• A United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai was forced to return to the U.S. two hours into the flight when one of the pilots realized he had forgotten to bring his passport. A new crew was brought in and the flight took off again six hours after its initial departure.
• What do you get when you put librarians in charge of doing math? A $25.4 million estimate for an open-records request. The Pikes Peak Library District in El Paso County gave a journalist the $25.4 million estimate that calculated it would take 613,440 hours to complete, the equivalent of a team of five people working full-time for 59 years.
• The genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, meaning that its DNA registry containing sensitive information on millions of people could be bought for pennies on the dollar by bad actors. California‘s attorney general issued a rare consumer privacy alert reminding residents that they have the option to direct the company to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material it holds prior to any sale.
• Don’t delay that vacation: Hawaii is sinking 40 times faster than scientists initially thought.
• It was quite a week for the White House:
  • It is seeking corporate sponsors for the annual Easter Egg Roll event, a move that has ethics experts concerned and members of both political parties outraged.
  • It terminated $250 million in federal funding for public and behavioral health in Colorado.
  • European universities are investing millions of dollars in new or expanded academic programs as part of an effort to lure American academics whose research programs have lost funding from the federal government or who are concerned about academic freedom.
  • The number of people trading in their Teslas has tripled over the past year as owners increasingly become concerned about the signal their cars send about supporting Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock continues to trade at slightly less than half of what it was in December. Musk likely is not concerned, however, because he is positioned to make billions of dollars in new government contracts under the Trump Administration.
  • In a classic example of the “Streisand Effect,” President Donald Trump brought national attention to a little-known and little-seen portrait of himself located in the Colorado State Capitol’s Gallery of Presidents. President Trump feels the portrait is less flattering than, say, the images used on the superhero trading cards he has promoted, and he blamed Gov. Jared Polis. In reality, Republican state legislators raised the money for the portrait and approved its installation. Nevertheless, lawmakers agreed to remove the portrait.
• The live-action remake of “Snow White” is on pace to be one of the biggest flops of the decade, even bigger than “Joker: Folie à Deux.” At the heart of the debacle: a series of self-inflicted wounds.
• A jury ordered the makers of the Roundup weed killer to pay $2.1 billion in damages to a plaintiff who argued the product caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. Appeals courts have reduced previous large jury awards against Roundup by about 95%, which could also happen here.
• The Colorado Rockies will play the first game of the 2025 season today, and they are already 1.5 games back from the division-leading L.A. Dodgers.
• It is not easy being a mid-major program like the Colorado State University Rams. You want the program to do well, but when they do, you start to worry about losing players or coaches to schools in bigger conferences. That is what happened this week. Men’s basketball coach Niko Medved methodically built CSU into a team that made the NCAA “March Madness” tournament regularly, and his team gave one of the all-time great performances in a last-second loss to the University of Maryland. And then, less than 24 hours later, the University of Minnesota hired Medved away.
• It has been a tough couple of weeks for the Denver arts and business communities. First, we lost former Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation CEO Tom Clark, who was a behind-the-scenes driving force for many of Denver’s biggest accomplishments over the past few decades. And, this week, the family and friends of Denver Botanic Gardens CEO Brian Vogt are mourning his passing. He was 66.

Who won the week?

• GFM|CenterTable added Shelbey Royal as a senior director of search.
• Connect For Health Colorado named Nina Schwartz as its new chief policy and external affairs officer.
  • Turner PR has been named agency of record for Xanterra Travel Collection. Turner will handle earned media and social media strategy for the company’s National Parks collection, including accommodations, experiences and outposts in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Death Valley, Glacier, Rocky Mountain and Mount Rushmore.
• The Sundance Film Festival is relocating from Park City, Utah, to Boulder. Fun fact: The New York Times article covering the news first described Boulder as a “ski town,” which it is not, and then issued a correction calling it a “mountain town,” which it also is not. We’ll see if a second correction appears.