Gov. Gary Herbert and legislative leaders announced Thursday that they are abandoning efforts during the current session, which ends March 14, to overhaul the state’s tax code. The abrupt turnabout came in the face of mounting pressure and criticism from industry, community and education leaders.

The announcement follows weeks of closed-door negotiations over HB441, which sought to dramatically expand the state’s sales tax through the addition of new taxes on service-based business. Those new taxes would have been offset in the aggregate by a corresponding cut to the state’s income tax, which is earmarked for spending on public education.

“For a number of reasons, this session we’re not going to be moving forward with pursuing the passage of HB441 over the next week or two,” said House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville.

Herbert, Wilson and Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, committed to continuing discussions of tax reform over the coming months, with the governor saying he hopes to call the Legislature back into special session “by this summer.”

Utah’s economy is shifting away from traditional sales, Adams said, leading to dwindling receipts for the state’s general fund and prompting lawmakers to pull between $200 million and $300 million in sales tax revenue out of the higher education budget this year to fund other programs.

“We cannot sustain that,” Adams said. “It affects the education community, it affects every agency in the state. We have to have a solution to this problem.”

While Thursday’s news conference in the ostentatious Gold Room added some formality to those statements, major tax reform has been a recurring subject on Capitol Hill for years. A 2017 effort similarly saw weeks of closed-door discussions, which ultimately gave way in the final days of the session to talk of interim discussions that never fully materialized.

The governor even pointed back to similar efforts by Gov. Olene Walker in 2003-2004 and, later, by Gov. Jon Huntsman.

“This is not easy," Herbert said Thursday. "It would have been easy to kick it down the road as we see too often on tough issues around the country. ... That’s not how we do it in Utah. We’re embracing the challenge, we’re going to find the right solutions.”

The governor had declared tax reform to be his No. 1 priority for the 2019 session during his State of the State address, and had built a combination of reform and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts into his budget recommendations.

On Thursday, he bristled when asked if he and lawmakers had “caved” to public pressure, saying the word is pejorative and that government leaders instead “responded to what the public understands and wants to do.”

“I don’t think we caved to anything,” Herbert said.

Wilson said that it is “tricky” to tackle a topic like tax reform during Utah’s annual 45-day session, and that there is value to taking more time to consider the proposed changes.

“We’ll keep at it,” he said.

The sweeping tax reform proposal, in the form of HB441, was publicly released last week, with the session’s March 14 adjournment fast approaching. The measure would have begun taxing everything from funeral services to lawn care, from legal services to ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft.

Bill sponsor Rep. Tim Quinn, R-Heber, on Thursday morning said he had enough votes to pass the reform package out of the House. And even after state leaders put the proposal on ice, he continued to assert that House members would’ve passed HB441 in a floor vote.

He would not say whether the Senate was responsible for the bill’s demise this session. Now, he says, he’s focused on building statewide support for the legislation.

“And then we pass it in a special session," he told The Salt Lake Tribune. "We accomplish the same thing, we just do it a few months down the road.”

Adams, the Senate president, said in an interview with The Tribune that he’d held out hope the plan could be enacted right up until Thursday. “I still wanted to try to catch that Hail Mary, but the reality is, there just wasn’t time,” he said.

“When our senators find out that there’s a policy that’s worth doing, they’ll march through all kinds of adversity to do the right thing. And we just need to get the policy right," he said. “We’re very close to it.”

Discussion on the bill will likely focus on the taxation of business inputs, or services that one company provides to another, Senate and House leaders said. Taxing each of these inputs — the accounting, legal and architectural services that a construction firm might use, for example — has a snowballing effect that can add significant cost to the company’s final product, lawmakers and businesspeople say.

The bill’s authors had prepared some language addressing these concerns and planned to insert it on the Senate side, Quinn said. But they didn’t get the chance.

Quinn acknowledged he’s disappointed that HB441 didn’t clear the Legislature this session but said every new policy benefits from more input. He’s just keeping his fingers crossed that lawmakers don’t give in to the industries pressuring them for tax carveouts.

“I hope we can stand strong and realize that we have a good framework and foundation for good policy,” he said.

The snowball effect of cascading service taxes was a primary sticking point for the state’s business and technology community. And after Thursday’s announcement, Salt Lake Chamber President Derek Miller issued a statement taking credit for the decision to postpone HB441 for interim review.

“After hearing from a number of our member businesses and listening to their concerns, we called upon the governor and the Legislature to allow for more time for deliberation on efforts to modernize Utah’s tax code,” Miller said. “We recognize a policy change of this magnitude requires a robust public process and ample discussion.”

Last week, the Salt Lake Chamber sent out a news release quickly declaring support for HB441 and calling the legislation a “monumental step forward.” But by Thursday, the organization was lobbying state leaders to push the pause button.

Abby Osborne, the group’s vice president of public policy and government relations, said the chamber was never fully on board with the bill but is solidly behind tax modernization in concept.

Misconceptions about the proposal are running rampant in Utah’s business community, she said. So in addition to suggesting changes to the tax-reform package, the chamber will spend coming weeks and months trying to educate its members about it.

“We all know that all of us are going to have to pay a little bit of the price. But how and what and how and when needs to be addressed,” she said.

The bill was also opposed by the Utah Education Association, which met with House leadership earlier in the week and objected to cutting the state’s income tax rate in lieu of significant investment in public education. Sarah Young, UEA’s government relations director, said the organization was happy with the decision to reconsider immediate passage of HB441.

“We recognize that the sales tax and the impact on the general fund need to be restructured,” Young said, “and we’re supportive of that process.”

The proposal’s effect on education funding was also cited by the left-leaning Alliance for a Better Utah in its reaction to Thursday’s announcement. In a prepared statement, executive director Chase Thomas urged lawmakers to allow for public input as part of its ongoing deliberations on tax reform.

“We support these efforts to modernize our tax system, securing much needed revenue for the future," Thomas said. "But we would urge lawmakers to leave the income tax rate alone so that our schools can receive much-needed investment. Our children are counting on us to secure a bright future for them, and we can’t do it without adequate funding for K-12 education.”

Democrats, who make up a minority in the Legislature, also praised the delay.

“We are glad the people of Utah made their voices heard to slow down the process of developing tax reform legislation which will affect every resident and every company that does business in the state,” House Democrats said in a statement.

"We agree that as we shift from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy, tax reform is necessary to balance our state finances. But it cannot be done on the backs of small local businesses and cannot come at the expense of education. "

If lawmakers are unable to reach a consensus for a special session, their next scheduled opportunity to pass tax reform would be during the 2020 session, the same year the full House and half the Senate will face election.

Asked Thursday about whether changes to the tax code become more difficult the closer it gets to the next election, Herbert, who has indicated he won’t run for re-election, hesitated and then said, “I’ll just let the Legislature answer that.”

Adams said “that may play into effect but I don’t think so. I think we’re looking for a good policy.”

Wilson said the election for most lawmakers next year hadn’t even been on their radar.

“Election cycles — we just finished one for crying out loud," he said. "We don’t want to think about that right now, we just want to think about getting this [tax imbalance] fixed.”

This Pat Bagley cartoon appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Friday, March 8, 2019. You can check out the past 10 Bagley editorial cartoons below:

• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/03/06/bagley-cartoon-temple-bar/" target=_blank><u>The Temple Bar</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/03/05/bagley-cartoon-real/"><u>The Real National Emergency</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/03/04/bagley-cartoon-war/"><u>The War on Hamburgers</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/03/01/bagley-cartoon-loyalty/"><u>Loyalty Oaf</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/02/28/bagley-cartoon-shredding/"><u>Shredding the Constitution</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/02/28/bagley-cartoon-liars-club/"><u>The Liar’s Club</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/02/26/bagley-cartoon-nordic/"><u>The Nordic Menace</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/02/25/bagley-cartoon-utahs-hot/"><u>Utah’s Hot Topic</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/02/22/bagley-cartoon-state-flag/"><u>State Flag Redesign</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2019/02/21/bagley-cartoon-partners/"><u>Partners in Crime</u></a>

Want more Bagley? Become a fan on Facebook.

Amendments drastically alter a bill to ban conversion therapy in Utah, leading to the resignation of a prominent LGBTQ advocate from a state suicide task force. Utah lawmakers abandon a proposed tax overhaul, for now. And prosecutors drop counts against a medical cannabis patient facing drug charges.

At 9 a.m. on Friday, Salt Lake Tribune senior managing editor Matt Canham, reporter Bethany Rodgers, and news columnist Robert Gehrke join KCPW’s Roger McDonough to talk about the week’s top stories. Every Friday at 9 a.m., stream “Behind the Headlines” at kcpw.org, or tune in to KCPW 88.3 FM or Utah Public Radio for the broadcast. Join the live conversation by calling (801) 355-TALK.

