Who Had the Worst Week?

• An unlicensed acupuncturist in New York City has been arrested after a patient’s lungs collapsed. Ouch.
• Alabama police tased and arrested a high school band leader when he refused to stop his band from playing after the game had ended.
• A Danish artist who gave a museum two blank canvases to place on display was ordered to repay $70,000 of his fee.
• Russell Brand has postponed his comedy tour after several women accused him of sexual assault.
• Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, was forced off the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation after he made “comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists.”
• Anheuser-Busch InBev said it will no longer cut the tails off its famous Clydesdale horses after pressure from animal-rights activists.
• European regulators have fined TikTok $368 million for not sufficiently protecting the privacy of children’s accounts.
• The shooting outside Dierks Bentley‘s bar in LoDo that injured five was the nation’s 500th mass shooting this year.
• Did India send assassins to Canada to kill a prominent Sikh leader? Canada says it did, and the countries are expelling each other’s diplomats as a result.
• Rupert Murdoch, 92, is retiring from the boards of Fox and News Corporation.
• Is Denver‘s food hall craze waning? Axios Denver thinks it might be.
• Weld County‘s High Plains Library District has agreed to pay $250,000 to a librarian it fired after she objected to the cancellation of programs for youth of color and LGBTQ teens.
• Colorado State Sen. Faith Winters has been hospitalized with a head injury after a bicycle accident. She reportedly was forced to swerve to avoid being struck by a truck and ended up hitting a curb.
• Tennis star Simona Halep has hired PR firm Berk Communications to help fight her doping ban. Berk works with other high-profile athletes such as Aaron Judge and Alex Rodriguez.
• Oh, Spain. The country won the FIFA Women’s World Cup last month and the president of the country’s soccer federation managed to completely overshadow it by forcibly kissing one of the players. Now, Spain has announced that the the player he kissed, Jennifer Hermoso, has been left off of the national team’s roster for the upcoming EUFA Nations League tournament “to protect her.”

So, who won the week?

• 104 West Partners has joined the Next Practices Group (NPG) network after a strategic investment by the Austin-based holding company. The agency will retain its name and leadership structure.
• Communications strategist and former Denver Post reporter Karen Crummy has joined the 76 Group.
• Some things go together like peanut butter and chocolate. In that spirit, Illegal Pete’s restaurant has co-developed a queso-flavored cannabis vape pen.
• DIA rose from 14th to seventh place in J.D. Power’s 2023 North America Airport Satisfaction Study. Better customer ratings for security was the biggest piece of DIA’s higher score this year.
• Former CU Buffs and Denver Broncos running back Phillip Lindsay is joining 104.3 The Fan as an afternoon sports talk radio host.
• Two Denver restaurants – La Diabla Pozole y Mezcal and Molotov Kitschen + Cocktails – made the New York Times’ list of the nation’s 50 most exciting restaurants.
• The Colorado–Colorado State football game drew 9.3 million viewers to make it the most-watched late-night college football game ever on ESPN. It was also ESPN’s fifth-most-watched regular-season game ever on the network for any time slot.
• A PBS volunteer who paid about $100 for Bob Ross’ first painting from his instructional TV show, “The Joy of Painting” sold it at auction for $9.85 million. That’s a lot of happy, little dollar bills.