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      Mitt Romney booed and called ‘traitor’ at Utah Republican convention

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      Mitt Romney was loudly booed at the Utah Republican party convention on Saturday – and called a “traitor” and a “communist” as he tried to speak.“Aren’t you embarrassed?” the Salt Lake City Tribune reported the Utah senator asking the crowd of 2,100 delegates at the Maverik Center in West Valley City. “I’m a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president’s character issues.”Romney was the sole Republican to vote to impeach Donald Trump twice – for seeking political dirt on opponents from Ukraine and for inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January, before which he told supporters to “fight like hell” in support of his lie that the presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden.Six other Republican senators voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment.“You can boo all you like,” Romney told a crowd the Tribune said spat insults “like so many poison darts”.“I’ve been a Republican all my life. My dad was the governor of Michigan and I was the Republican nominee for president in 2012.”Romney, who will not face re-election in 2022, was also a governor of Massachusetts and would ordinarily be a member of the GOP establishment.But the party is firmly in the grip of Trump and his supporters – according to a CNN poll this week, 70% of Republicans believe the lie that Biden did not win enough legitimate votes to be president.At the Utah convention, a motion to censure Romney failed narrowly. Some in the crowd applauded and after the state party chair, Derek Brown, asked delegates to show respect, Romney ended with a plea to “come together in strength and unity”.Other speakers faced dissent, among them governor Spencer Cox. He told a largely maskless crowd he knew some “hated” him for his Covid-19 mitigation measures – but touted other moves such as banning “vaccine passports” in state government.Private businesses in Utah can still demand proof of vaccination.In one of many attacks on Biden’s attempts to pass new spending bills on top of the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill passed in March, Utah’s other senator, Mike Lee, told Republicans Democrats followed “one idea: unquestionable trust in government”.Chris Stewart, a congressman, told the crowd Biden was pursuing an agenda of “radical socialism”. He also said the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, “kind of sucks”. More

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      Revealed: the full extent of Trump’s ‘meat cleaver’ assault on US wilderness

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      For thousands of years, Native nations of the US south-west lived in the majestic canyons of Bears Ears.

      But it was land that conservative politicians and corporate interests also sought to control.

      So in late 2016, the Hopi celebrated when the Obama administration protected Bears Ears by declaring it a national monument, sheltering it from development and extraction.

      Just one year later, after Donald Trump took office, he drastically reduced the size of the monument by 85%.

      The administration justified the rollback by pointing to some local residents who opposed the monument. In truth it was also responding to a push by groups with deep ties to major GOP donors and the extractive industries.

      As the industry grew, the breaking point for Rogers was when a drilling pad was installed across the street from the home of a church family. Noxious fumes, nonstop industrial noise and dead birds followed, as Rogers tells it.

      The family reported headaches, nosebleeds and respiratory problems. Earlier this year, a pipe broke in the middle of the night and spewed a fluid drilling byproduct over the family’s home and livestock.

      The town is located in the middle of vast oil and gas fields, much of which are public lands.

      The Trump administration has opened up significant swaths of land around Carlsbad for oil and gas drilling.

      Scientists at the University of Wyoming discovered the Red Desert was the starting point of a wondrous large-mammal migration.

      Each year, hundreds of mule deer – a struggling species unique to the west – travel a 300-mile round trip from the Red Desert to forests south of Jackson Hole and back to feast on fresh greenery and bulk up in anticipation of winter.

      “It is the longest migration so far recorded for the species,” says Dr Matt Kauffman, a scientist with the US Geological Survey and the leader of the Wyoming Migration Initiative that maps migration corridors across Wyoming and the west. Each animal learns the route from its herd and follows the path “for the rest of its life”, he said.

      But around and within the corridor, land being leased for oil and gas drilling is on the rise. This magnificent migration depends on the region’s relatively undisturbed landscape, which includes private land as well as vast tracts of public land. More

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      Trump finalizes plans to open Utah monuments for mining and drilling

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      Lawsuits are pending from groups who have challenged the constitutionality of shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Plans finalized on Thursday for two national monuments in Utah downsized by Donald Trump would ensure that lands previously off-limits to energy development will be open to mining and drilling. The move comes despite pending lawsuits from conservation, […] More