News that Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers is paying bonuses to prosecutors who achieve a certain percentage of felony convictions at trial may be raising eyebrows among other DAs, but it’s hardly a shocker to anyone who’s followed Chambers’ other efforts to turn her office into a conviction machine…

The e-mails contained an ugly ultimatum: Annette Story had to fork over $1,500 or lose contact with her son. Kidnapping? Extortion? No, just another child/family investigator (CFI) demanding an increase in his retainer. Under current Colorado law, Story had no recourse against such an outrageous threat, but a new bill…

Wild horses get injured and sometimes die in federal roundups, and “excess” horses sent to slaughterhouses endure much harsh treatment along the way. But not everyone wants to hear about that — not even horse people, as one animal welfare group found out this weekend, when Rocky Mountain Horse Expo…

Former Senator Tim Wirth, a formidable opponent in the 1980s of the U.S. Army’s big plans for its training site in southeastern Colorado, views possible expansion of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site as possibly a greater threat to the area’s environment and economy today than it was then. Now the…

In the dozen years since the Columbine shootings, school officials have become hypervigilant about potential troublemakers in their midst — so hyper, in fact, that state lawmakers are now seeking a formal review of school disciplinary procedures to determine if principals are too quick to involve police and the juvenile…

Last week, we reported on the anticipated demand for costly water diversion projects by 2050 — and the conservation strategy proposed in Filling the Gap, a timely report from environmental groups. Unfortunately, most Denver residents won’t read the report; most of them don’t have a clue where their water comes…

Chuck Zukowski likes to think that his work as an El Paso County reserve deputy sheriff sharpened his skills as an off-duty investigator of cattle mutilations, UFO and Bigfoot sightings and ghostly apparitions — and vice versa. But law enforcement bosses aren’t keen on those who think differently. Last month,…

Over the next four decades, millions of new residents along the Front Range are expected to boost water demands more than 50 percent above the currently available supply. But that doesn’t mean the state needs a slew of costly water diversion projects that will damage the ecology and economy of…

Roughly four out of every ten prisoners in solitary confinement in Colorado is either developmentally disabled or mentally ill, a figure that’s been rising steadily over the past decade. Senate Bill 176, headed for a statehouse committee review later this week, seeks to drastically reduce that number — and slash…

Days after Congress slashed $2 million from the Bureau of Land Management’s budget in response to public outcry over its wild horse roundups, BLM director Robert Abbey announced that the agency was “accelerating” reforms to the program, including reducing the number of mustangs removed from the range and redoubling efforts…

Locals fighting the Army’s plans for increased training on the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site — the subject of this week’s cover story, “The War Next Door” — have a basic public relations problem. Unless you grew up in southeastern Colorado, you probably have never seen its stunning views, hidden canyonlands,…

Artillery ranges and tank maneuvers on fragile grasslands. Depopulated farm towns, suitable for urban warfare exercises for thousands of troops. A military installation the size of Massachusetts, sprawling across southern Colorado from Trinidad to the Kansas border. If you’re going to plan, plan big. And the U.S. Army’s plans for…