The alcohol Breathalyzer came to life slowly, over the course of decades.

Warning: This story talks explicitly about female anatomy and traumatizing procedures.

A district court judge ruled last year that a federal law banning female genital mutilation was unconstitutional. He said it’s up to the states to make laws about this cultural practice. While we don’t know how many people undergo the procedure in the Mountain West, many hope to amplify the conversation as some states pass laws and others don’t.

Ammon Bundy, who led an armed standoff with the federal government in an Oregon wildlife refuge, took to Facebook this past weekend. He said he failed a background check to buy a firearm -- and then things took a turn.  

When Jessy Rosales was a sophomore at the University of California, Riverside, she had a boyfriend and she was taking birth control pills. Then out of nowhere, she started feeling sick.

"I just thought it was the stomach flu," she says. "It turns out I was pregnant."

Rosales was clear that she was not ready to have a baby. She wanted a medication abortion, where she would take one pill at the clinic and a second one at home a day or two later to induce a miscarriage.

A top U.S. Department of the Interior appointee who pushed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil leasing is taking a job with an oil company seeking to develop a major project in Alaska.

Joe Balash, an assistant secretary at the department who oversaw the Bureau of Land Management, left his job last week. On Wednesday he announced his new position as senior vice president for external affairs with Oil Search, a Papua New Guinea-based company that first expanded into Alaska in 2017.

As the Mountain West continues to see a disproportionate number of youth suicides, one tribe in Southwest Colorado is opening up a new mental health center on its reservation to deal with alarming rates there.