Utah State News Service

By Miranda Tilley The Logan City Council on Tuesday approved a new student housing unit near Utah State University — over the objections of some residents who said their cherished views of Old Main would be blocked. The 55-foot-tall campus residential unit will be built on 6th East near Utah State University. Jan Nyman, a resident of Adams neighborhood, said the complex will be an “eyesore to the community and the university.” Neighbor Marilyn Griffin said she would “really like to not see any of these big buildings in front of Old Main.” The residents’ concerns sparked a conversation about protecting key viewsheds — like those including Utah State’s oldest and most iconic building. Mike DeSimone, Logan’s community development director, said the city has never defined specific views, like Old Main, that need to be protected. DeSimone said the intent of the plan for the complex was to intensify housing for students near campus. And that, he said, would alleviate another c...

By Miranda Tilley   The Logan City Council on Tuesday increased the price to purchase winter parking permits to $75 — and Mayor Craig Petersen hopes this will decrease vehicles parked overnight in the street.   “The struggle the city has with overnight street parking is that it creates problems for the snowplows,” Petersen said. The original proposed ordinance for the price of permits was $250 but, after hearing testimonies from Logan citizens, the council settled on $75. Landlord Dakota Worrell said the originally suggested price hike was troublesome. He said it would have been more economical, "for me to have my tenants collect their parking tickets and I’ll pay that instead of buying permits."  The current violation for overnight parking without a permit is a $20 fine. Councilman Tom Jensen suggested the council evaluate whether that could be increased. “You’ll take a lot more cars off the street if you increase the ticket rather than the permit,” Jens...

By Nicholas Porath With a ban on kratom approaching, tobacco and vape stores carrying the product across the Wasatch Front are preparing to get rid of remaining stock.  The herbal supplement, made from the leaves of a tree in the coffee family, is set to be banned by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency after Sept. 30, and the stores have until that day to sell their remaining supplies. The Blue Sphinx in Providence is offering a 50 percent off promotion on kratom to quickly get rid of the remainder in its store. General manager Fred Done isn’t happy about the ban, which will place the active chemicals in the plant in the Schedule 1 category of controlled substances alongside heroin, marijuana, LSD and ecstasy. Done said the ban will hurt a lot of his customers. “There’s a lot of benefits from it,” he said. “We have had a lot of people that came in that had pins in their hips, knees or back. It’s an all-herbal remedy and they didn’t have to worry about the euphoria or oth...

By Junshi Zhao Indonesians in northern Utah are feeling the effects of drug-related violence in their homeland. Suri Young, a restaurant manager in Logan, has been working toward her American citizenship for years — as a green card holder, her ability to visit family in Indonesia has been limited. But even once Young earns citizenship next year, she is unlikely to make the trip, especially now that Indonesia's anti-narcotics chief has declared the start of a drug war. To support the war, which was annoucned by Indonesia's national anti-narcotics agency chief, Budi Waseso, earlier this month, the agency is adding weapons, investigators and technology. Waseso told  Reuters  that he viewed the lives of drug dealers as “meaningless.” He would like his country to be as aggressive as the Philippines in fighting drug trafficing. The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has made the extra-judicial killings of criminals a cornerstone of his dome...

By Keith Ariaz The last time Jaxson Webb completed a season in an Aggie baseball uniform he was holding a World Series trophy. Now, back on the Utah State University club baseball team after two years away, Webb is having a much different experience. The Aggies ended their 2016 fall season 2-8, the team’s worst record in years. But as the team heads into winter practice to prepare for the spring season, Webb and his teammates are nonetheless feeling confident they can recapture the qualities that made them champions in 2014. Webb acknowledged ending the fall season feeling discouraged. “It’s very hard not to compare this team to the last one,” Webb said. “That year we only lost two games and ended the season 12 and two. Two of the teams we lost to this year we had beaten every game that season, so yeah, it’s a little hard not to compare.” Asencion Junior Gonzalez, one of the newest members on the team, agreed that the end of the season was discouraging. He nonetheless believ...

By Shanie Howard Utah State University’s Counseling and Psychological Services center is now broadcasting counseling workshops to the university’s regional campuses. Leaders from CAPS made the decision to broadcast   their   workshops to other Utah State University campuses last month. The results, so far, have been varied. “It has worked well for some of our topics,” said LuAnn Helms, the assistant director of CAPS. So far the classes have only had between five to 12 students attending, but Helms believes that by next semester   more students will participate and CAPS will be able to better determine which topics work well via broadcast and which don’t.  “We will try it again next semester and try to get more people,” Helms said.  CAPS began offering counseling workshops for students in 2011, allowing students to sit together and discuss ways to deal with different issues they faced, such as dealing with stress, building resilience and getting heal...

By Hannah McDonald As a volunteer for an online crisis counseling agency, Utah State University sophomore Catie Giraldes usually takes about eight calls in a two-hour shift. On Wednesday around 2 a.m., Giraldes was called in to respond to around 25 people in crisis. The agency for which she volunteers temporarily shut down its services that morning until it could respond to a record number of callers, some of whom had been waiting three or four hours for counseling. Giraldes’ experience reflected a nationwide rise in crisis calls following the presidential election. Utah, much like many other states, was not immune to the fear and discontent some people were feeling in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, who rose to power on promises of mass deportations and bans on Muslims, and his running mate Mike Pence, who has linked gay unions to the “deterioration of marriage and family” and has supported funding organizations “which provide assistance to those se...