For two years, a group of world-class scientists pitched their idea for a hot new biotech company to investors: a start-up focused on a promising therapy for preeclampsia, a serious pregnancy complication that can become life-threatening. It was cutting-edge science, backed by a Nobel laureate, a Harvard kidney specialist, a leading chemist, and a biologist with both expertise and personal experience.

Eventually, they gave up — not on the science, and not on preeclampsia — but on the investors.

"We talked to so many different venture capitalists and other companies. The scientists and doctors would get excited," said Melissa Moore, a University of Massachusetts Medical School scientist who began working on preeclampsia after she suffered from it in 2003 and was put on bed rest for more than a month, only to give birth seven weeks early to a baby girl who weighed less than four pounds. "But as soon as their lawyers heard 'sick, pregnant women,' nothing happened," Moore said. "There's such a sense of liability."

Moore and her colleagues' experience highlights a persistent problem in medical research. About 10 percent of reproductive-age women become pregnant each year in the United States, but far less research is done into pregnancy than into much less common conditions. The effect of medicines on pregnant women and their fetuses is rarely studied. Basic understanding of pregnancy itself is full of gaping scientific holes, mysteries that include how the placenta forms and what, exactly, controls the timing of birth. Some pregnancy experts call the placenta, an organ that is necessary for all human reproduction, the Rodney Dangerfield of the human body because it gets "no respect."

The default assumption has long been — and, to a large extent, still is — that it's essential to protect pregnant women from research, rather than ensure they benefit from its rapid progress. But concerted pressure from scientists and advocates is slowly beginning to change policy and research culture.

In January, an updated federal policy that governs protections for human research subjects went into effect, officially removing pregnant women from being listed as "vulnerable to coercion or undue influence," alongside children and "mentally disabled" people.

"We all joke about pregnancy brain, but I was still able to make decisions for myself and my fetus," said Sonja Rasmussen, a pediatrician and clinical geneticist at the University of Florida.

Separately, a federal task force last year recommended that pregnant women's participation in drug trials that offered benefit to the fetus no longer require the approval of the father of the child as well.

"Once the child is born, only consent of one parent is needed," said Catherine Spong, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who chaired the task force. "Given the autonomy of pregnant women and the evolution of family structure, we really should align that with parental consent for pediatrics."

Activists successfully pushed for more women to be included in medical research in the 1990s, but pregnant and lactating women have largely been left behind. Now, another round of activism that began a decade ago is pushing new thinking on pregnancy. High maternal mortality rates in the United States have intensified the focus, and there is a growing awareness that conditions during pregnancy can affect a baby's risk of developing chronic conditions late in life.

Some researchers note that pregnant women are increasingly being studied in their own right — and not just as the environment in which a fetus develops. Recent evidence suggests that pregnancy complications may predict women's susceptibility to dementia or heart disease decades later.

“Probably most people think pregnancy is a time-limited experience, and therefore, because it lasts only nine months, we don’t need to invest that many resources in it — because it’ll be over soon,” said Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “But that’s really a fallacious idea. Pregnancy is a stress test for a woman, and there are these dual opportunities, to both understand what lies ahead for the pregnant woman, but also by doing research that ensures a healthy pregnancy, we’re contributing to the long-term health of the nation.”

The medical attitude toward pregnancy was shaped more than half a century ago by the thalidomide crisis, when women who took the medication for morning sickness had babies with birth defects. The incident helped launch the modern era of U.S. drug regulation, with requirements to prove the effectiveness and safety of drugs before they could be approved for sale. Pregnant women, however, are typically left out of such research.

One study found that the risks to human pregnancy were "undetermined" in 98 percent of prescription drugs approved between 2000 and 2010. An analysis of historical data showed it took nearly three decades to get more precise risk information. That's despite the fact that of the 6 million women in the United States who are pregnant each year, 90 percent take at least one medication.

Anne Drapkin Lyerly, a bioethicist and obstetrician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that there is a deep-seated norm to leave pregnant women out of clinical trials, reinforced by policies that have classified them as "vulnerable" and institutional rules that have made it easier to avoid considering the potential risks and benefits altogether.

"If you want to exclude a pregnant woman from research, all you've got to do is check the box; she's excluded, no explanation needed," Lyerly said. "If you want to include her, there's a whole slew of paperwork and decisions, and you have to justify your decision."

Taking women out of the vulnerable category is a long way from changing their access to drug trials or changing the incentives drug companies have to include them, but advocates say it's a long-overdue start. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also released draft guidance on when to include women in clinical trials, laying out the case that there is a "critical public health need" for more information on how to use drugs safely in pregnant women.

"If you don't do these studies, then you don't have the data to base your decision, but you're still making decisions," Spong said. "You're providing care in the absence of data."

During the flu pandemic of 2009, Rasmussen recalled deliberating with other experts on whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should recommend that pregnant women should be given Tamiflu — which it did.

"It's one of the things I'm proudest of in my career is we looked at that and weighed the risk and benefits instead of the knee-jerk, 'We can't let pregnant women have that because the data are limited,' " Rasmussen said.

Another teaching moment for the medical community came last year, when an HIV drug called dolutegravir was flagged as potentially causing birth defects through a study that surveilled the use of the drug in Botswana.

"The dolutegravir finding was something that oriented the whole HIV research community toward research in pregnancy, even people who don't work with pregnant women. It raised questions about how to think about women," Lyerly said.

For people who are pregnant or hope to conceive, the unknowns extend far beyond what drugs women can safely take. The National Institutes of Health, which tracks its research funding on nearly 300 health categories, ranging from rare Batten disease to ubiquitous allergies, only began breaking out its spending on pregnancy, maternal health and breast-feeding in 2017.

Stephanie Hinze, 37, of Atlanta, suffers from spina bifida and has used a wheelchair since she was 8 years old. When she and her husband decided to conceive, there was little information for her to rely on — except for an informal network of other women with disabilities who had already had children. Concerns included whether it was safe to carry a child at all; fertility questions; whether she was gaining weight at the right rate, given that doctor's offices weren't equipped with accessible scales; and what to do when she couldn't feel the baby moving due to a decreased lack of sensation in her abdomen.

Hinze, who has two sons, one of whom is adopted, is now pregnant for the second time. She says she was lucky — her first pregnancy went smoothly and her medical team was supportive, contrasting with anecdotes she has heard from others. But at each step, they were solving new puzzles.

"My doctor, while he was great and very receptive, didn't know everything to expect. As things happened, during the pregnancy, he'd say, 'Let's deal with this issue and let's figure this out.' " Hinze said. "You don't want to go in and your doctor's not entirely sure what the solution will be for what's going on."

NIH last year partnered with the CDC to survey how disabled women experience pregnancy. The questions they hope to answer include: Are they more likely to develop complications? Does disability affect women's ability to breast-feed? What is their basic experience of pregnancy like?

"We don't know," said Alison Cernich, director of the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, describing the evidence gap around disability and pregnancy that she attributes to a "quadfecta" of barriers for women: Women's health is often overlooked, many disabled women belong to ethnic groups that do not receive optimal care due to bias, many disabled people experience poverty, and disabilities are often stigmatized.

The basic science of pregnancy, too, is getting a closer look, as NIH has so far funded $76 million in research projects to study the human placenta, the temporary organ that provides oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. The recent discovery that it is possible to grow a miniature version of the placenta in a laboratory setting may help scientists understand fundamental questions about how it develops, in part in response to secretions from the uterus.

"Even in the 21st century, we don't know what's in the secretions, we don't know the composition of them, which the whole of the future of the human species depends on," said Graham Burton, a professor of the physiology of reproduction at the University of Cambridge.

The placenta is necessary for a successful pregnancy, but it also affects the health of the pregnant woman. Preeclampsia, which causes maternal high blood pressure, is caused in part by proteins released from the placenta that affect the function of blood vessels in the mother. There is no treatment for preeclampsia, which ends only when the woman delivers the baby — and the placenta.

Surendra Sharma, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University, has been trying to tease out the science behind an alarming observation made by other researchers: women with preeclampsia appear to be at increased risk for dementia decades later. Intriguingly, he has found that there are misfolded proteins in the placenta from women with preeclampsia, similar to those found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's. Women with preeclampsia are also at increased risk for heart disease and stroke.

The idea that treating preeclampsia could help both mothers and babies adds urgency to the quest of Moore and colleagues, who have been disappointed but not deterred by the lack of investor enthusiasm.

"It was an eye-opener, really, to see how worried drug developers seemed to be about the pregnancy indication, but on the other hand, I don't think it's an insurmountable thing," said Craig Mello, a Nobel laureate and co-founder of the fizzled start-up.

