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JonBenet Ramsey’s murder front burner
Oct 24th
One of the most notorious unsolved murders in Boulder, not to mention U.S. history, has recently been moved to the front burner, at least for the time being.
On Dec.26, 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in an obscure basement room in her family home in the University Hill neighborhood. She had been sexually assaulted, then strangled with a garrote.
Due to the fact that JonBenet was a child beauty-pageant star, the case captured the world’s interest and spawned nearly unprecedented media coverage for several years, never going completely away.
The case began as a suspected kidnapping due to an oddly written ransom note, which demanded $118,000 for her safe return. Late in the day, John Ramsey discovered her body and brought it upstairs to a roomful of shocked police officers and Ramsey family friends.
In the course of the investigation, District Attorney Alex Hunter empaneled a grand jury in 1999 to consider the case. The grand jury handed down indictments of JonBenet’s parents—John and Patsy Ramsey—but the indictments were never reported until the Daily Camera published a story earlier this year quoting members of the grand jury saying it had indicted the couple for child abuse resulting in death.
Hunter was quoted as saying he had declined to prosecute the Ramseys at that time because he didn’t believe he could prove the case “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Daily Camera reporter Charlie Brennan and a group known as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a lawsuit in Boulder District Court in September, claiming:
“The plaintiffs believe… that the indictment is a criminal justice record that reflects official action by the grand jury, and accordingly that it is subject to mandatory disclosure upon request.” Brennan and the RCFP also argue that the indictment should be made public in the interest of government transparency.
The Boulder DA’s office said unsealing the indictment would be “breach of promise” to the jury, citing the importance of maintaining the integrity of grand jury secrecy.
But last week, Weld County Judge Robert Lowenbach, the judge hearing the lawsuit by Brennan and RCFP, ruled that current Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett must show why the indictment must remain secret.
Not surprisingly, John Ramsey opposes the move unless the entire Grand Jury records are released.
Whatever the grand jury transcripts might show, in 2008, then District Attorney Mary Lacy declared that new DNA technology proved the Ramseys innocent of any wrongdoing.
The genetic material matches came from a drop of blood found on JonBenet’s underwear early in the investigation. The authorities determined then that the blood was not from a member of the Ramsey family but could not say whether it came from the killer.
In 2006, Lacy’s office announced the arrest of John Karr , after several months of investigation. But Karr’s DNA did not match, and less than two weeks later Lacy announced that he was no longer a suspect.
Hal Haddon and Bryan Morgan, attorneys who represent John Ramsey said in a letter to the Camera: “Public release of the allegations of an un-prosecuted indictment only serves to further defame (John Ramsey) and his late wife Patricia. Mr. Ramsey will have no access to whatever evidence the prosecutors presented to the grand jury and will have no ability to disprove those allegations in a court of law. Nor will the public have any ability to evaluate the propriety of the indictment unless the entire grand jury record is unsealed and opened to public view.”
From the beginning, investigators believed someone in the household was responsible, citing the lack of evidence of a break in, the complex layout of the house, the amount of time it took to write the two, 400 +/-word ransom-demand letters and similarities to Patsy’s hand writing. But a key detective, Lt. John Eller, who was the ranking investigator, would not press the Ramseys to be interrogated separately; insisting that the parents were victims, not suspects.
Under pressure, Patsy finally provided writing samples but a forensic handwriting expert ruled that, while very similar, the writing in the sample did not rise to the legal standard required to determine it was hers.
On Wednesday, the judge ordered the grand jury record to be released.
BC1 Editor Ron Baird covered the JonBenet Ramsey investigation for the Colorado Daily, when it was a real newspaper.
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CU researchers find hyper evolution in walking stick insects
Oct 21st
off a cascade of ecological impacts,
new CU-Boulder study finds
A California walking stick insect that has evolved to produce individuals with two distinct appearances—an all-green form that camouflages well with broader leaves and a form with a white stripe running down its back that blends better with needle-like leaves—can markedly affect its broader ecological community when the appearance of the bug is mismatched with the plant it’s living on.
The new findings, based on research carried out at the University of Colorado Boulder, illustrate the ability of rapid evolution to cause a cascade of ecological impacts.
The scientists found that a walking stick insect that is not well camouflaged is more likely to be eaten by birds, and in turn, those birds are then also more likely to feast on the spiders, caterpillars, plant hoppers, ants and other arthropods living on the same plant. The resulting overall reduction in bugs living on the plant also means that the plant itself was less likely to be attacked by sap-feeding insects.
“Our study shows that the evolution of poor camouflage in one species can affect all the other species living there and affect the plant as well,” said Tim Farkas, lead author of the study published in the journal Current Biology. “It’s intuitive, but also really surprising.”
Farkas led the study as an ecology and evolutionary biology doctoral student in Assistant Professor Patrik Nosil’s lab at CU-Boulder. Nosil and CU-Boulder doctoral student Aaron Comeault are also study co-authors. All three have since moved to the University of Sheffield in England.
