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Free gun locks available today in St. Louis areas

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

ST. LOUIS - Gun owners can pick up a free gun lock at St. Louis City Fire Department engine houses, St. Louis public library locations, and select county library locations.Missouri and Illinois parents can request a free gun lock online from St. Louis Children's Hospital, and free, no-questions-asked gun locks are available at all BJC hospital emergency rooms. New law requires doctors to assess Missouri kids under 6 for lead exposure To find a location nearest to you, click here.

Editorial: Colorado agency permitting Suncor pollution is derilect in its duty to protect the environment

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Suncor Energy’s pollution permits in Colorado for both air and water are outdated and out of touch with modern expectations for environmental protection.For unknown or perhaps inexplicable reasons, updating the expired permits for the Commerce City refinery has been elusive for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. We can describe the years-long process as a boondoggle, but really it’s a dereliction of duty to protect Coloradans and our land, water and air from pollution.On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency rejected CDPHE’s latest attempt to update a permit, regulating the harmful particles and gasses emitted by Suncor’s Plant 2, which refines oil into fuels like gasoline and jet fuel.KC Becker, the head of EPA Region 8, said that the EPA is prioritizing air quality for those who live near the Suncor facility in Commerce City and northwest Denver.“Improving air quality for the underserved communities affected by harmful air emissions from the Suncor re...

Carnation Festival, a Red Rocks double-header and more things to do in Denver this week

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

The comedy “Bottoms” will open the 2023 CinemaQ Film Festival in Denver in 2023. ( Orion Pictures/Brownstone Productions)Q marks the spotThursday-Sunday. Founded in 2009 “to celebrate queer voices, queer visions, and queer visibility” on screen, the four-day CinemaQ Film Festival returns to the Sie FilmCenter on Aug. 10-13, showcasing “the best in new and classic LGBTQ+ cinema from around the world.”Things kick off Thursday with an opening night party and the presentation of “Bottoms,” a comedy about two queer high school girls who start a fight club for cheerleaders. In the ensuing days, the fest features live Q&As with filmmakers, panel discussions, and a dozen films and shorts like “Saint Drogo,” “Perpetrator” and “Gussy.” There will also be a double feature of restorations of two Andy Warhol horror flicks from the 1970s. The festival wraps up with an ice cream social, marketplace, and a showing of “Problemista,” another comedy.The Sie is located at 2510 E. Colfax...

Denver comic Ben Roy on his YouTube special, his punk band, the merits of anger, and pop culture’s demise

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Ben Roy feels the heat from all sides.The Denver comedian and singer of the punk band Spells has taken a hatchet to polite society in his vicious but philosophical jokes, as well as spittle-flecked music performances that find his band setting up on the floor, surrounded by bouncing crowds, as vocalist and songwriter Roy vibrates like a wiry windsock.Related ArticlesEntertainment | “Ted Lasso” star kicks off stand-up comedy tour in Denver this fall After four critically acclaimed stand-up albums, tours and music albums with his band, his Denver-based, truTV series “Those Who Can’t” (with his Grawlix trio, including Denver’s Adam Cayton-Holland and Andrew Orvedahl), and ongoing Grawlix podcasts, his first hour-long video special, “Hyena,” is on the loose.Released by 800 Pound Gorilla Records — the esteemed label for mega-comic Kevin Hart’s LOL! Studios — “Hyena” builds on the 44-year-oldR...

CinemaQ Fest straddles the sublimely ridiculous and the deadly serious

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

The checklist for a well-programmed film festival might go something like this:Deliver a varied slate of films: fiction and nonfiction; feature-length films and shorts; comedies and dramas.Sculpt shorts packages with intentional juxtapositions that delight and create meaningful, pleasing and potent echoes.Host guests and panels that guarantee the film-centric gathering is an event, not just cinema’s version of binge-watching.Above all, engage, entertain and expand comfort zones.Director Sav Rodgers on the search in his personal doc “Chasing Chasing Amy.” Courtesy of Denver FilmFor 15 years, Denver Film’s Cinema Q Festival has been more than checking the boxes. It has been serving, reflecting and expanding that vague yet vital notion of community.Under the guidance of founder Keith Garcia, the LGBTQ+ branded screenings grew from a monthly program to a spotlight section during the Denver Film Festival to an annual festival that will celebrate its 15th year with Thursday’s opening nigh...