Late last year, Moore and colleagues demonstrated a therapy's promise in treating a baboon version of preeclampsia. They hope to develop the drug through an unconventional nonprofit model.

Moore's expertise is rooted in basic biology, a deep understanding of a molecule called RNA that performs a slew of basic functions in cells, including turning instructions written in the genetic code into proteins and regulating the genome. When Moore was pregnant and suffering from preeclampsia, she first met S. Ananth Karumanchi, a Harvard physician who had discovered a protein that was overabundant in women with preeclampsia — and they began talking about using RNA to reduce the level of protein. Translating that insight into an effective drug now depends critically on a UMass Medical School chemist, Anastasia Khvorova.

As relative newcomers to the field of pregnancy, the team is undeterred by history.

“One of the reasons we’ve not had a lot of drugs for pregnant women is the risk is viewed as too high — and that’s really unfortunate,” said Karumanchi, who recently moved to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “I think not doing anything for these pregnant women is not an option.”

The mother of a 4-year-old boy whose hand was bitten off by a neighbor’s dog thanked people for their “amazing outpour[ing] of support,” asked for donations to help with her son’s recovery — and shared a description of the attack that differs from initial reports.

The boy was injured Sunday afternoon. At that time, Layton Fire Battalion Chief Jason Cook said the child was in his family’s backyard; had a sock on his hand; reached under a vinyl fence to play with two huskies who lived next door; and one of the dogs bit with enough force to sever his arm.

According to a Facebook post by the boy’s mother, Hope Brown, the “brutal attack” happened when “a husky went under our fence and bit Austin’s hand and then attempted to pull him back under the fence. Our baby lost his arm from the elbow down because it was ingested by the dog. He has multiple other bites up as well as severe bruising on his face and jaw and a black eye.”

A separate Facebook post, written by a woman who said she was sharing additional information from the mother, said Brown’s husband was with the boy and tried to fight off the dogs. It said the boy was wearing mittens.

The director of Davis County Animal Control, Rhett Nicks, said his staff is continuing to investigate the boy’s injury and expects to meet with both the boy’s family and the dogs’ owner next week. As to Brown’s account posted online, he said: “I can’t comment on that. That, in and of itself, is evidence for us.”

The two dogs are in quarantine to determine whether one or both has rabies. An investigation is underway to determine if the dogs are dangerous, and the possible outcomes range from no action to an order to euthanize the pets.

Brown wrote that her son had “emergency surgery” on Sunday; another surgery on Tuesday; and a third surgery was scheduled for Thursday. “We can use all the prayers, support, and help we can get.”

“We’re asking for donations to help during Austin’s hospital stay so we can be with our baby. He’s going to be here a little while longer. Any other donations will go towards helping Austin and our family during this time and hopefully getting a prosthetic in the future. He will need one from the elbow down.”

Neighbors set up an account at Golden West Credit Union to benefit the family — “Superman’s Army,” account 3660062 — and there’s also a Paypal link to the account.

“We’ve already had an amazing outpour[ing] of support from our neighborhood and community,” Brown wrote. “We are just overwhelmed with the of love and support shown to us in this horrific time.”

An online petition calling for the huskies’ lives to be spared continued to gather signatures — reaching nearly 170,000 by Thursday afternoon. Jessica Nusz, who described herself as a “best friend” of the owner of the dogs, Polar and Bear, wrote that Bear “was playing with what he thought was a toy” and “didn’t see that there was a child on the other side of the fence” when he “bit down too hard.”

The big school safety bill proposed this year to protect Utah students from a would-be shooter was revived Thursday after stalling in a deadlocked committee. But most of what was included in the original version has now been cut out.

The new trimmed measure would require teachers to take more lockdown trainings and fund two new state positions for a public safety liaison and a mental health specialist to focus on security in schools.

The earliest draft asked for nearly $100 million to hire more campus police officers and pay for structural improvements, including more locks, better cameras and bigger fences around schoolyards. Nearly all of that money was stripped from the measure for other bills.

And additional provisions in HB120 — including surveys to collect students’ opinions about their school environment and teams at each school that would determine when a kid might be a threat to peers — were slashed. The Senate Education Committee had questioned both of those Wednesday, suggesting it could infringe on student privacy and lead to teachers profiling students of color or those with disabilities. Other lawmakers said it called for “unfunded mandates” because there was only $1 million left in the proposal.

Though it is now gutted, the sponsor, Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful, said the measure still matters. “Some of you might ask, is it even worth bringing back?” he said. “Yes, it very much is.”

The bill has passed in the House. It will now head to the Senate floor after a unanimous vote in committee Thursday.

A Senate committee threw up a roadblock Thursday to a bill that would have allowed motorists to run red lights — if they first stopped for 90 seconds, determined the light is not cycling properly and proceeded when the coast is clear.

The Senate Transportation Committee voted down HB151 on a 1-5 vote. It The House earlier had passed it 39-34.

HB151 was strongly opposed by law enforcement, prosecutors, cities and the Utah Department of Transportation. They viewed it as hazardous, and a solution to a problem they say doesn’t exist.

But the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, said “it is a simple common-sense solution” that provides a method for someone who is interminably stuck at a red light” to legally proceed through it.

Jason Davis, deputy director of UDOT, said repeatedly that most signals on state highways are tied into central operations that automatically detect problems, which are quickly fixed.

But Ivory said malfunctioning lights are common enough “that we’ve all been there,” and the bill is needed. Instead of directly legalizing going through red lights in such instances, the bill sought to make doing so an “affirmative defense” if a driver receives a ticket.

But Linda Hull, UDOT policy and legislative services director, said, “People will use this law as an excuse to be able to drive through a red light.”

Senate Minority Leader Karen Mayne worried aloud of people using the law on “giant highways, where if people go through they are dead.” She opposed the bill.

Sen. Jake Anderegg was the bill’s lone supporter on the committee. “I am one who has blown through these intersections because I sat at an intersection at 3 a.m. for five minutes it never changed…. It requires common sense.”

After his bill went down, Ivory said, “I’ll be back” next year.

In a scene likely worth millions of dollars in free advertising, President Donald Trump displayed a spread of burgers from some of the country’s biggest fast-food chains inside the State Dining Room of the White House on Monday as hungry football players looked on.

With cameras rolling, he offered a presidential endorsement of "all-American" restaurants including McDonald's, Chick-fil-a and Wendy's.

"We like American companies, OK?" Trump said, standing before hundreds of Big Macs and chicken sandwiches alongside the North Dakota State football team. "Go eat up. Enjoy yourselves, everybody."

But the companies haven’t been quick to return the affection or attempt to cash in on the presidential product placement, with McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Wendy’s all remaining silent about Trump’s endorsements. When Trump held a similar event in January, Burger King was the only company to reference it on social media — by mocking Trump for misspelling the word hamburger in a tweet.

“[D]ue to a large order placed yesterday, we’re all out of hamberders,” Burger King tweeted on Jan. 15, a day after Trump honored the Clemson football team with Whoppers and Big Macs, adding that it was “just serving hamburgers today.”

due to a large order placed yesterday, we're all out of hamberders.
just serving hamburgers today.

— Burger King (@BurgerKing) January 15, 2019

The corporate reticence underscores the tense relationship between a polarizing president and top U.S. consumer brands. From Sharpies to Big Macs to Diet Cokes, companies behind some of the president's favorite products have kept him at arm's length even as he has lavished them with public praise and highlighted their products in the White House.

"It used to be that brands would love to get an endorsement from the president," said Tim Calkins, who teaches marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "Now, if anything, I think these companies probably squirm a bit."

Trump's own divisive brand makes him a less-than-ideal endorser for companies seeking to avoid the partisan fray, Calkins said.

Representatives of McDonald's, Burger King and Chick-fil-a did not respond to multiple requests asking if they welcomed Trump's endorsement. Newell Brands Inc., which produces the Sharpie pens Trump has praised while signing executive orders, also did not respond to multiple requests. White House officials also did not respond to requests for comment.

In the past, consumer brands have been eager to highlight their proximity to presidents, whose endorsements are especially significant because they are presumed to have access to the best products, said Nick Powills, CEO and chief brand strategist of Chicago-based No Limit Agency.

When then-President Barack Obama visited restaurants in Washington, D.C., and abroad, the companies regularly highlighted the visits on social media and some still have menu items named after him.

"It was almost like winning a Michelin star," Powills said of the presidential visits.

During a White House visit by the Boston Red Sox in 2014, slugger David Ortiz took a selfie with Obama on a Samsung smartphone. Samsung, which had an endorsement deal with Ortiz, tweeted out a photo of the "historic" moment, noting that it was "captured with his Galaxy Note 3."

Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter each invited instructors from Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics to give speed-reading courses to staff in the White House, a marketing coup for the company.

Today, even businesses that once sought out the Trump brand have acted to distance themselves from a president whose divisive and incendiary rhetoric has sparked opposition from more than half the country.

Since the 2016 campaign, six New York residential buildings have moved to strip the "Trump Place" logos from their facades, and several retailers have stopped selling Trump-branded apparel.

Nike, which last year moved out of a Trump-owned New York location, started an ad campaign in September featuring NFL quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick. The ads put Nike squarely at odds with Trump, who had attacked Kaepernick and other NFL players for kneeling in protest during the national anthem.

The company said its sales increased 10 percent in the quarter after the ad was released, despite public criticism from Trump.

"For companies whose consumers are more progressive, more Democratic, being called out by the president isn't a bad thing," said Julie Hootkin, a partner at Global Strategy Group. "It might be a really good thing."

Consumers increasingly want companies to take action on political and social issues, according to a study published last week by Global Strategy Group. The survey found that eight in 10 consumers want companies to take a stand, and almost half said it would be appropriate for corporations to take a position against Trump.

On the other hand, there are a number of brands that have actively played up their closeness with Trump, including U.S. Steel, Boeing, Fox News and Foxconn. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said Trump was "chosen by God."

And Trump is certainly not toxic to the thousands of supporters who have purchased his "Make America Great Again" hats and other campaign merchandise. Writers of pro-Trump books have lobbied White House aides to secure a presidential tweet, and the president's shout-outs have helped propel several tomes to bestseller status.

But companies also have discovered the dangers of associating with a mercurial president.

In early 2017, Harley-Davidson's top executives visited the White House and showed off several motorcycles to Trump, who praised the company for making products in America.

By 2018, Trump was publicly advocating for a boycott against Harley after the company announced it was shifting some of its production to Asia. The company blamed tariffs resulting from Trump's trade war with China and Europe. In January, Harley Chief Financial Officer John Olin told investors the tariffs would cost the company as much as $120 million in 2019.

"Many @harleydavidson owners plan to boycott the company if manufacturing moves overseas," Trump tweeted in August. "Great!"

A company spokeswoman declined to comment beyond saying that "there was no boycott."

Trump has also publicly attacked other private corporations, including Ford, General Motors, and the NFL. The president regularly attacks Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

Some companies, including outdoor retailer Patagonia, have taken aggressive stances against Trump's policies. Patagonia sued Trump in 2017 over his move to reduce the size of two national monuments in Utah, and used its retail website to deliver a stark message to shoppers: "The President Stole Your Land."

Patagonia spokeswoman Corley Kenna said the move was not driven by profit motives or politics.

"Our community expects us to take bold positions," she said.

Other brands have been reluctant to take on the president, who has been willing to use the power of his office to pursue vendettas against corporate foes.

"The silence is deafening," said Calkins, the Northwestern professor. "Everybody is very nervous about how the administration might respond."

Some brands have found other politicians more palatable than Trump, even in today's polarized climate. After Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced his presidential bid last month, the Twitter account for Hot Pockets posted a picture of the senator holding one of its snacks.

"@CoryBooker don't forget about us when you get elected," the company tweeted.

A company spokeswoman said there is no formula for deciding when to engage with politicians and noted the company's previous interaction with Booker about 2012 Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Apparel brand Rag & Bone posted a tweet of Obama sporting a customized version of the company's bomber jacket last month.

During his presidency, Obama's impromptu stops at local establishments would often spark celebratory tweets from the businesses: "#presidentialswag" Taylor Gourmet tweeted in 2014; "delighted" said Politics & Prose in 2014; "Super honored!" Shake Shack said in 2015.

Trump has largely avoided Washington, D.C.'s restaurants and small businesses, opting instead for restaurants inside the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Powills said the lack of response from the fast-food companies highlighted by Trump in recent weeks striking.

“It’s unfortunate that that’s what we’ve come to,” said Powills. “No matter what, you’re at a celebration at the White House and it should be something you (promote). It’s too bad that silence is the answer.”

Provo • The last thing BYU’s basketball team needs is a distraction as it heads into another West Coast Conference tournament that it must win in order to get back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2015.

That’s why Yoeli Childs is refusing to become one.

The big elephant in the room regarding Childs this season has been whether or not it will be his last in a Cougar uniform. The 6-foot-8, 225-pound junior tested the NBA draft waters last spring before deciding to return, and has not said what he will do this time around.

“That’s not really where my thoughts are right now,” Childs said after Thursday’s practice at the Marriott Center Annex. “My thoughts are on tomorrow, having a great practice, then having a great game the next day and taking this team as far as we can go.”

The Cougars (19-12, 11-5) tied for second with Saint Mary’s in the WCC race but got the third seed for the conference tournament and will play in the quarterfinals on Saturday night (10 p.m. MDT, ESPN2) at Orleans Arena against either San Diego, Portland or Santa Clara.

Coach Dave Rose said the team will travel to Las Vegas on Friday, practice there that afternoon, then watch one half of the game that will determine their opponent on Saturday.

“It is a little unsettling, not knowing who we play,” Rose said.

It could be unsettling for BYU fans if Childs, the team’s leading scorer (21.5 ppg.) and rebounder (9.8 rpg.) leaves for the professional ranks with one year of eligibility remaining as Elijah Bryant did last year and Eric Mika did the year before that. But Childs isn’t giving any clues regarding what he might be thinking.

“Obviously, it is something you think about a little bit,” he said. “But my focus is with this team right now. I am so grateful that I get to go play with this group of guys.”

Childs, named an All-WCC First Team performer for the second straight year on Tuesday, is probably leaning toward leaving, several people close to him have said throughout the season as he has accumulated 17 double-doubles and 18 20-point games.

What do his teammates think?

“We just want what is best for him. He’s a brother. He is family. We want him to be where he feels comfortable. We want him to do whatever he feels is best,” said fellow junior Zac Seljaas. “It is kinda between him and his family and what his thoughts are. Whatever he decides, we are going to support him 100 percent.”

Both players said they will be plenty motivated to win the WCC tournament for the first time ever and reach the Big Dance.

“I think back to when I was a kid and watching March Madness and just being in awe watching all the games and the great players,” Childs said. “I always looked at it and thought, ‘I can’t wait until that is me.’ I think a lot of our guys feel that way and it definitely motivates us and drives us to get to that level.”

After being left off the 10-member All-WCC First Team, junior guard TJ Haws, a second-teamer for the second straight year after making the first team as a freshman, should be motivated.

“Hopefully it is a healthy thing,” Rose said. “I think that the majority of the media and coaches would tell you that he is one of the top 10 players in the league for sure. The numbers didn’t work out that way for him. We will see how he responds.”

Haws collided with San Diego’s Isaiah Wright in the final minutes of BYU’s 87-73 win over the Toreros last Saturday, but has not shown any ill effects in practice this week.

“He’s been full go,” Rose said.

Freshman forward Gavin Baxter missed every practice last week and then the USD game with an illness. He’s back practicing and should be able to play Saturday.

“It is his wind [lacking], mostly,” Rose said. “His timing has been good. I mean, first day back, first competitive eight-minute session, he had three blocks right at the rim. … Hopefully we will be able to still count on him for 23-28 minutes that he has been giving us. We might have to do it a little bit different way, with shorter periods.”

BYU coach Dave Rose discusses WCC tournament pic.twitter.com/x7gRPtxsyx

— Jay Drew (@drewjay) March 7, 2019

Saturday’s WCC Quarterfinal Game

At Orleans Arena, Las Vegas

No. 3 BYU vs. TBA, 10 p.m. MDT

TV: ESPN2

BYU could play either Portland, San Diego or Santa Clara on Saturday at the WCC tournament, which makes preparation a bit tricky, Rose says pic.twitter.com/3ewenxQzK1

— Jay Drew (@drewjay) March 7, 2019

Alexandria, Va. • Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced Thursday to nearly four years in prison for tax and bank fraud related to his work advising Ukrainian politicians, much less than what was called for under sentencing guidelines.

Manafort, sitting in a wheelchair as he deals with complications from gout, had no visible reaction as he heard the 47-month sentence. While that was the longest sentence to date to come from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, it could have been much worse for Manafort. Sentencing guidelines called for a 20-year-term, effectively a lifetime sentence for the 69-year-old.

Manafort has been jailed since June, so he will receive credit for the nine months he has already served. He still faces the possibility of additional time from his sentencing in a separate case in the District of Columbia, where he pleaded guilty to charges related to illegal lobbying.

