News

part 1 of 2 If every physician wound up with patients like Charles Stevinson, medical school might not seem like such an onerous obstacle. That’s because Stevinson, whose car dealerships and real estate have made him a millionaire more than a hundred times over, has taken the physician-patient relationship to…

Dem bones: Longshot Democratic gubernatorial candidate Frank Arteaga wanted to make a statement when he staged a marathon walk to Denver from his residence in distant Trinidad earlier this month. Instead, the candidate–who’s taking on incumbent Roy Romer despite never having held elective office–wound up dead by the side of…

Scratch another executive director from the troubled Colorado AIDS Council. Known as the Governor’s AIDS Council until it was transferred to the Colorado Department of Health last summer, the agency has been plagued by politics and a near-constant turnover of its top administrators. Now, after only two months on the…

Some Kurt Replies Michael Roberts’s April 13 article regarding the gifted Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Suicide Is Brainless,” is completely without compassion–e.g., “suicide is an essentially selfish act usually committed by people who aren’t looking past their own noses at the times of their deaths.” How could Mr. Roberts possibly know…

It was early in 1993, and Susan Barnes was furious. Like millions of other Americans, she’d been following the Tailhook scandal and the investigation that ensued. Not one of the 140 Navy and Marine Corps officers recommended for discipline would face criminal charges. Of the 35 admirals investigated for their…

part 2 of 2 One of the so-called “good deal” trips took Guard members to Europe, where they had taken Air Force Academy cadets for training in over-water navigation. During a stop in Berlin, says Dewett, he, Colonel Rosson and several other officers and enlisted men attended a live-sex show…

part 1 of 2 The Colorado Air National Guard went to war against North Korea early on the morning of April 9. The hostilities came almost without warning and then quickly intensified; within hours of reporting for duty at Aurora’s Buckley Field, Guard members were diving for cover and donning…

When Leonard Fahrni says he reads Playboy for the magazine’s articles, you can believe him. Fahrni does indeed read Playboy–and Entertainment Weekly and God knows what else–to fill his storehouse of knowledge. To him, each dollop of data, each apparently trifling fact, deserves to be gathered, recorded, catalogued and treasured…

All the news that’s unfit to print: Every year Carl Jensen and a loyal staff of news watchdogs at Sonoma State University in California pore over publications large and small, sniffing out the important stories that appeared somewhere–anywhere–only to be met by almost overwhelming silence from other media outlets. Jensen’s…

When my wife and I were planning to have a second child, we didn’t give much thought to what we would feed him or her–we naively thought that would be the least of our worries. Instead, we’ve found ourselves embroiled in a daily battle with corporate America over the most…

Of Life and Limb I feel the articles in Westword are always thought-provoking, but Kate Hawthorne’s April 13 cover story, “Out on a Limb,” was positively inspirational! My best wishes to those families. And to Westword I say, Keep up the good work! I don’t know what we would do…

Colorado polluters would be able to avoid fines and keep secret internal investigations of their own environmental wrongdoing under a bill that, after being thwarted in recent years, stands a good chance of passage by the Colorado General Assembly. The Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry calls the bill a…

The most vocal liberal on the state Criminal Justice Commission has given up–driven out, he says, by politics that seem to breed prisons. In an eight-page resignation letter, Roger Lauen urged Governor Roy Romer, other commission members and legislators to “please wake up” before the current mania for building prisons…

History books remember Cynthia Ann Parker as the Anglo girl who was kidnapped at age nine from her frontier Texas home in the spring of 1836 by a Comanche raiding party. Twenty-four years later she was rescued by the Texas Rangers, then spent the few remaining years of her life…

part 2 of 2 For families that had just come through such dramatic situations, life dwindled down to mundane problems rather quickly. My car had died while Bill was still in the hospital. No, I didn’t crack it up; it just needed some warranty work. But that meant I had…

part 1 of 2 The first week in October was hell on the traumatic amputation specialists at University Hospital. Within 36 hours they received three emergency cases: a detached arm and two severed legs. On Monday, October 4, Mike Thurby of Arvada was hauling the day’s last load of trash…

Two strong forces conspired to put my head in the hands of the Ultima College of Cosmetology. The first was the inimitable ARC Value Village store at 72nd and Federal, where I have shopped for life’s little necessities for nigh on to a decade. Several years ago, ever on the…

Anton Chekhov once wrote, “Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.” But then, Chekhov never appeared on CNN, electronically labeled “Victim’s Wife.” Having been in publishing for nearly twenty years, I understood from the start that Bill’s excellent adventure made excellent copy. A…

Law and disorder: State legislators are already peeved at having to find $400,000 in a tight, tight budget to fund Attorney General Gale Norton’s new “death squad” for pushing the prosecution of death penalty cases. Adding to their irritation is the fact that Norton broke her budget by about that…