News

A woman on Mayor Wellington Webb’s Black Advisory Council has received more than $47,000 in no-bid city contracts over the past fifteen months–including a controversial $16,500 award to provide “outreach” to minority artists that the city is paying for with money from the 23rd Street Viaduct project. The contracts signed…

Postal worker Terry O’Neill says he thought he was doing the right thing back in 1989 when the U.S. Justice Department first asked him to provide information about allegations of discriminatory practices against other U.S. Postal Service employees. Until he got that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach…

Eve Meelan bought purple laces for her green Doc Martens to make a fashion statement. But when the fifteen-year-old freshman set boot on the campus of Smoky Hill Senior High School last week, she found her laces tied to the First Amendment. Dean of Students Cathy Brondos told the surprised…

Last year, Bert Matthews had to fight the City of Denver and the Colorado Rockies for the right to hawk The Homestand Flier, the baseball-themed scorecard and paper he publishes and sells for a dollar a copy. This year, the city and the team raised the white flag, but another…

Breaking the Spell I’d like to know what it is with this band Spell. Is somebody at Westword sleeping with somebody in the band or related to them? All you guys do is write about them and write about them, and now they’re on the May 4 cover. C’mon already–enough…

The days should be getting sunnier for anyone living downwind of Rocky Flats. The Department of Energy facility is officially out of the nuclear-weapons business. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary has promised the plant’s dark secrets will be dragged into the light. And the federal government seems serious about cleaning…

part 2 of 2 In April 1990 Stephanie was dawdling along the aisles of the Wild Oats health food store when the young woman from the ashram approached and asked if she had heard the news. Revelations of the guru’s sexual demands had come out at a meeting of devotees…

part 1 of 2 Have you heard the news?” Stephanie Mines was startled by the young woman’s question. She recognized her in the aisles of the health food store as another devotee of the Swami Amar Jyoti, whose Sacred Mountain Ashram is west of Boulder, near the small mountain town…

Brawl in the family: The fact that Family Focus was here first–the nonprofit service agency was founded in Denver almost twenty years ago–hardly mattered. Once James Dobson moved his Focus on the Family organization from California to Colorado Springs a few years ago, it didn’t take long for people to…

The Scales of Justice Regarding “Justice (Dept.) Is Served” in the April 27 issue: Enough already about Rocky Flats! You’ve coasted on this topic long enough. Can’t Westword’s editor find anything else to write about? Joe Garcia Arvada I very much appreciated grand jury foreman Wes McKinley’s assessment of the…

The break-in at the small South Broadway office a month ago had all the sinister overtones appropriate to what would turn out to be Richard Nixon’s final weeks. In fact, a Denver police detective recalls the phone conversation that put him on the case: “The guy called up and said,…

Former Aurora resident Sunny Big Keem, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder in connection with the 1992 slaying of a California millionaire, is expected to be sentenced to life in prison next month in Los Angeles. When the prison door slams shut behind him, it…

The controversial Winter Park Recreation Association went a long way toward smoothing over its frosty relations with the City of Denver last week. It fared more poorly at the Moffat Tunnel Commission, which turned up the heat–and the numbers–in its efforts to collect rent from the cash-flush mountain resort. While…

Austreberto Aguirre’s big vision is a shadow of its former self. This week’s edition, anyway. La Gaceta, the newspaper he’s published in one form or another since 1947, today is little more than a few Xeroxed pages stapled together. Inside, where Senor Aguirre, editor and founder, once ran hard-hitting exposes…

part 2 of 2 Most physicians who are honest with themselves will acknowledge that cancer can be a capricious disease and that claiming success for cures or remissions is an inexact science. Add to this the fact that many terminal patients go to oncologists with the expectation only that they…

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…