Lee waves the white flag on public lands sale

⏰ Tick Tock

Days to Utah's 2025 municipal primary elections (8/12/2025) - 43
Days until Election Day (11/4/2025) - 127
Days until the 2026 midterm elections (11/3/2026) - 491
Days until the 2028 presidential election (11/7/2028) - 1,226

👀 Here's what you need to know for Monday morning:

UTAH AND THE WEST

Podcast: Mike Lee runs into some roadblocks. [Utah Political Watch]

Sen. Mike Lee pulled his plan to sell off millions of acres of public lands from the massive reconciliation bill. [Los Angeles Times]

Inside Utah's PR campaign to seize public lands. [Grist]

How a Utah charter school company split a Wyoming town. [WyoFile]

Two firefighters dead, one hospitalized, after a sniper opened fire in Idaho. [Coeur d'Alene Post Falls Press]

What the end of the "roadless rule" could mean for Utah's national forests. [Utah News Dispatch]

Here's how a BYU graduate's research is helping to optimize wildfire modeling. [Deseret News]

Utahns' ability to get a leg up decreased between two generations, with a big exception. Here's what has worked in that community. [Salt Lake Tribune]

NATIONAL

The Senate is set to begin voting on its version of the massive reconciliation bill that will add an estimated $3.3 trillion or more to the deficit over 10 years. [New York Times]

• The bill has $1.1 trillion in health care cuts and would result in nearly 12 million Americans losing health coverage. [New York Times]

House Republican leadership is discussing new ways to restrict the classified information available to all members of Congress. [CNN]

When she was governor of South Dakota, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem supplemented her income by secretly taking a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit organization. [ProPublica]

INTERNATIONAL

Intercepted communications between senior Iranian officials reveal them were discussing how the U.S. military strikes on nuclear facilities were less devastating than expected. [Washington Post]

The International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran's nuclear capabilities suffered "severe damage" from the U.S. airstrikes, but the country could restart operations in a matter of months. [CBS News]

TECHNOLOGY

The Trump administration has built a searchable national citizenship database. [NPR]

U.S. energy companies are pouring record sums into building power plants infrastructure to meet demand from data centers. [Financial Times]

President Donald Trump says he has found buyers for TikTok. He will disclose their identities "in about two weeks." [New York Times]

ENVIRONMENT

The numbers of gray whales migrating along the California coast continue to plummet. [Los Angeles Times]