Before Judge T.S. Ellis III imposed the sentence, Manafort told him that "saying I feel humiliated and ashamed would be a gross understatement." But he offered no explicit apology, something Ellis noted before issuing his sentence.

Manafort steered Donald Trump's election efforts during crucial months of the 2016 campaign as Russia sought to meddle in the election through hacking of Democratic email accounts. He was among the first Trump associates charged in the Mueller investigation and has been a high-profile defendant.

But the charges against Manafort were unrelated to his work on the campaign or the focus of Mueller's investigation: whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russians.

A jury last year convicted Manafort on eight counts, concluding that he hid from the IRS millions of dollars he earned from his work in Ukraine.

Manafort's lawyers argued that their client had engaged in what amounted to a routine tax evasion case, and cited numerous past sentences in which defendants had hidden millions from the IRS and served less than a year in prison.

Prosecutors said Manafort's conduct was egregious, but Ellis ultimately agreed more with defense attorneys. "These guidelines are quite high," Ellis said.

Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys had requested a particular sentence length in their sentencing memoranda, but prosecutors had urged a "significant" sentence.

Outside court, Manafort's lawyer, Kevin Downing, said his client accepted responsibility for his conduct "and there was absolutely no evidence that Mr. Manafort was involved in any collusion with the government of Russia."

Prosecutors left the courthouse without making any comment.

Though Manafort hasn't faced charges related to collusion, he has been seen as one of the most pivotal figures in the Mueller investigation. Prosecutors, for instance, have scrutinized his relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business associate U.S. authorities say is tied to Russian intelligence, and have described a furtive meeting the men had in August 2016 as cutting to the heart of the investigation.

After pleading guilty in the D.C. case, Manafort met with investigators for more than 50 hours as part of a requirement to cooperate with the probe. But prosecutors reiterated at Thursday's hearing that they believe Manafort was evasive and untruthful in his testimony to a grand jury.

Manafort was wheeled into the courtroom about 3:45 p.m. in a green jumpsuit from the Alexandria jail, where he spent the last several months in solitary confinement. The jet black hair he bore in 2016 when serving as campaign chairman was gone, replaced by a shaggy gray. He spent much of the hearing hunched at the shoulders, bearing what appeared to be an air of resignation.

Defense lawyers had argued that Manafort would never have been charged if it were not for Mueller's probe. At the outset of the trial, even Ellis agreed with that assessment, suggesting that Manafort was being prosecuted only to pressure him to "sing" against Trump. Prosecutors said the Manafort investigation preceded Mueller's appointment.

The jury convicted Manafort on eight felonies related to tax and bank fraud charges for hiding foreign income from his work in Ukraine from the IRS and later inflating his income on bank loan applications. Prosecutors have said the work in Ukraine was on behalf of politicians who were closely aligned with Russia, though Manafort insisted his work helped those politicians distance themselves from Russia and align with the West.

In arguing for a significant sentence, prosecutor Greg Andres said Manafort still hasn't accepted responsibility for his misconduct.

"His sentencing positions are replete with blaming others," Andres said. He also said Manafort still has not provided a full account of his finances for purposes of restitution, a particularly egregious omission given that his crime involved hiding more than $55 million in overseas bank accounts to evade paying more than $6 million in federal income taxes.

The lack of certainty about Manafort's finances complicated the judge's efforts to impose restitution, but Ellis ultimately ordered that Manafort could be required to pay back up to $24 million.

In the D.C. case, Manafort faces up to five years in prison on each of two counts to which he pleaded guilty. The judge will have the option to impose any sentence there concurrent or consecutive to the sentence imposed by Ellis.

___

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

It's a big step for women.

If all goes according to plan, on March 29, astronauts aboard the International Space Station are scheduled to conduct the first all-female spacewalk. Anne McClain and Christine Koch will venture out together about 240 miles above the Earth, and make history. To add to the significance of their mission, the spacewalk will take place during Women's History Month.

“It was not orchestrated to be this way,” said NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz. “These spacewalks were originally scheduled to take place in the fall — they are to upgrade batteries on the space station.” McClain and Koch’s spacewalk will be the second of three planned excursions for Expedition 59, which launches next week on — what else? — Pi Day at 3:14 p.m. Eastern time.

Schierholz pointed to the fact that women would be at the controls as well. Mary Lawrence will serve as Lead Flight Director and Jackie Kagey will be the lead spacewalk flight controller.

One NASA flight controller expressed her excitement at working on the mission.

McClain is also slated to perform a spacewalk with astronaut Nick Hague on March 22.

"Of course, assignments and schedules could always change," Scheirholz said.

Both McClain and Koch were members of NASA's 2013 astronaut class, half of which was comprised of women.

McClain, a major in the U.S. Army and a pilot, "wanted to be an astronaut from the time I was 3 or 4 years old," she said in a 2015 NASA video interview. "I remember telling my mom at that time, and I never deviated from what I wanted to be. Something about exploration has fascinated me from a young age."

McClain is currently aboard the ISS. Koch, an electrical engineer, will join her March 14 in what will be her first space flight, according to NASA. Space is just the latest exciting frontier Koch has conquered: her work has taken her on expeditions to the South Pole and the Arctic.

When asked in a February interview about the importance of conducing her mission during Women's History Month, she said, "It is a unique opportunity and I hope that I'm be able to inspire folks that might be watching."

Noting that she did not have many engineers to look up to growing up in Jacksonville, North Carolina, "I hope that I can be an example to people that might not have someone to look at as a mentor . . . that it doesn't matter where you come from or what examples there might be around you, you can actually achieve whatever you're passionate about."

“If that’s a role that I can serve,” she said, “it would be my honor to do that.”

The Boulder, Colo., police department is conducting an internal investigation after video surfaced of an officer questioning a black man who was picking up garbage in front of his residence. The officer has been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete.

On Friday morning, an officer initially approached the man as he was sitting in an area behind a private property sign and asked him if he had permission to be there, according to a department release. The Daily Camera reported that the man is a student at Naropa University in Boulder, and the building is listed as a school residence. Police have not publicly named the man or the officer.

The man gave the officer his school identification card and said he both worked and lived in the building. However, the officer continued to investigate and called for backup, "indicating that the person was uncooperative and unwilling to put down a blunt object."

In the 16-minute video, which appears to have been taken by a friend and fellow building resident after the encounter began, the man can be seen holding a bucket and a trash picker.

"You're on my property with a gun in your hand threatening to shoot me because I'm picking up trash?" the man with the trash picker says.

The man being questioned repeatedly says of the officer, "He's got a gun!"

"Just relax, man," the officer responds as sirens are heard and more officers arrive and surround him.

Though a police spokeswoman would not release the number of officers involved, citing the ongoing investigation, at one point the man can be heard saying that there are eight officers "with guns drawn." The video appears to show at least one officer, on the far left, holding a gun before putting it away.

Police chief Greg Testa rebutted these particular claims made in the video at a city council meeting on Tuesday, saying "Body worn camera video indicates that only one officer had a handgun out and it was pointed in the ground."

The man who was stopped by police and the person taking the video repeatedly assert to the officers that the man lived at the residence, and that he was only picking up garbage.

An officer can be heard assuring the man, who is agitated by the encounter, that "my plan is not to shoot you." The encounter continues for several minutes until an officer says "we've decided we're going to end things at this point."

"Officers ultimately determined that the man had a legal right to be on the property and returned the man's school identification card." the Boulder police department release states. "All officers left the area and no further action was taken."

"We began looking into the incident on Friday, shortly after it occurred, and quickly made the decision that we needed to launch an internal affairs investigation," Boulder Police spokeswoman Shannon Aulabaugh said in an emailed statement.

"Our internal affairs investigation will include a review of all body worn camera video, interviews of everyone involved which includes both officers and community members, reports and all other related information," she said.

Testa said in a prepared statement before the city council that "this is an extremely concerning issue and one that we are taking very seriously." Members of the public who attended the hearing carried signs and trash pickers, the Daily Camera reported.

"While it appears that the officers responding to the requests for backup followed standard procedures given the information they heard over the radio, all aspects of this incident, specifically the actions of the initial officer, are being investigated," he said.

"I am not aware of any information that the man did anything unlawful or wrong," Testa said.

Charles Lief, president of Naropa University, also spoke at the hearing. "I do not want to underestimate the amount of trauma that was experienced by our student, who was the victim in this situation," he said. He noted that he spoke to the man's mother and "she has made clear that her son is not interested in becoming a symbol for any issue that we have to deal with in this city."

“The incident that impacted him is going to be one that’s going to take him a long time to deal with,” Lief said. “The city cant wait that long for us to talk about the broader issues that we have to address.”

A group of young people incensed over the demise of a conversion therapy bill in the Utah Legislature staged a sit-in outside Gov. Gary Herbert’s office on Thursday, resolved not to move until the state’s chief executive had apologized.

And it worked.

At 2 p.m., Amelia Damarjian and Isaac Reese, both 19, were the first to arrive for the demonstration over Herbert’s decision to support dramatic changes to the bill. The legislation sponsored by Rep. Craig Hall was initially written to protect LGBTQ youths from the widely discredited practice of conversion therapy, or attempts to alter sexual orientation or gender identity. But earlier this week, a House committee stripped out the original language and — with Herbert’s stamp of approval — adopted a new version that advocates say would do nothing to stop the dangerous practice.

“It’s disheartening to see a bill that was originally intended to protect LGBTQ youth be stripped away to only help protect the therapists that are committing these atrocities against young people,” Reese, of Salt Lake City, said.

Several hours after the protest began, a group of more than 30 had gathered near the door to the executive offices when Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox walked out to deliver a letter from Herbert.

.@SpencerJCox is now sitting with the protestors and is listening to one of them talk about conversion therapy. pic.twitter.com/cwpRoaoVfC

— Bethany Rodgers (@BethRodgersSLT) March 8, 2019

In it, the governor wrote that his intention in supporting an amended version of the conversion therapy bill was “never to harm you.”

“We have had an enormous misunderstanding, and I am sorry,” the Republican governor wrote. “I met with Rep. Hall this morning, and we agreed to continue working on this.”

They got their apology from @GovHerbert. “We have had an enormous misunderstanding and I am sorry.” pic.twitter.com/xjuPW8oQv2

— Bethany Rodgers (@BethRodgersSLT) March 8, 2019

After carrying out the letter, Cox sat down cross-legged near the demonstrators and began listening to their stories. The lieutenant governor said he’d been surprised when the House Judiciary Committee refused to pass the bill, HB399, without significant revisions. LGBTQ advocates have said the new version of the bill would be worse than the status quo, and Hall has effectively killed the legislation this session.

The ban’s original language was negotiated between Equality Utah and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which took a neutral position on HB399. Cox said he and other supporters had perhaps been too focused on the church’s stance.

“There was a feeling that if we can just get them to neutral, then we’d be fine,” Cox told the demonstrators. “And so we didn’t spend really any time with any of the other legislators. And I think ... in retrospect, that was a mistake.”

The governor’s office over the past couple of days has faced backlash for signing on to the substitute bill offered up by Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield. On Wednesday, Equality Utah’s executive director, Troy Williams, resigned from the governor’s youth suicide task force, saying he refused to be “window dressing” for a group that wasn’t serious about protecting LGBTQ teens.

And Damarjian, of Orem, took Cox to task on Twitter for making a “big speech” about tolerance and love after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando but then failing to stand up for a firm ban on conversion therapy.

On Thursday evening, after receiving Herbert’s apology and talking with Cox, Damarjian said she appreciated the gestures and that the lieutenant governor took time to listen to a couple of demonstrators describe their painful experiences with conversion therapy. But these gestures are just the first step, she said.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful that something happened,” she said. “But ... we’ve just been getting a lot of platitudes, nice words, speeches for I don’t know how many years. ... I think I’ll need to see something more tangible to really have that level of trust.”

In his letter, Herbert wrote that he’d met with Hall on Thursday morning and that they’d agreed to continue working on banning conversion therapy for minors. Williams has also said advocates will be back “year after year after year” until the prohibition is passed.

Cox said he and others plan to reach out to legislators before next year’s session for one-on-one conversations about banning conversion therapy. They’ll also continue to engaged the LDS Church, he said.

“We’ll ... see if we can get them from neutral to support. That would be helpful, and I don’t think we’re far away from this,” he said.

In response to one of Damarjian’s tweets, Cox said that what she’s read “isn’t the whole story” and that Herbert does support a conversion therapy ban. Upon realizing that there weren’t enough committee votes to pass the bill as originally conceived, the governor decided to back the substitute so some version of a ban could succeed this session, he wrote.

Amelia, I am so sorry that you are hurting. Please know that I am hurting too. I worked on this bill since November and thought we had a chance. What you have read isn’t the whole story. The Governor does support banning conversion therapy and has said so multiple times...

— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) March 7, 2019

Utah already staged one “Red Out” promotion at the Huntsman Center this season, but the crazy nature of this Pac-12 basketball season merited another gimmick Thursday night.

As their game vs. USC unfolded, the Utes learned they would find themselves either alone in third place in the conference or in a six-way tie for third, via a win or loss.

Utah won. The red uniforms, new red shoes and suits worn by the players and the suits and ties modeled by the coaching staff proved to be the right formula in a critical 83-74 victory.

The Ute coaches had won football coach-style shirts and pants during the Pac-12 season, but they upgraded their fashion game for USC's visit.

“A lot of us forgot how to tie ties,” coach Larry Krystkowiak joked, after having asked his staff to dress up for the sake of the team’s seniors – with three of them in the starting lineup for the first time in nearly four months.

On the court, the Utes (16-13, 10-7 Pac-12) looked sharp in the game's first 30 minutes, building a 16-point lead. The closest the Trojans (15-15, 8-9) came after that was within seven points, as the Utes played their most complete game since beating USC in Los Angeles four weeks ago.

The Utes likely will have no worse than a No. 5 seed in the Pac-12 tournament, depending on potential tiebreakers, but they probably have to beat UCLA on Saturday to earn a first-round bye next week in Las Vegas.

On the locker-room whiteboard, Krystkowiak had written that the Utes would need “a bunch of warriors” in the absence of center Jayce Johnson. They got balanced scoring, outrebounded USC 32-23 and produced 17 second-chance points to the Trojans' one.

Parker Van Dyke led the Utes with 20 points, after going scoreless with 0-for-5 shooting last weekend at Colorado, where the whole team struggled. Timmy Allen added 19 points, Sedrick Barefield had 17 and Donnie Tillman and Both Gach scored 10 each. Barefield and fill-in center Novak Topalovic each grabbed seven rebounds.

“We've had a hard time with coming out with the right intensity at home, and that's something we wanted to fix,” Barefield said.

Bennie Boatwright, Nick Rakocevic and Elijah Weaver each scored 17 points for USC.

Last month in Los Angeles, the Utes dominated USC for the game’s first 38 minutes, before the Trojans’ late run made the score (77-70) reasonably close. This game played out similarly, although the Trojans’ rally this time came soon enough to make Utah agonize in the last two minutes.

Johnson had played one of his better games last month in the Utes' win over USC in Los Angeles, posting 13 points and 13 rebounds. Topalovic started in Johnson's absence and Van Dyke also returned to the starting lineup, marking the first time since a Nov. 12 loss at Minnesota that Krystkowiak used this starting five. In the minutes when Topalovic rested, Krystkowiak went with a small lineup.

“I just had to to have the mentality that we were going to get [rebounds] and make up for Jayce's absence.

The Trojans didn't really exploit Utah's interior defense in the first half, but they made enough 3-pointers to stay within 42-36. USC responded after the Utes went ahead by 12 points, in contrast to the way the Trojans trailed by 20 points in the first half in February.

Utah's offense was crisp as the second half began, with Barefield coming to life. The senior guard made an unusual play, stealing the ball and then hitting a pull-up 3-pointer. The Utes stretched their lead to 66-50 with 10 minutes left when Allen dunked a lob pass from Tillman.

The victory gives the Utes a chance to post a winning record in Pac-12 home games for a sixth straight season. Utah is 4-4 in conference games at the Huntsman Center with UCLA coming to town Saturday.

“The next one is our biggest game of the season, too,” Allen said.

😱😱😱

TIMMY ALLEN RAISE THE ROOF❗️#GoUtes🏀🔴 | 📺 FS1 pic.twitter.com/lJW202k0Xu

— Utah Basketball🏀 (@UtahMBB) March 8, 2019

PVD with tonight's recap vs USC. Utes trending 🆙#GoUtes🏀🔴 | #Pac12Hoops pic.twitter.com/LIu2SbICHI

— Utah Basketball🏀 (@UtahMBB) March 8, 2019

Utah entered the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament with the program’s highest-ever seed, but that didn’t do the Utes much good Thursday night.

No. 11-seeded Washington built an 18-point lead in the third quarter on the way to a 64-54 upset of the No. 6 Utes in a first-round game at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

The Utes (20-10), down to seven active players because of injuries and other factors, will have to decide whether they want to continue their season in the WNIT for a fourth straight year under coach Lynne Roberts. Regardless, they will have to live with the program's fifth consecutive defeat in the first round of the conference tournament.

Washington (10-20) advances to a quarterfinal game vs. No. 3 seed Oregon State.

