• The University of Denver is cutting jobs and tightening its budget amid an $11 million budget deficit. Officials cite decreasing enrollment as the cause.
• An Australian police officer who fatally Tasered a 95-year-old senior care home resident was found guilty of manslaughter. The officer said the woman – again, 95 years old – was holding a steak knife and acting erratically.
• Disney has agreed to pay $43 million to settle allegations that it systematically paid women less than male counterparts for more than a decade.
• Denver-based VF Corp., the parent company of brands such as The North Face, Vans and Timberland, announced it will lay off 242 employees at a warehouse distribution center in Virginia.
• A ransomware attack against Blue Yonder, a major supply chain technology provider, has left retailers including Starbucks resorting to backup plans to manage operations including scheduling and handling inventories.
• The new NWSL team in Boston – BOS Nation – is still another year away from taking the field, and the franchise is already a dumpster fire. After introducing the team’s new name with a video that was widely criticized as homophobic, the team is now revisiting the name after yet another public backlash.
• The dreaded PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) – hated by workers and managers alike – is becoming more prevalent than ever.
• You think your Thanksgiving dinner with family was awkward? Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Baker Mayfield filed a $12 million lawsuit against his father and brother for taking millions of dollars from him without his knowledge and now failing to make payments to repay that money as part of a settlement agreement.
• Bodhi, the “menswear dog” who became a social media celebrity as a model for Coach and others, passed away at the age of 15.
• Alabama A&M University announced that linebacker Medrick Burnett Jr. had passed away from injuries sustained in a football game a month ago, only to announce several hours later that he actually was still alive and remains hospitalized.
• Former NHL star Paul Bissonnette has been hospitalized after getting into a brawl with seven people at a Houston’s restaurant in Scottsdale. Who other than a hockey player would try to take on seven people?
• A California man was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport after he tried to check two suitcases filled with clothing soaked in methamphetamine, including a cow pajama onesie.
• There is now a Hallmark Christmas movie inspired by the romance of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce – “Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.”
• Kraft Mac & Cheese has inexplicably launched a new flavor – Everything Bagel.

Who won the week?

• Children’s Hospital Colorado will build a new playground at its Anschutz Medical Center location thanks to a $150,000 lead donation from Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton and his wife Skylene.
• The University of Colorado men’s basketball team defeated the No. 2-ranked defending national champions, the University of Connecticut Huskies.
• Vito the pug beat over 1,900 other dogs to win Best in Show at the American Kennel Club‘s National Dog Show. It is the first time a pug has won Best in Show.

• Elwood Edwards, the voice behind AOL‘s once-ubiquitous “You’ve Got Mail” alert, passed away due to complications from a stroke. He was 74.
• KOA Newsradio sports talk show host Alfred “Big Al” Williams was let go as part of broader iHeartRadio layoffs. Williams was a star at the University of Colorado before winning two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos.
• “Monday Night Football” commentator Jason Kelce apologized for responding to a hostile fan’s homophobic slur with his own homophobic slur. Said Kelce, “I chose to greet hate with hate, and I don’t think that’s a productive thing.”
• Rental car giant Hertz has apologized for threatening to have a customer who drove a rental car more than 25,000 miles in a month arrested. Hertz had originally tried to charge the customer a $10,000 fee for driving too many miles on an “unlimited mileage” rental agreement.
• NFL and college football announcer Kirk Herbstreit‘s golden retriever Ben passed away at the age of 10. Ben was a social media star, attending college and pro games with Kirk and even sometimes appearing on camera in the announcer’s booth.
• Forty three research monkeys escaped their lab in South Carolina and are on the run. Not going to lie: I’m rooting for the monkeys.
• Amsterdam police arrested 62 people after they attacked supporters of an Israeli soccer team in town to play a Dutch club. Officials described the attacks as “antisemitic” in nature.
• The University of Florida‘s men’s basketball coach has been accused of sexually harassing and stalking women, including university students.
• Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid was suspended for three games by the NBA for getting into a physical altercation with a columnist from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
• The academic papers on superconductivity technology that you have no doubt been reading may have been falsified.
• The presidential election results have some members of the legacy media wondering if Joe Rogan is more influential than The New York Times.
• 5280 has let former Editorial Director Geoff Van Dyke and Chief Revenue Officer Camille Hammond go as it restructured some of its publications, according to Corey Hutchins.

Who won the week?

• The Colorado Restaurant Association named Annette as its Restaurant of the Year and Penelope Wong from Yuan Wonton as its Chef of the Year.
• Denver received its first significant snowfall of the season this week. And Japan‘s Mount Fuji finally has snow on it, ending the longest stretch without snow in 130 years.
• The New York Times added approximately 260,000 paid digital subscribers in the third quarter, giving it more than 11 million total subscribers for the first time.
• The bells of Notre Dame in Paris rang for the first time since a devastating fire in 2019, a sign that the cathedral will re-open as planned next month.

• A Russian court fined Google $20,604,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s $20.6 decillion for you math nerds). The fine, for allegedly blocking access to Russian media outlets, literally exceeds all the money on Earth.
• Speaking of Google, it announced its quarterly earnings on Tuesday and shared with analysts that additional cost reductions would be coming following several rounds of layoffs over the past few months. The executives then addressed the issue with concerned employees during a town hall while wearing Halloween costumes. A man dressed as a starfish explained to employees that the leadership team was examining the issue of potential layoffs thoughtfully.
• Los Angeles Dodgers fans set a metro bus ablaze celebrating the team’s World Series win.
• New Jersey‘s largest newspaper, The Star-Ledger, will stop publishing its print edition early next year and transition to online only.
• The Miami Heat unveiled a statue of the team’s Hall of Fame player Dwyane Wade, and, well, it’s not good. It may be the worst likeness of an athlete since the infamous Cristiano Ronaldo bust.
• A 20-year-old rising star pro golfer, Jeffrey Guan, was struck in the face by a golf ball and has completely lost sight in his left eye.
• Thieves stole more than 24 tons of artisan cheese from a London cheese retailer in a crime local authorities are calling the “grate cheese robbery.”
• Women’s Tennis Association CEO Portia Archer is trying to defend holding the WTA Tour Finals in Saudi Arabia. “It’s difficult for me to say where we would ‘draw the line,’ so to speak,” Archer said of Saudi Arabia’s terrible women’s rights record.
• Former Denver Broncos wide receiver and longtime Denver sportscaster Mike Haffner died. He was 82.
• An age-old maxim – the Infinite Monkey Theorem – holds that a monkey given a typewriter and an infinite amount of time could reproduce the entire works of William Shakespeare. However, two mathematicians in Australia are trying to burst our monkey bubble by calculating that our universe would die a natural death before that could happen. Apparently “infinite” isn’t a term that is taught in Australian math classes.

Who won the week?

• The Denver-based social media agency VOCO has been acquired by Gravity Global. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• The Denver-based trade group GoWest Credit Union Association appointed Madlynn Schreibvogel as its new vice president of public relations. Schreibvogel previously was with the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration.