Colorado Matters

The voters have spoken, but the Electoral College hasn’t yet. Electors choose the next president on Monday and some of them have a plan to stop Donald Trump. However, a court in Colorado just dealt their movement a blow. Then, what a Colorado family learned when they quit the city and bought a farm near Greeley. The property came with water, but it didn’t mean they could always use it. Tershia D’Elgin’s new book about her father is called “The Man Who Thought He Owned Water.”

Hundreds of scientists, including roughly 70 from Colorado, have signed a letter to President-Elect Donald Trump asking him to “…take immediate and sustained action against human-caused climate change.” We ask a CU-Boulder ecologist — is it a quixotic move? Then sisters Jessica and Robin McIntyre are dealing with the prospect of early-onset Alzheimer’s. One sister has inherited the genetic mutation, the other has not. Plus, how Colorado jump started craft brewing in Italy.

There’s growing concern about a lack of diversity in metro Denver theater. A recent study surveyed the racial and gender makeup of playwrights, directors and managers at theaters in the Rocky Mountain Region. Then, before Bob Dylan became world famous he stumbled into Denver and didn’t make a positive first impression. Also, a local photographer and author follows in the photographic footprints of his great-great-grandfather. And, the group “Magic Music” is considered to be Colorado’s first Jam Band.

The water in the Fraser River, which winds through Grand County, is in demand. Native species and recreationists want water to stay in the river, but Denver Water plans to bring more of it to its customers on the Front Range. CPR’s Nathaniel Minor found environmentalists disagree on what to do. Then, we take stock of how Coloradans voted in 2016. And, German, Japanese and Italian prisoners of war were kept in camps throughout the US — including in Colorado — during World War II. At one, Camp Hale near Leadville, an American soldier who sympathized with the Nazis tried to help two German soldiers escape.

At Colorado’s largest online school, GOAL Academy, only a fraction of students logged on consistently, according to an investigation by Education Week. Now the school’s founder is involved with the opening of two new online schools. Then, a father of modern radical Islamism lived in Northern Colorado briefly in 1949. He later went home to Egypt and authored writings popular with today’s jihadists. Also, Colorado State University-Pueblo recently launched the country’s first center for cannabis research. And on the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we hear from a survivor who was on the USS Arizona that day. Islam cannot fulfill its role, except by taking concrete role in a society, rather in a nation. Later… what’s billed as the country’s FIRST cannabis research center… opens at Colorado State University – Pueblo. Then… it’s the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We hear from a Colorado survivor –nearly burned alive in the depths of the sinking USS Arizona… “We were no escape there from down the hatch, and down the ladder, since everything was so hot, and I tried to close the hatch and got burned pretty bad.”

The small house in north Denver near Interstate 70 where Candi CdeBaca lives has been in her family for generations. She thinks a plan to expand the interstate is a civil rights violation. She provides her thoughts and we hear the state’s viewpoint. Then, is there an ocean on Pluto? And, in 1966 two nuns founded one of the first schools in Colorado for kids with learning differences.

Donald Trump’s list of potential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court includes three Coloradans. A former state Supreme Court justice, Rebecca Love Kourlis, explains who they are and what their legal careers indicate about how they would rule on the bench. Plus, an investigation into why — at almost the last minute — language changed in an EPA report on fracking and drinking water. And, the future of voucher programs in U.S. schools. We also share a new holiday song from The Lumineers, and profile a Denver muralist.

Promises of a renewed coal industry by candidate Donald Trump revved up a Grand Junction crowd in October. But is a coal resurgence possible in Colorado? Meanwhile, new immigrants and refugees wonder how a Trump administration will affect their lives. CPR’s Megan Verlee has been listening to their concerns. And beer has been around for 8,000 years — the Egyptians drank a version of it. A University of Colorado historian, who fancies himself a “beer archeologist,” on reproducing ancient beers.