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Ten Things You Need to Know for Thursday – July 9, 2015

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Good Thursday morning from Salt Lake City. 

The NYSE technical problems were likely due to a failed systems upgrade. The Prison Relocation Commission will miss their August deadline. Gov. Gary Herbert says it will take some time to sort through the issues raised by the Supreme Court's marriage ruling.

Countdown:

  • Days to the 2015 Utah municipal primary elections – 33
  • Days to the 2015 election – 117
  • Days to the 2016 Iowa Caucus (tentative) – 194
  • Days to the opening day of the 2016 Utah Legislature – 201
  • Days to the 2016 New Hampshire Primary – 202
  • Days to the 2016 Utah primary election – 356
  • Days until the 2016 presidential election – 489

Thursday's top-10 headlines:

  1. Experts say the computer problems that halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday were due to a failed systems upgrade and not hackers [Fortune].
  2. The South Carolina House voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds. The bill now goes to Gov. Nikki Haley, who supports the measure [NBC News].
  3. The Prison Relocation Commission is going to miss the August 1 deadline to pick a site for the new facility. That decision may wait until October or later [Tribune, Deseret News].
  4. Gov. Gary Herbert says it's going to take some time for the state to work through any issues coming out of the Supreme Court's marriage ruling, but he's not eager to make changes to Utah's religious liberty law because of the decision [Deseret News, Fox 13, ABC 4, Tribune].
  5. Rep. Jon Cox resigns his seat to become Gov. Herbert's spokesperson. Current spokesman Marty Carpenter is leaving the position to work on Herbert's re-election campaign [Utah Policy, Tribune, Deseret News, KUER].
  6. Republican delegates will meet to pick Cox's replacement on July 30 [Utah Policy].
  7. NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia during a visit to Utah says the No Child Left Behind law has been an "unmitigated disaster" and desperately needs an overhaul [Utah Policy].
  8. School trust fund managers want changes to make it easier to distribute money to schools from public lands in the state [Tribune].
  9. Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, spent an hour on the phone with presidential candidate Donald Trump urging him to tone down his inflammatory comments on immigration [Washington Post].
  10. Medicare may begin paying doctors to have end-of-life discussions with patients [Washington Post].

On this day in history:

  • 1850 – President Zachary Taylor died suddenly of cholera. He was succeeded by Millard Fillmore.
  • 1868 – The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing African-Americans full citizenship and all people in the United States due process under the law.
  • 1896 – William Jennings Bryan denounced supporters of the gold standard with his "cross of gold" speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
  • 1955 – Bill Haley and the Comets "Rock Around the Clock" hit No. 1 on Billboard magazine's best-seller records chart, marking what some consider the beginning of the rock 'n' roll era.
  • 1992 – Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton tapped Al Gore of Tennessee to be his running mate.