The Environmental Protection Agency released a new standard on fine particulate pollution that lowers the allowable limit by 20 percent, a move that Utah state officials said won't matter much in the Beehive State as it already meets that standard.

But Utah's U.S. Sens. Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch, along with four other senators, took issue with the new standard in a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson that said the new standard will have a chilling effect on business.

The Bureau of Land Management is struggling about what to do with an ever-increasing number of wild horses, both on and off the range.

The drought of 2012 has not only dried up forage on federal rangelands, limiting the carrying capacity of those lands, but it has also withered interest in adopting the mustangs as a decrease in hay production has sent prices spiraling upward. With nearly 50,000 wild horses corralled in holding facilities and the need to round up another 11,000 that are currently running wild, the agency has reached its tipping point with no clear solution.

And in Montana, where the state has been studying elk in the Bitterroot Valley, the role mountain lions have played in reducing elk numbers in that valley has prompted a new study of the large cats as well.