There’s nothing like a good catfight. For the past two decades, animal shelters across the country have been describing themselves as “no-kill,” giving people the impression that if they have to part with their pets, at least Rover and Fluffy will end up with another family rather than in animal…

Jasmine arrived wrapped in a soft blue-and-pink baby blanket. Helen Martin gingerly unbundled the dark-haired infant and dressed her in a frilly white baptismal gown. The baby’s mother and grandmother didn’t know what kind of bonnet to get, so they’d bought both sheer and solid white. It was up to…

Last Thursday, museum directors from across the country descended on Golden for a conference hosted by the Mountain-Plains Museums Association, and after a long day of meetings and workshops, a couple dozen conferees ambled into the Denver Sheraton West’s lounge for some refreshment. Once the beer started flowing, so did…

Lieutenant General John Rosa stood before a group of reporters last week and announced that the Air Force Academy is waging war on sexual assault and harassment. Like any military operation, this one requires a tactical approach and a thorough knowledge of the enemy. Armed with studies conducted by everyone…

Members of an independent panel charged with reviewing sexual misconduct at the United States Air Force Academy offered sharp words for the institution’s leaders, but no real closure for victims who have anxiously awaited their report for the past three months. In a July e-mail exchange among sexual-assault victims that…

From Russia With Love, a Denver-based mail-order-bride company, knows its target market: desperate old men. “Perhaps by now you have heard every excuse in the world why this or that lady will not go out with you. One of the most common responses is: You are just too old for…

On August 3, 2001, Dietrich Angerer and Viktoriya Dubovchenko stood in the Summit County Courthouse and bound their lives together. But there were no bridesmaids or groomsmen to celebrate the occasion. No father to walk his little princess down the aisle. Even Dietrich’s own mother, Josefina Ygoa, was at home…

Faculty and students at the United States Air Force Academy have opposing perceptions of the school’s atmosphere for women and efforts to prevent sexual harassment, according to a General Accounting Office study released September 12. While 51 percent of faculty members surveyed for the report stated that the overall conditions…

Just as the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, beneficiaries of its special sales tax are changing the way the money is distributed by bringing the Denver Center for the Performing Arts into the coveted top tier. In the process, they’ve left many smaller cultural organizations feeling…

When Jessica Brakey first enrolled in the United States Air Force Academy, she believed in its hallowed honor tradition. Like every other cadet, she agreed to abide by the code: We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. But during her time there, she…

Nothing instills fear in homeowners like threats to their quality of life and the possibility of declining property values. The fear is so palpable among residents living near a vacant lot at 84th Avenue and Simms Street that more than a hundred of them endured a community meeting two weeks…

Jane Komperda is just learning to hear vowels and consonants in her head. She’s been paying close attention to the whisper and buzz certain letters make as they’re mouthed so that she can sound them out while reading. Until now, she’d never thought about how words beginning with the letter…

Denver’s public schools were in bad shape last year. Students were entering middle school — even high school — without basic reading skills, and the state had deemed more than half the schools in the district “low” or “unsatisfactory” based on their scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program exam…

Total Science, a junglist duo from the U.K., is behind the Snake Pit’s DJ booth. Their beats have the primal feel typical of British electronica, but faster. Think Underworld on ephedrine. It’s a fitting soundtrack to the night, because outside it’s Trainspotting — only on crack, not smack. Dave Maddux,…

Cadets call it the Zoo. And recently their pet name for the United States Air Force Academy has become remarkably apropos, as more and more of our future military leaders are found to be acting like animals. In the early hours of July 20, Colorado Springs police were alerted to…

Robert Wayne Rosberg, you’ve really done it this time. What were you thinking when you parked outside that high school? You know that as a convicted sex offender, you’re not allowed around children. Yeah, yeah, you were 250 yards away, and those teenage boys looked like ants from that distance…

Andrea Prasse is reviled at the Air Force Academy. Not only was she branded a liar, but she dared to go public about it. So when the superintendent offered to let her return in February, nine months after she was found guilty of breaking the honor code, cadets blasted her…

For more than forty years, cadets at the United States Air Force Academy have been pledging to live honorably and to abide by a simple code: “We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.” It is their most sacred tradition, a bond to those…

Members of a military panel charged with studying the sexual-assault problem at the Air Force Academy didn’t give the officers in charge there a slap on the wrist; they gave them a pat on the back. A thirteen-member “working group,” assembled by Air Force Secretary James Roche earlier this year…

As if it weren’t hard enough the first time for Jocelan Martell to hear how her son was fatally beaten, she now has to relive it again — all because of a technical glitch. On March 14, Martell had fought back tears as a witness described the brutal scene in…

A district judge in Arapahoe County who can’t keep up with cases has resorted to paying his grown kids out of his own pocket to do legal research. A Douglas County judge is so far behind that he had to take three boxes of court files with him on a…

He kissed her. She kissed him back. He did a tequila shot off her bare breast. She did shots off another guy in the room. She said she was too drunk to consent to what happened later. He said he was, too. Now Douglas Meester could face life in prison…