Utah led 18-17 after the first quarter, but Washington took a 34-26 halftime lead and started the third quarter impressively, as the Utes struggled to score. The Huskies took a 52-36 advantage into the final period.

Utah senior forward Megan Huff, a repeat selection to the All-Pac-12 team, finished with 10 points on 3-of-15 shooting, although she grabbed 17 rebounds. Andrea Torres also scored 10 points for the Utes and Kiana Moore and Erika Bean added nine each.

Dru Gylten, who made the conference’s all-freshman team this week, scored eight points, but committed seven turnovers and had only one assist.

The Utes were 18-1 overall and 7-1 in the Pac-12 when January ended, but a more difficult schedule and their personnel shortage has caught up to them, resulting in nine losses in their last 11 games.

Missy Peterson led Washington with 23 points. The Huskies had gone 2-15 in league play and likely would have tied for last place in the Pac-12, but a game vs. Arizona State was canceled because of weather conditions in Seattle.

Last week, 95 percent of you knew about pushes to ban conversion therapy in Utah, but only 40 percent knew about an increase in bird-plane collisions at the Salt Lake City International Airport. Think you kept up with the news this week? Take our quiz to find out. A new one will post every Friday morning. You can find previous quizzes here. If you’re using The Salt Lake Tribune mobile app, click here.

For clarification and fact checking — but hopefully not cheating — purposes, you can find the stories referenced in each question here: Question 1, Question 2, Question 3, Question 4, Question 5, Question 6, Question 7, Question 8, Question 9, Question 10, Question 11 and Question 12.

Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint feminists were not alone in their belief in a Heavenly Mother.

There are hints of a feminine deity in ancient Hebrew scriptures and stories as well as in writings of early Christian fathers, scholar Fiona Givens argued Thursday at a “Women of Mormondom” conference at Orem’s Utah Valley University.

Givens was a keynote speaker at the two-day symposium, exploring themes of polygamy, political polarization, marriage, family and gender and publishing female voices.

The Eugene England Lecture to be given Thursday night by Laurie Maffly-Kipp, professor of religion and politics and Washington University in St. Louis was titled “‘This is a Woman’s Church’: Prophetesses, Domestics, and Rangatira in Mormon History.”

In her lecture, Givens, co-author of “The God Who Weeps,” said 19th-century women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints likely were encouraged in their ideas about a Mother God by American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Stanton and a committee of other women published The Woman’s Bible, in which they interpreted the Genesis story, Givens told a packed audience, to include “a plurality of gods” indicated by the “let us” references to the creators.

“‘A Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational,’ more than three male personages,” the scholar quotes Stanton as saying.

The Shakers, an 18th-century faith, “also posed an unusual challenge to divine patriarchy,” Givens said, “positing as they did a female incarnation of Jesus in [founder] Ann Lee.”

In her prepared remarks, Givens concluded that “Mormonism has already achieved two feminist landmarks toward which Cady Stanton could only wistfully aspire, and which no other Christian tradition has yet to accomplish.”

It has “a scripturally warranted dogma that places Eve at the forefront, as the initiator and bold champion of the entire human family’s sojourn on earth,” she said, “and a theological affirmation of a feminine counterpart to God the Father, equal in glory and divinity.”

What remains is for Latter-day Saints, Givens said, “to tap more deeply the potential of a theological framework that has dared to challenge the model of unequivocal patriarchy, both on earth and in heaven.”

Kristine Haglund, former editor of Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought, spoke on anger in Mormon doctrine and culture at the conference, and was present for Givens’ speech.

Heavenly Mother scholarship is “a little more accepted by mainstream Latter-day Saints,” Haglund said, “since the first publications in the 1980s and 1970s by scholars Linda Wilcox, Margaret Toscano, Janice Allred and Maxine Hanks.”

The church itself “has assimilated some of this scholarship into its own essay,” said Haglund, a Boston-based writer and editor. “And general authorities are referring to ‘heavenly parents’ more frequently over the pulpit these days.”

The conference took its name, “Women of Mormondom,” from an 1877 volume by the same name, which included hundreds of profiles of Latter-day Saint women.

“While written by Edward Tullidge, Eliza R. Snow solicited material for the book, worked extensively on the manuscript, and promoted it among LDS women,” UVU organizers wrote in the symposium description. “It was … the story Mormon women wanted told of themselves.”

What stories do LDS women “want told about their lives today?” they wondered. “What shape do their lives reflect in contemporary American culture?”

The conference, sponsored by the school’s Center for the Study of Ethics, continues Friday.

The guy in the car next to us was losing his mind. We were stationary in double left-hand turn lanes. His rage wasn’t directed at us. Yet. It was focused instead on the car directly ahead of him, operated by a teenage kid talking on his cellphone.

He kept making “hang up” motions with his fingers. The kid must have seen it in his rearview mirror because he pantomimed a sex act with one of his own fingers.

I don’t agree with people talking on cellphones while driving, but I do enjoy a show. The angrier the guy got, the more “flippant” Kid Cellphone became.

The second the arrow turned green, the guy leaned on his horn even though the vehicles in front of the kid hadn’t had time to move yet.

Out of the corner of his eye, the guy must have seen me smiling because he rolled down his window and challenged us to pull over so he could teach me some manners.

So engrossed was he in settling some imaginary score, that he failed to notice the kid ahead had pulled away. Cars behind him started honking, which caused his rage to go nuclear.

For the next few miles, the guy followed us. He flashed his lights and kept motioning for us to pull over. We didn’t because my wife was driving.

I’m not against fighting per se, only that it has to be for a better reason than someone else talking on his cellphone. Also, I’m old. It takes longer to heal.

The guy finally made a smoking right turn and whatever was driving him out of his mind became someone else’s problem. One could only hope that it didn’t involve his wife and kids.

Most people call this kind of behavior “road rage.” I call it being an [deleted].” It’s amazing how little it takes to drive people to it.

We could help reduce road rage. I’m not sure how it could be scientifically measured, but I suspect that such incidents rarely get their start on the road. Either you’re a jerk to begin with, or you had a bad day and aren’t in the mood to be patient.

If the Legislature wanted to do something helpful, it might consider looking into some way to reduce this public menace. Perhaps some kind of meat thermometer that, when pounded into a driver’s skull by the police, would reveal exactly how furiously impaired a driver was.

Anything over the 0.05 BAC (big a--hole content) would be evidence that you’re too mad to be driving.

Note: In rural or less populated areas, the presumptive level of rage would be 0.08 BAC because few may really care if you go ballistic and hit a cow.

A conviction for DWR (driving while raging) would result in a large fine, loss of driving privileges and a requirement that the meat thermometer remain in your head for a year after regaining your license.

I’m making this suggestion because of my experience investigating rage-caused traffic accidents — like the time a woman felt slighted by a guy in a big four-wheel drive truck.

She followed him around honking and screaming at him. At a stop sign, the guy had enough. He jacked it into four-wheel drive, threw it into reverse and backed up onto the woman’s hood. Then he sped off.

This wouldn’t have happened if a rage thermometer had been in use. I’ll leave the details to the Legislature, which, like all great ideas, almost guarantees that it will never happen.

Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.

What were they thinking? If you watch "Leaving Neverland," the HBO documentary about Wade Robson and James Safechuck, two men who say that Michael Jackson sexually abused them as children, you will find yourselves asking that question a lot.

Often that question will be directed at the boys' parents. Why would you let your young son sleep with an adult man? Why would you bring your son over at 1:30 in the morning to share a man's bed? Joy Robson and Stephanie Safechuck, the mothers of the alleged victims, spend a lot of time on camera explaining themselves.

Their answers suggest that the power of celebrity and ignorance about pedophilia combined to powerful and insidious effect. Jackson, on their telling, groomed not just the boys but their families, sizing them up as vulnerable and then seducing them into a fantasy of fame and success. He took care, as well, to make the families financially dependent on him at key moments.

There were times when each mother asked her boy whether anything had happened to them. Wade and James admit they insisted at the time that nothing had. As adults, they say that they lied out of fear and guilt, and even out of a kind of love that they cannot help feeling for their abuser even now.

Their mothers say that they believed the denials. They wanted to believe them. They thought that children would speak up if they were mistreated — an assumption that underestimates pedophiles’ ability to get their victims to help them keep their secrets.

But it’s not just the parents whose actions inspire disbelief. The pop star had an enormous retinue of enablers — including, Robson and Safechuck say, lawyers who coached them on what to say about other boys’ allegations of abuse. The fortifications are still in place: The Jackson estate has responded to “Leaving Neverland” by blasting Robson and Safechuck as “admitted perjurers,” which they are, having said they lied in court to protect Jackson.

Not all of Jackson's enablers, though, have been in the family's employ.

