Newspapers
Rone’s articles have appeared in hundreds of U.S. and foreign newspapers. Here are a few recent examples.
'Cowboy Catholic' leads Heritage Foundation plans for 2nd Trump term
When Kevin Roberts took over as president of tiny Wyoming Catholic College in 2013, few people outside its Lander, Wyoming, base even knew the school existed. But in just three years, the media-savvy Roberts managed to put the conservative campus in the national spotlight by embracing the term "cowboy Catholics" and by refusing to accept federal grants and student loans that he felt would compromise the school's independence and religious freedom.
"I fully expected Kevin to be the next senator from Texas or something," said Glenn Arbery, who became the college's president after Roberts' departure in 2016. "The man has an energy and a brilliance about what he wants to do politically. That was just evident. He was too big for our little college for sure."
Photo: (Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)
Utah trial featuring a prominent member of polygamist sect and an L.A. businessman has wide implications
SALT LAKE CITY—On the surface it seems an odd partnership: a prominent member of a secretive Utah polygamist sect and the Armenian immigrant owner of a prosperous chain of Southern California truck stops.
But testimony in the federal court criminal trial in Salt Lake City of Los Angeles fuel distributor Lev Dermen is that he and Jacob Kingston, a member of the Mormon breakaway sect known as the Order, as well as relatives of Kingston, engaged in a $470-million fraud of a government biofuel program. Kingston has testified at the trial in exchange for a lighter sentence.
In his opening statement to the jury, Dermen’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said the Kingston sect has a long history of defrauding the government and that Jacob Kingston, not Dermen, as the government claims, was the true mastermind of the alleged fraud.
Photo: Lev Dermen and Jacob Kingston (Federal Court Files)
Was Mitt Romney’s vote the fulfillment of a Mormon prophecy?
SALT LAKE CITY—Utahans reacted to Sen. Mitt Romney’s decision to break Republican ranks with a mixture of pride and dismay Wednesday, with some in this majority-Mormon state even suggesting that his vote to remove President Trump from office recalled a prophecy attributed to the church founder Joseph Smith.
Although generally debunked as apocryphal by modern historians, the so-called White Horse Prophecy dates to 1844 when Smith himself was a candidate for president of the United States. The Mormons — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — have long regarded the U.S. Constitution as a divinely inspired document.
According to the legend, Smith predicted that someday the Constitution would be in extreme danger — hanging “like a thread as fine as silk fiber”— and that a member of the church would ride in on a white horse to save it.
Photo: CNN
Utah Pharmacy Role in Idaho Execution
April 18, 2021
Here’s how a Salt Lake City pharmacy played a key role in the execution of an Idaho serial killer
Salt Lake City pharmacist Richard Rasmuson remembers the frantic call from an Idaho prison official seeking a lethal dose of a drug for an execution in his state. A death warrant had been served and the clock was ticking.
“He said, ‘We have a scheduled date, and we’ve spent all this money getting it ready, and we’re under the gun because we don’t have any way to do it,’” Rasmuson recalled in one of several interviews with The Utah Investigative Journalism Project.
Rasmuson said the prison official offered a large amount of cash upfront and promised that no one would ever reveal who had provided the drug.
Rone Tempest: Learning to navigate in a post-print world
The Salt Lake Tribune is joining a digital trend. But will readers follow?
The writing has been on the wall or, more accurately, on the digital screen for years.
On Jan. 1, Salt Lake City will become yet another American city without a daily print newspaper.
The Salt Lake Tribune will be online-only six days a week, with a print edition Sunday. The LDS Church-owned Deseret News will also move online daily, with a single weekly print edition and a monthly magazine.
In 2012, University of Southern California journalism professor Jeffrey Cole boldly predicted that “almost all” print newspapers in the United States would be extinct in five years. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, was not far wrong.
Photo: Hannah Grabenstein | AP file photo
‘Scared all the time’: Former Daggett inmates describe abuse at the hands of jail officers
Dustin Porter said he has recurring nightmares of the attack dog that lunged at him in a slippery jail hallway: “I’ll wake up right before he bites me.”
Josh Olsen said he was told to wear long-sleeved shirts to hide the marks made on his arm by the jolts of a stun gun.
Josh Asay recalled the terror of having a semiautomatic handgun pointed at his face: “We were pretty much scared all the time. The people who were watching over us were hurting us.”
In their first public interviews since Utah state investigators abruptly closed the 80-bed Daggett County jail in February, several former inmates detailed what they described as painful “initiation” rituals in which a guard at the jail — sometimes with other officers as witnesses — repeatedly stunned them with a Taser weapon and subjected them to terrifying K-9 police dog “training” exercises.
Photo: Trent Nelson, Salt Lake Tribune
Tribune Op-ed: China lobby link undermines Tribune series
Only a few days after the Tribune's much-deserved Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, you have disappointed by allowing a well-known People's Republic of China lobby to "sponsor, organize and pay for" a 10-day trip by one of your reporters to mainland China. That trip produced your front-page series "Changing China."
The stories by reporter Tony Semerad beginning with "China: The Economic Elephant in the Room" on April 16 were serviceable and had some interesting elements such as the positive Sino-Utah business climate created by the many Chinese-speaking LDS missionaries.
However, allowing the so-called "nonprofit" China-United States Exchange Foundation to organize and pay for the trip was unethical and unworthy of your normally high standards.