The Guardian reports that a Denver-based company, Elite Sterling Security, has sold 300 bulletproof backpacks over the last two months. The company has also received inquiries about their backpacks from 2,000 families across the U.S. And the company is in talks with schools in Colorado about “equipping them with ballistic safety vests, a scaled-down version of military uniforms designed to hang in classroom cupboards for children to wear in an emergency,”The Guardian reports.

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The billboard was paid for by a group of locals who asked to remain anonymous, according to Lamar Advertising, which spoke with KUSA.

From the AP:

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Imagine he wanted – and legally had the right to be – that child's father. It's a very real scenario, all across America. But in one state, that may soon be changing.

As a riveting CNN story last summer, at the height of "legitimate rape" fever, illuminated, a stunning majority of states – 31 of them – offer some form of visitation and custody rights for men who impregnate their rape victims. And it's not just the threat of having to co-parent with one's assailant that's a nightmare for many victims -- it's the ugly opportunism it inspires. As attorney Shauna Prewitt, whose daughter was the product of a sexual assault, wrote back then, "When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child." A baby can become a bargaining chip.

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Dish offered $25.5 billion in cash and stock on Monday for Sprint, which Dish says beats the offer from Japan's Softbank Corp. Softbank is offering $20 billion in cash, and shareholders get to keep 30 percent of Sprint. Dish is offering $17.3 billion in cash, and Sprint shareholders get 32 percent of the combined Dish-Sprint.

Sprint Nextel Corp.'s stock jumped on the news, as investors started looking forward to a bidding war between Dish and Softbank. Sprint had accepted the Softbank offer and was expecting to close on it this summer. Sprint, the country's third-largest cellphone carrier, said it would evaluate Dish's offer.

Charlie Ergen, Dish's executive chairman, has been looking for a way into the wireless world for years. Dish has been buying space on the airwaves for cellphone service or wireless broadband. The Englewood, Colo., company has tried to partner with cellphone companies to put its spectrum rights to use, but has been repeatedly rebuffed.

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It was hard to leave my friend Mary’s house Wednesday morning once we heard there was going to be snow all day across Nebraska. Both fireplaces were lit, there was coffee and muffins, Sadie was happy with her pack, the gorgeous Golden Retrievers Max and Malie, and I was headed to Nebraska? Why?

A word about Mary. I met her through Open Salon, she was one of the fantastic originals, and we connected through our writing right away. She came to our crazy Salon party at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, where Glenn Greenwald and Duncan Black cavorted with Joe Klein (no, they didn’t cavort, although they were all there) and Arianna Huffington came for a minute and left her lovely sister Agape while she departed in a limo for dinner with celebs (which was all good) and Gov. Ed Rendell dropped by and a bunch of Open Salon people came and they were pretty much my favorites. There was Dave Cullen, of course, my writer on the Columbine school shootings, still a year or two away from his award-winning book, and I’m sure there were other people, and then there was Mary.

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I complained in my last post that it’s been hard to meet people since I’m averse to leaving Sadie alone in a hotel room. But in Evanston I met a drunk welder in a cowboy hat as soon as I checked into my dog-friendly Best Western. “Hey, good lookin’,” he said, and I can state categorically that I was not good looking at that moment: dirty hair, no makeup, boots still salty from our trip to Bonneville Salt Flats.

(Oh, here’s Sadie, before she got salt poisoning.)

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The House-Senate committee, which will introduce a bill this week drafted from the 58 recommendations that the pot task force issued last month with taxes being one of several issues the committee is considering, would ask voters to approve a 15 percent excise tax and a 15 percent special sales tax. Those rates plus existing local and state tax rates -- for food and beverage sales in Denver, the the combined total tax rate is 8 percent -- could mean a total tax rate 0f 38 percent on marijuana purchases in the Denver area.

Currently, medical marijuana is taxed like all food and beverage sales are and fluctuates from county to county, in Denver that rate is just 8 percent.