At one point the documentary shows news footage from the early 1990s. Jackson appears at the edge of a hotel rooftop, thrilling the crowd below. A boy is there, too, looking down at the fans. The news announcer calls him Jackson's "traveling companion," as though his cycling through favorite pre-pubescent boys were the most normal thing in the world. (Robson sees the footage and knows he has been replaced.)

Everyone knew that something was wrong about Jackson's relationship with boys. Everyone. Teenagers in Kansas City in the early '90s knew it, I can attest. When Slate ran a defense of Jackson against the accusations of abuse in 2005, it was a contrarian take. But because nothing could be proved in court, either in a 1993 civil lawsuit or the criminal trial of 2004-5, our culture tacitly decided to pretend that Jackson might just be weird rather than alarming.

The opening move of that Slate defense was that if Jackson was a predator, more kids would have tried "getting rich" by going public. Like the mothers, the author thought he knew how sexually abused children would behave and, in the absence of that behavior, disbelieved the abuse accusations. The documentary shows how hard it can be for victims to acknowledge what happened to them. For both Robson and Wade, having sons of their own seemed to be the event that did the most to trigger a reckoning.

The documentary barely mentions Jackson’s music. But those who watch and come away convinced that Jackson was a monster — as I think most viewers will — may be prompted to rethink their relationship to his work.

The sophisticated thing to say is that the art should be separated from the artist's flaws. Jackson didn't always cooperate with that project. The videos for "Black or White," "Smooth Criminal" and "Man in the Mirror" all open with shots of children. "Scream," his catchy 1995 duet with his sister Janet, is entirely an expression of anger at the "lies" and "confusion" that had been spread about him in the 1993 abuse lawsuit. He portrayed himself as the victim of people who didn't understand him and wanted to bring him down: just what he wanted the boys in his bed to believe.

I've heard songs of his hundreds of times. I think it's enough.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a senior editor at National Review, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and contributor to CBS News.

Barbie turns 60 on Friday. The Mattel fashion icon isn't nearing retirement, however: She's being strategically reinvented to reflect today's increasingly diverse world.

Thin, blond, white Barbie is on her way out. Physically and racially diverse Barbie dolls are in. And, accompanied by messaging that promotes progressive values, the diverse dolls are poised to become central to the brand's image.

"When you say 'Barbie' to someone, a very clear image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed, slim doll comes to mind," said Barbie's vice president of design, Kim Culmone, in a 2016 interview with The Telegraph. "In a few years, this will no longer be the case."

As those who frequent the toy aisle should have noticed, this change is already underway, and recent changes to the brand tell us about its future.

"Mattel has always presented a Barbie with an idealized body type and look, but the world is different now," explains Americus Reed, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "This is not your mother's Barbie."

Nor is it your mother's world. Given changes to the U.S. population, a Barbie who is white and exceptionally thin is a Barbie who has lost much cultural relevance.

In 1960, a year after Barbie's debut, approximately 89 percent of the U.S. population was white. But by 2017, only 49.6 percent of children under 10 were white, according to the Census Bureau - positioning the population to become "minority white" by 2045.

The average American's physique has also changed. According to the Center for Disease Control, the average U.S. woman in 1960 was about 5-foot-2 and 140.2 pounds, but today's average is nearly 30 pounds heavier, at 5-foot-3 and 168.5 pounds. These factors make the iconic Barbie a more problematic idealized fantasy figure for many girls and women, increasing long-standing concerns that Barbie play damages girls' self-esteem.

Barbie has also lost some of her cultural relevance due to generational politics.

The millennial parents (ages 23 to 38) of Barbie's target audience are, overall, more politically liberal than the generations that preceded them. Millennials apply their progressive ethos to their purchasing decisions, tending to be socially conscious shoppers who support businesses that share their values But Barbie long tended to eschew politics.

Finally, parental nostalgia for Barbie has been waning - also likely affecting interest in the brand, as consumers (including parents) tend to spend more when feeling nostalgic. When today's young parents were children in the early 2000s, Disney Princess dolls and MGA Entertainment's fashion-forward and racially diverse Bratz dolls debuted, quickly capturing girls' loyalty.

In 2005, at the height of Bratz's popularity, I interviewed several young African American girls for my book "Growing Up With Girl Power." Madison, then 9, told me, "I buy Bratz dolls because all of them - all the Bratz dolls are treated right." And Rhea (also 9) observed, "For the black Barbie dolls, they give 'em, like, orange [outfits] and everything before the white, and [for the white] one, they give her, like, pink and blue or something," she observed. "A lot of black people hate orange!" MGA's Bratz cast Barbie in such a negative light that they upended Mattel's long-standing 90 percent share of the doll market.

Unable to stem the tide through competitive offerings, Mattel sued MGA for intellectual property infringement, suppressing Bratz's production. When Mattel finally lost its protracted battle in 2010 and was ordered to pay the rival $300 million, "that was a wake-up call," said Angharad Valdivia, professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana's Institute of Communications Research.

As Barbie sales declined from 2012 to 2014, missteps dogged the brand's reputation. In 2014, a Barbie designer made headlines by blaming moms for girls' body image issues, and an "I Can Be a Computer Engineer!" picture book went viral for featuring Barbie as a computer science student who was incompetent and less intelligent than the boys in her class.

Could Barbie have possibly been more out of touch?

So Mattel changed leadership and reimagined the Barbie doll and the brand. Through Mattel's @BarbieStyle Instagram, which debuted in 2014, Barbie embraced progressive politics - a calculated appeal to parents who use the photo site.

Television commercials like "Imagine the Possibilities" (2015) and "The Dream Gap Project" (2018) positioned Barbie as pro-girl empowerment and supportive of girls' aspirations - addressing, among other things, concerns regarding Barbie's messages about girls' intelligence and capabilities.

Most significantly, Mattel launched a "Fashionista" Barbie line in 2016 that offered three new body types - "tall," "curvy" and "petite" - and an expanded range of skin tones, hair textures and colors and face molds.

This meant that black and brown Barbies were no longer merely "dye-dipped" versions of white Barbie, as famously criticized by Ann DuCille in her 1996 book, "Skin Trade." Though the Fashionistas are racially ambiguous, they offer more nuanced representation than did their predecessors.

The changes appear to be helping. Since 2016, Barbie sales have been uneven, rising, falling and rising again. But as senior vice president Lisa McKnight told Adweek, "Focusing our efforts on diversity and inclusivity is resonating, as 55 percent of all the dolls sold in 2018 were diverse dolls."

Despite Barbie's changes and the diverse dolls' commercial success, criticisms of Barbie's physical appearance will continue - and for good reason: Over the years, peer-reviewed research has suggested that Barbie dolls could harm young girls' body images, food intake and career aspirations, among other issues.

While Mattel may point to curvy Barbie as a marker of progress in this area, it is not a solution. Only a small subset of Barbies are curvy, and although Time characterized curvy Barbie as having "meat on her thighs and a protruding tummy and behind," calculations provided by the BBC indicate they are still quite thin. Curvy Barbie would scale up to a woman who is about 5-foot-6 and wears a U.S. size 4. While this is an improvement over the traditional Barbie, who would scale to 5-foot-9 and wear a size 2, it is still unattainable for most girls and women.

Valdivia observes that curvy Barbie is curvy only when compared with the other Barbie dolls. "If you look at curvy Barbie alone, she's still a pretty thin Barbie," she said. "The curvy doll next to the tall Barbie dolls looks chunky, but only because that Barbie is spindle-thin."

This is because of constraints that the iconic brand faces. "All the criticisms of Barbie have been criticisms of what Barbie stands for," says Valdivia. "How can Mattel do a Barbie doll that's not a Barbie doll? They still have to work within a rough Barbie template to keep the doll recognizable."

It's a good question, but Reed said it's entirely possible that accumulating changes will allow Mattel to gradually redefine what makes a Barbie recognizable. "At some point, the white, blond, thin Barbie will no longer be needed," Reed said, "and the institutional memory of Barbie will be dead."

Reed noted that his 8-year-old daughter, who is African American and Latina, was excited to pick out a Barbie that looks like her, a positive experience that, if replicated on a broader scale, should pay off for Mattel in the long term.

"It's creating context for when my daughter is older and has her own children," Reed said. "A connection is going to be there, and Barbie will still be in the conversation."

At 60, Barbie’s place in the conversation is one of the brand’s most remarkable aspects. Her ongoing history reflects changes to our political and social environments — a touchstone for our evolving cultural norms, values and ideals.

Rebecca Hains is professor of media and communication at Salem State University and the author of “The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years.” She is also editing the anthology “Cultural Studies of LEGO: More than Just Bricks,” scheduled for release next year.