislature? How best to plan for the change in age requirements for LDS missionaries? What does the future of higher education look like? Will we see more online classes, video conferencing and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs?) Will these new methods of teaching and lear...

Jack Schmidt, professor in Utah State University's department of watershed sciences and head of the US Geological Survey's Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, has long studied the Colorado River. He's among the team of scientists that designed a series of controlled releases of water from Glen Canyon Dam in an effort to restore habitats altered by the use of dams.

Mark Lynas, author of “The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans” joined us for the hour on Wednesday. He says we need to embrace Nuclear Power and Genetically Modified Organisms as parts of any successful portfolio of solutions to Climate Change. Many fellow environmentalists disagree.

Mark Lynas is the author of a number of books, including The God Species, and is Tom Williams guest for the hour. We discuss Lynas' idea that we must master human technology, like nuclear power, to save the world from ourselves.

When USA Today invited their readers to send in questions about fracking for Duke University professor Robert Jackson, readers responded with such questions as: “What happens to the chemicals that are left behind after the fracking process? What is the risk to well water? It’s my understanding that fracking uses massive amounts of water? Does fracking cause earthquakes?”

According to www.domesticviolencestatistics.org every 9 seconds in the U. S. a woman is assaulted or beaten; domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women—more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined; and nearly 1 in 5 teenage girls who have been in a relationship said a boyfriend threatened violence or self-harm if presented with a breakup.

What should government’s role be in promoting our health? New York City’s mandated downsizing of sodas was recently blocked by judge. In Utah, HCR2, which urges the state to address obesity, overwhelmingly passed the 2013 legislature. Some governments are adding fatty foods and violent video games to the traditional list of goods, like tobacco and alcohol, subject to “sin taxes.”

Governor Gary Herbert will join us on Thursday’s Access Utah. We’ll ask him about Medicaid expansion, guns, the possible prison move, air quality, the economy, and anything else you’d like us to talk about. We’ll also ask the governor if there are any bills he may veto. Later in the program Sen. Todd Weiler R-Woods Cross joins us to talk about his proposal that we look at changing Attorney General...

The book by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein: “It’s Even Worse than It Looks--How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism” caused quite a stir when it was published last year. Mann and Ornstein said that the dysfunction in our government is the result of a mismatch between increasingly parliamentary-style parties and our constitutional separation of powers. Th...

Our guest for the hour today is Emil Kerenji, an applied research scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We’ve recently experienced a zombie renaissance and Southern Utah University Assistant Professor Kyle Bishop has a book out called: “American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture.” He says that zombie movies reflect our cultural anxieties. Indeed, such movies have addressed the violence of the Vietnam War, fears of mass annihilation during the Cold War...

On the next-to-last day of the 2013 Utah Legislature, we’ll ask you which issues you’re focused on: Liquor Laws? Guns? Medicaid Expansion? The Budget? Social Services? State’s Rights? Education? Is there a bill you hope passes? Maybe there’s a bill you hope dies in the home stretch?

BYU is out with a poll on Utahns’ attitudes toward guns and Utah Parents Against Gun Violence recently delivered a letter to Governor Herbert urging him to veto a bill which would loosen concealed carry restrictions.

Amit Peled was raised on an Israeli kibbutz listening to cassette tapes of the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. He went on to become a prominent cellist in his own right and was recently selected to play Pablo Casals’ cello.

During the first half of Access Utah, Sheri Quinn talks with author Christine Geery about her first book, "A Heart Full of Hope." In the book, she tells the stories of what she calls her "ordinary life." Each story reveals the extraordinary experiences many of us can relate to but oftentimes overlook.

How do we control health care costs, reduce the numbers of uninsured Utahns, ensure high quality health care, and provide for a sound economy? Governor Herbert and Utah legislators are grappling with those questions and deciding how to implement the Affordable Care Act and whether to expand Medicaid.

The U. S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments later this month on a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, narrowly approved by voters in 2008. The amendment to the state’s constitution states that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The Utah Pride Center and 26 other groups recently filed a brief with court urging the justices to declare that gay a...

The recent suicide of Utah junior high school student, David Phan, has focused attention on bullying. Other recent teen suicides have prompted action at the Utah legislature.

We’ll try to find a good balance among many competing uses of our limited water supply on Monday’s Access Utah. We’ll preview the Bear River Basin Forum, sponsored by the Bear River Watershed Council.