The proposed Colorado taxes are markedly higher than the taxes placed on recreational marijuana in the only other legalization state -- Washington. At present, Washington state's Initiative 502 legalized small amounts of marijuana and marijuana products for people 21 and older and established a 25 percent excise tax on those products.

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In a CNN interview discussing the plan, NRA official Asa Hutchinson claimed he is "open to expanding background checks," but the Huffington Post notes "he stopped far short of endorsing the type of universal background checks for all gun sales that have been proposed" in major legislation before the U.S. Senate.

All of this points to five key questions at the heart of today's increasingly bizarre gun debate - and their not-so-satisfying answers:

1. Why does the NRA oppose the universal background check policy it once championed?

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According to a report from the Associated Press, Kaufman Police Chief Chris Aulbaugh told The Dallas Morning News that investigators didn't know if McLelland and Woodward's deaths were related to Hasse's killing, but they couldn't discount it. "It was a shock with Mark Hasse, and now you can just imagine the double shock and until we know what happened, I really can't confirm that it's related but you always have to assume until it's proven otherwise," Aulbaugh said.

The three cases have prompted a multiagency manhunt, including the Kaufman County Sheriff's Department, the Texas Rangers, Colorado Springs law enforcement and the FBI. “Because we have to treat it as related [to the Hasse investigation], we’ll be working side by side again,” Aulbaugh told The Dallas Morning News.

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They announced their intention to seek the death penalty against Holmes in court on Monday.

Last week prosecutors said they rejected an offer from Holmes' attorney to have him plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. Prosecutors said the offer to have Holmes spend life in prison wasn't a serious attempt at plea bargaining.

Holmes is charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder for the July 20 assault on a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" that killed 12 people and injured 70. His attorneys are expected to argue that he was legally insane at the time of the shooting.

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In its preview story of the political week ahead, the New York Times notes that the president is "seek(ing) to regain momentum" on the gun issue as "a filibuster threat is growing in the senate" and as a two-week congressional recess is marked by a nationwide activist push by the National Rifle Association. To counter it, the president is heading to Colorado, a state made famous by two of the most high-profile gun massacres in history - and now the first state in the historically pro-gun West to pass serious gun regulations.

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Behind-the-scenes maneuvering erupted into a public quarrel between prosecutors and the defense over Holmes' public offer to plead guilty, but the two sides could still come to an agreement that would spare Holmes's life in exchange for spending the rest of his life in prison.

"Even if they give notice on Monday that they are seeking the death penalty, they can come off that and enter into a plea bargain any time," said attorney Dan Recht, a past president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.

As the tangled and bloody case returns to court, survivors and families of the victims are uncertain about what happens next.

If the case goes to trial, "all of us victims would be dragged along potentially for years," said Pierce O'Farrill, who was shot three times.

"It could be 10 or 15 years before he's executed. I would be in my 40s and I'm planning to have a family, and the thought of having to look back and reliving everything at that point in my life, it would be difficult," he said.

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No plea agreement exists, prosecutors said in a scathing court document Thursday, and one "is extremely unlikely based on the present information available to the prosecution."

They also said anyone reading news stories about the offer would inevitably conclude "the defendant knows that he is guilty, the defense attorneys know that he is guilty, and that both of them know that he was not criminally insane."

Neither the defense nor the prosecution immediately returned phone calls Thursday.

Holmes is charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder in the July 20 shootings in a packed theater in the Denver suburb of Aurora. Twelve people were killed and 70 were injured.

Holmes' attorneys disclosed in a court filing Wednesday that their client has offered to plead guilty, but only if he wouldn't be executed.

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Tom Clements was shot around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday in Monument, north of Colorado Springs, said Lt. Jeff Kramer, of the El Paso County Sheriff's Office.

