Who Had the Worst Week?

• Federal officials think they have pinpointed the primary cause of the Cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened more than 1,500 people across the country – shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants. Sadly, this is not the first time “Taco Bell” and the terms “explosive diarrhea” and “vomiting” have been used together.
• Denver PR professional Abby Hagstrom‘s cat, Bones, briefly shut down the Eisenhower Tunnel when it escaped from her vehicle while returning from Steamboat Springs. Hagstrom realized the cat was missing when she stopped for gas, and the Apple AirTag tracker showed he was in the tunnel on, appropriately enough, one of the tunnel’s catwalks. Bones was safely recovered.
• Spain and Argentina will face off Sunday at Metlife Stadium, rebranded as New York/New Jersey Stadium for FIFA, to determine the winner of the 2026 World Cup, but they may be doing it in the worst air quality in the history of the tournament. Wildfires in Canada are pushing smoke into the Northeast, and New York is among the top-five cities globally for worst air quality today.
• RTD is considering how to make $62 million in cuts to balance its budget, and one of the areas it said it is considering is the 16th Street Shuttle, the single most used bus line in its network with more than 2.3 million riders. Two days later, after an outcry from business leaders and city officials, RTD backed away from that, saying the potential cuts it shared were hypothetical and “just for illustrative purposes.”
• The Western Kentucky football team revoked a player’s scholarship because he took too long to grieve his mother’s death. Adding insult injury to injury, they are also refusing to allow him to transfer to another school to complete his final year of eligibility.
• If you have ever been on the receiving end of Kyle Clark‘s “press release reading music” – mercifully, I have not – you had a bad day. This week, it was the new Front Range passenger rail line “Colorado Connector” (“CoCo” for short) that got the honor. Clark took aim at the flowery language the CoCo team used to describe the newly unveiled brand design for the new rail line.
• Has one of the signs of the apocalypse ever been a job posting before? AI purveyor Anthropic posted multiple jobs this week that seemingly indicate it thinks its technology could hasten the end of the world. The jobs included an “Enforcement Analyst” that “will play a critical role in protecting against the misuse of AI systems for radiological and nuclear harms.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously downplayed the risk of AI in the past, saying that just because AI could help bad actors create biological weapons, he doesn’t “think biological attacks will necessarily be carried out the instant it becomes widely possible to do so.” He did acknowledge, however, that “added up across millions of people and a few years of time, I think there is a serious risk of a major attack … with casualties potentially in the millions or more.”
• America took a step closer to moving to year-round Daylight Saving Time. But when we tried it before in the 1970s, we didn’t even make it a year before it was repealed.
• Is LinkedIn deleting posts critical of large, financially attractive businesses? Eric Anderson has questions.
• Two Custer County GOP officials railed against the recent cancellation of their local Fourth of July fireworks show, saying the deaths of three firefighters in the days leading up to Independence Day didn’t justify the decision to cancel. Said one of the officials, “Noooo, people are dying! Yeah, that is what a firefighter does: he fights fire. You libtard son-of-bitches don’t even understand what a firefighter does. That’s why he gets paid to put his life on the line to defend you. … We understand some people lost their lives. But you don’t shut life down because of some death. That’s not how this works here in this country. We are not afraid of death. We embrace it.” Neither of the two officials are volunteer firefighters.
• Denver hospitals have seen e-scooter injuries more than double so far this year.
• Hilton Grand Vacations has fired an employee who sent a racist message via social media to Las Vegas Aces basketball player Chelsea Gray. Hilton Grand Vacations announced the firing, saying “The person responsible for posting this information is no longer with the company. His behavior was in violation of multiple company policies and does not reflect our company’s values in any way.”
• It may seem like all the TV stations in Denver have their own news helicopter, but in fact they all split the costs of a single helicopter. That’s right – SkyFox, Copter4, Sky9 and AirTracker7 are just station-specific branding for the same helicopter. That collaboration is at risk, though, as Denver 7 announced it is withdrawing from the partnership and will forego helicopter coverage moving forward.
• NBC fired a security guard after an intruder confronted and screamed racist insults at “Today Third Hour” co-host Craig Melvin on the show’s set.

Who won the week?

• Outdoor gear company Travoca has named Denver-based Big Fish Collective as its agency of record.
• Telemundo‘s KDEN named Xitlaly Ruiz as anchor and multimedia journalist for “Noticias Telemundo Colorado.”
• Boulder Daily Camera sportswriter Brian Howell is leaving the paper. He has not announced where he is headed yet.
• Denver ranks as the fifth-most-fit city in the country. Arlington, Va., Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Seattle rank ahead of us.
• The Philadelphia Mint beat out the Denver Mint and two others to produce the new $1 coin featuring the image of President Donald Trump.