COLORADO SPRINGS – Gunfire erupted without warning – a burst of rifle shots from a vehicle just 10 or 15 feet away that left two people crumpled on the sidewalk, bleeding and dying. It was 10:51 p.m. on a Friday in June 2008, and the first sound the emergency operator heard was a scream, followed [...]
Colorado is continually heralded as the fittest state in the country – but behind that ranking stand a host of health measures that paint a different picture, placing the state mid-pack or worse in things such as infant mortality and binge drinking. And even that No. 1 ranking – best – among the 50 states [...]
By Kevin Vaughan and Burt Hubbard | The I-News Network During the 12-year span between the mass shootings at Columbine and Aurora, Coloradans used guns to kill themselves about four times more frequently than they used them to kill each other, an I-News analysis of death certificates found. The analysis, which covered the years 2000 [...]
Want to know the future of journalism? Meet the high school students who attended the I-News 2012 Investigative Journalism Institute. They ranged in age from 16 to 18. They were of different backgrounds, means and experiences. But they were to the person sharp, thoughtful, and excited about journalism. We put them to the test at [...]
Two Colorado lawmakers plan to push for a comprehensive examination of racial and ethnic inequality in the state as a precursor to future legislation aimed at closing some of the gaps that separate Latinos and African Americans from whites. State Reps. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, and Angela Williams, D-Denver, said they plan to introduce the measure, [...]
By some of the most important measures of social progress, black and Latino residents of Colorado have lost ground compared to white residents in the decades since the civil rights movement. Minority gains made during the 1960s and 1970s have eroded with time, an I-News analysis of six decades of demographic data from the U.S. [...]
Kids in Colorado miss nearly 8 million hours of school each year because of toothaches. Children from low-income families are most at risk for tooth decay, the most common childhood disease, with untreated cavities affecting 19 percent of kindergartners in the state’s poorest schools. Many if not most of these children are eligible for Medicaid [...]
Among the hurdles to attacking disparities in health between ethnic and racial minorities and whites are the confounding reality that some inequities have so far defied explanation and the differing views on what constitutes “fairness.” That’s the assessment of Dr. Paula Braveman, a national expert who has done extensive work on health issues that is [...]
Harold Fields, a member of the I-News board of directors, today received a humanitarian award from the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Colorado Holiday Commission. Fields was a systems engineer for IBM who managed the team that built the prototype for spreadsheet technology. He developed the software that drove the first laser video disk, and [...]
By KEVIN VAUGHAN and BURT HUBBARD I-News Network President Barack Obama’s county-by-county victories in Colorado virtually mirrored the vote to legalize marijuana use in the state – in all but eight mostly rural counties, pot passed in places that supported the president’s re-election bid and failed in places that supported Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Click [...]
Here’s a snapshot I took this week of the I-News newsroom. There’s such a buzz in the newsroom these days. You can see the two newest members of our staff, reporter-extraordinaire Kevin Vaughan in the back and editor-with-the-magic-touch Jim Trotter in the foreground. Jim is working with reporter Ann Carnahan Espinola, who has teamed up [...]