A family member called 911 to report the shooting and officers found Clements, 58, dead. Search dogs have been called in to comb through a wooded area around Clements' home, and authorities were going house to house trying to find out what neighbors heard and saw.

Clements lived in a wooded neighborhood of large, two-story houses on expansive 2-acre lots dotted with evergreen trees in an area known as the Black Forest. Long driveways connect the homes to narrow, winding roads that thread the hills. Clements' home was out of view, behind a barricaded of crime-scene tape in the road.

Gov. John Hickenlooper appointed Clements to the post in 2011 after he served for more than three decades in the Missouri Department of Corrections. He replaced Ari Zavaras, a former Denver police chief who led the department under two governors.

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Part of Colorado's story of change comes from the statehouse where Democrats control both the governor's office and both chambers of the Legislature. But as much of the story comes from outside the Capitol, where organic grass-roots uprisings are obliterating old political assumptions.

For decades, this was a state whose electoral topography was reliable Republican and whose politics was dominated by an unholy coalition of cultural conservatives and oil and gas interests. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became the national conservative movement in a microcosmic petri dish, passing socially conservative constitutional amendments and a so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights aimed at pulverizing the public sector.

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“This person -- if there were no assault weapons available, and no this or no that -- this guy’s going to find something, right?” he said. “If it was not one weapon, it would have been another.”

Eight months later, Hickenlooper has changed his tune.

As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Hickenlooper is poised to sign some of the toughest new gun control laws in the nation, capping a journey that has transformed a popular, data-driven Western Democrat who takes his son shooting into an unlikely frontman for bringing new gun laws into the center of the United States.

After Aurora (after Oak Creek, after Newtown) Hickenlooper started "asking questions about guns and death," the Times notes. "Did ammunition limits make sense? Did background checks really keep guns away from potential killers?"

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You may have read the headline-grabbing news that in advance of its conference on drug policy this week, the U.N. issued a report urging the United States government to block Colorado and Washington state from moving forward with voter-approved laws that allow adult citizens to use marijuana as a less harmful alternative to alcohol. What you may not have heard is that on the very same day the U.N. released that report, U.S. ambassador Joseph Torsella slammed his U.N. colleagues for drinking too much on the job. Apparently, binging at the U.N. is so commonplace and excessive that it is hindering the organization from conducting its most basic work.

As hypocrisy humor goes, this is pretty funny. An international body immersed in one drug (alcohol) yet telling governments to outlaw an objectively less harmful drug (marijuana) is biting comedy. It hilariously exemplifies the double standards and contradictions that still define many global leaders' views of drugs.

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Judge William Sylvester did not in so many words grant the use of truth serum on Holmes, because truth serum is the stuff of Hogwarts and not juridical determinations. What Sylvester granted was that a "narcoanalytic interview" could be employed to determine if Holmes is genuinely insane. This would entail injecting the accused mass murderer with gradual doses of a barbiturate (most likely sodium amytal) while prosecutors subject him to questioning.

Like taking other barbiturates (or even just a few too many stiff drinks), sodium amytal (also known as sodium amobarbital) can function to lower inhibitions and prompts willingness to talk. In his column on "'Truth serum' and 'what really happened'," psychiatrist August Piper detailed how narcoanalytic interviews typically proceed:

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If Holmes is convicted, he could be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison. Judge William Sylvester said Holmes, 25, can change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity later, if he chooses.

Such a change could be the only way Holmes could avoid life in prison or execution.

Prosecutors, for their part, have not said yet whether they will pursue the death penalty, announcing Tuesday that they will make their decision known on April 1.

The judge set Aug. 5 for the start of the trial. Prosecutors and defense attorneys declined comment.

As he has done in past hearings, Holmes sat silently through Tuesday's proceedings. He wore a red jail jumpsuit and sported a thick, bushy beard and unkempt dark brown hair.

When he walked into the courtroom, he looked at his parents, James and Arlene Holmes. They sat silently at the front of the room and left without comment after the hearing.

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