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Editors' Picks

The last time Colorado was home to gray wolves was in the 1940s. Supporters of reintroducing the endangered species to Colorado are busy gathering signatures to put a measure on next November's ballot. (Public domain photo from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Flickr: Creative Commons)

Updated: What you need to know about a ballot effort to bring wolves back...

Editor's note: This story originally was published on Nov. 17, 2019. On Tuesday, Dec. 10, the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund submitted to the...
Former GOP Congressman Mark Kennedy speaks at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus on May 2, 2019, the day the board of regents named him as the system's new president. The announcement that Kennedy was the sole finalist for the $850,000-a-year job was met with unprecedented protest and concern that politics, not merit drove the process. (Photo by Susan Greene)

CU regents passed over more experienced and prominent applicants when picking Kennedy as president...

The University of Colorado’s elected board of regents passed over applicants with more experience running universities and more distinguished careers when it hired conservative former...

The Indy stories of 2019 that stayed with us long after the reporting ended

Metrics tell us a version of the story of our year at The Colorado Independent. They tell us what three stories had the most...
Former Sen. Mark Udall opens up about life after elected office, mediation and all the avocados he has been eating lately. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Mark Udall talks torture, life after political office, and dharma “I didn’t want to...

Mark Udall is not depressed.  Colorado’s former senior U.S. senator knows, five years after Cory Gardner ousted him from office, that “people have been saying...
We were married on June 13, 1970, in Susie’s parents’ living room. We were 21 and too young to know any better, but one look at Susie’s smile is all the evidence you need to understand why the marriage lasted a lifetime.

Littwin: Writers write, but this one couldn’t write about the most important person in...

This story begins — and sometimes, I fear, ends — when my wife, Susie, died two weeks short of our 49th anniversary, and I...
Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney at his kitchen table, breaking months of silence about the man he killed and job he lost in a December 2018 shooting. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a rural town’s silence (Part...

Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part collaboration between The Colorado Independent and The Rio Blanco Herald Times. We posted the first part, linked...
Still shot from the dashboard camera on former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney's patrol car as he chased Daniel Pierce through the desert. The December 10, 2018 pursuit ended when Kinney fatally shot Pierce.

Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a rural town’s silence (Part...

Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part collaboration between The Colorado Independent and The Rio Blanco Herald Times. We will post the...
Idrissa Camara, an aide at a Pueblo home for disabled people, volunteered for solitary confinement at the Aurora detention center. The experience, he says, brought him close to ending his life. Photo by Bryan Kelsen

GEO-run Aurora ICE Detention Center is isolating immigrants – some mentally ill – in...

The former ICE detainee agreed to talk under one condition: That he be called “Elvis.” The Salvadoran with a pompadour and an “I’d rather be...

Where’s Leroy Garcia? Supporters of Colorado’s Senate president tout his hands-off leadership. Others say...

When one of your first jobs involves collecting several dead bodies every day for six months in the 110-degree heat of an Iraqi war...
Photo of smoggy downtown Denver skyline via the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Air Pollution Control Division, Technical Services Program, Wednesday, March 6, 2019.

Colorado’s vaunted oil and gas rules are flawed and inadequately enforced Air quality continues...

Colorado’s much-touted regulations on emissions from oil and gas operations have not kept pace with explosive growth in oil and gas activity, resulting in...