One-night only: A chance to see Burning Man-style art in Denver

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Artists Ryan Elmendorf and Nick Geurts will bring a bit of Burning Man to Denver this weekend, installing their large-scale, interactive sculpture “Awakening” in the RiNo neighborhood for a one-night-only event on Saturday.Viewers can enter the sculpture “Awakening” through a door in the ear of its head. Photo by Valerie Santerli, provided by the artistsThe evening offers a chance to see a landmark artwork making its local debut, but it is also a party with some of the special attractions that make the Burning Man festival, staged annually in the Nevada desert, such a wild affair: DJs, performance artists, fire spinners, aerialists, adult beverages and more than 20 vendors selling various wares.It will also serve an artful cause. The $20 admission raises funds that the artists will use later this month to take the piece back to the festival, where they are the de facto ambassadors for Colorado among an international group of over-the-top makers.“I think that what a lot of people ove...

Children’s Hospital Colorado expands genetic testing in hopes of detecting rare diseases sooner

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Stephanie Burkhardt is one of the luckier members of a group no one wants to join: She’s the mother of a child with a rare, incurable disease.When her son Connor was 3, he started having unexplained seizures. Testing at Children’s Hospital Colorado quickly uncovered the cause — a genetic syndrome called Batten disease, which causes waste products to build up in his cells.Children with Batten disease either don’t meet developmental milestones, or lose skills over time. They eventually lose their sight and ability to speak or move, and have a shortened life expectancy. The disease has 13 subtypes, which affect about 14,000 children worldwide.While the diagnosis was devastating, getting it quickly allowed Connor, now 6, to promptly start receiving a drug that reduces his seizures and allows him to attend school and play around their Centennial home like a boy who isn’t sick, Burkhardt said. Most children with Batten disease aren’t able to feed themse...

5 things we learned about Mayor Johnston’s progress on fixing Denver’s homelessness problem

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Making a dent in Denver’s homelessness challenges requires some math.Five hundred existing rental units that can be better leveraged by the city and its housing partners to make them available to people living on the streets; 500 hotel rooms in properties converted into shelters; and 500 tiny homes, ice fishing tents or other small-scale temporary shelters. That’s the formula Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration has in mind to achieve its ambitious goal of offering shelter to 1,000 people living on the city’s streets by the end of this year.“We’re running at all three of those options as quickly as we can and with as much effort as we can in hopes that we deliver on a percentage of those targets on all of those parallel lines of effort get us over that 1,000-person goal,”  Cole Chandler, Johnston’s senior advisor for homelessness resolution, said.Chandler outlined the plan in a presentation before the City Council safety, housing, education ...

Will it spin, or won’t it? The mystery behind Mission Ballroom’s disco ball

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Mission Ballroom has secured its place in the Denver music scene since its establishment in 2019 not just because of the artists who perform there, but in part because of its unique “Mission Ball” – an LED art installation that spins above the heads of concert-goers and lights up the dark.But on some evenings, the ball instead sits unused within the venue at 4242 Wynkoop St., in the River North Art District, leaving attendees puzzled, even disappointed.Don Strasburg, co-president of AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, which owns the concert venue, said the truth behind the mystery is actually fairly straight-forward.Each performer is briefed on the technical capabilities of the room, including the Mission Ball, in advance, and their teams “determine what level of use they want with it,” he said.For instance, the ball shone brightly over the crowd at DJ Fred Again’s show last October. Other musicians, including DJ John Summit, electronic music group M83 and ho...

Fire crews respond as Gardena residence erupts in flames

Published Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:02 GMT

Crews responded to a mobile home that was fully engulfed in flames in Gardena Thursday morning. Firefighters were on the scene at South Vermont Avenue near West 135th Street shortly before 5:30 a.m.Firefighters respond to a blaze in Gardena on Aug. 10, 2023. (KTLA)Sky5 was in the area covering a car crash when the crew spotted flames shooting into the air from the burning mobile home.Firefighters were attacking the fire, hoping to stop it from spreading through the mobile home park and to a nearby apartment complex. Protesters shut down 134 Freeway in Glendale It was unclear if anyone was inside the structure when it caught fire.