Evolution is often thought of as a process that unfolds slowly over centuries if not millennia, as individuals with genetic advantages have a greater chance of surviving to pass down their genes to the next generation.
But scientists are increasingly identifying instances when evolution works on a much shorter time scale. An oft-cited example of rapid evolution is the peppered moth. The light-colored moths were historically able to camouflage themselves against lichen-covered tree bark in England. A darker variant of the moth existed but was more rare, since birds were able to easily spot the dark moth against the light trees. But during the industrial revolution, when soot blackened the trees, natural selection favored a darker variation of the moth, which began to flourish while the light-colored variant became less common.
Evolution on such a rapid scale opens up the possibility that the process could have ecological effects in the short term, impacting population sizes or changing the community makeup, for example.
Researchers have begun to compile examples of these “eco-evolutionary dynamics.” The new study offers some of the most comprehensive evidence yet that evolution can drive ecological change.
“We have combined both experimental and observational data with mathematical modeling to show that evolution causes ecological effects and that it does so under natural conditions,” Farkas said. “We also focused simultaneously on multiple evolutionary processes—including natural selection and gene flow—rather than just one, which affords us some unique insights.”
Farkas and his colleagues—including Ilkka Hanski and Tommi Mononen, both of the University of Helsinki in Finland—focused their attention on the walking stick Timema cristinae, which lives in Southern California. The flightless insect lives primarily on two shrubs: chamise, which has narrow, needle-like leaves; and greenbark ceanothus, which has broad, oval-shaped leaves. The variant of the walking sticks that have a white stripe down their backs are better camouflaged on the chamise, while the solid-green walking sticks are better camouflaged on the greenbark ceanothus.
The research team began by cataloguing the walking sticks living on the two types of shrubs in 186 research patches, and determined that the striped walking sticks were indeed more common on chamise and vice versa.
In a second experiment, the researchers artificially stocked the needle-like chamise with the different variants of walking sticks. A month later, they sampled the shrubs and found that more striped walking sticks survived than un-striped walking sticks. They also found that chamise stocked with striped walking sticks were home to a greater number of arthropods as well as a greater variety of arthropods than shrubs stocked with un-striped walking sticks. Finally, there were more leaves damaged by hungry insects on chamise stocked with striped walking sticks.
The scientists surmised that the differences were caused by scrub jays and other birds that feed on walking sticks. A group of easy-to-spot walking sticks could attract birds, which might then feed on other arthropods as well. To test their idea, the researchers repeated the experiment, but in this case, they caged some of the shrubs to keep the birds from feeding. As they expected, the caged chamise stocked with un-striped walking sticks did not have the same drop in numbers as they did when the bushes were not caged.
“Studies of how rapid evolution can affect the ecology of populations, communities and ecosystems are difficult to accomplish and therefore rare,” Farkas said. “We’re hoping our research helps biologists to appreciate the extent of dynamic interplay between ecology and evolution, and that it can be used by applied scientists to combat emerging threats to biodiversity, ecosystem services, and food security.”
Funding for the study was provided by CU-Boulder, the European Research Council and the Academy of Finland.
-CU-
Role of natural gas in municipal power generation to be examined
Oct 10th
Boulder to convene community working group on the future role of natural gas in local energy supply
The City of Boulder announced today that it will create a community working group of industry specialists and local stakeholders to explore concerns and opportunities related to the use of natural gas to generate electricity for the City of Boulder, should it decide to form a local electric utility. Natural gas will likely play a significant role in Boulder’s energy portfolio, whether the community continues to be served by Xcel Energy or by a municipal utility. The focus of the group’s work will be to examine issues and concerns related to fracking and methane releases and to explore current and possible industry best practices.
On Nov. 5, Boulder voters will be asked to weigh in on a ballot measure that would institute a five-year moratorium on fracking in Boulder and on Boulder-owned open space property. However, given the tremendous growth in natural gas production in Colorado, the current and future use of natural gas as an energy source for Boulder customers has raised concerns over fracking — a process that uses a pressurized water mixture to release oil or natural gas from deep underground.
In addition to discussing concerns over fracking, the community group will also discuss the issue of methane leakage. While it is widely accepted that burning natural gas emits significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, recent studies have found that using natural gas may actually release more greenhouse gases over its lifecycle. That’s because quantities of raw methane, a major component of natural gas, can escape into the atmosphere during natural gas extraction, production and distribution.
“If Boulder chooses to municipalize, before we commit to a particular energy portfolio, we want to address concerns around the use of natural gas supplied from fracking and how we can minimize the negative impacts through best practices or other means,” said Heather Bailey, executive director of energy strategy and electric utility development. “Natural gas is likely to be a necessary transition energy source as Boulder makes what we hope will be a dramatic shift away from coal and other fossil fuels toward renewable sources. Recognizing this, we have been working on what we can do as a municipal utility to influence the development of responsibly sourced gas that limits or eliminates the harmful impacts of fracking and methane release.”
Executive Director Bailey also commented that the city has a “unique opportunity” to benefit from a discussion with local experts on the feasibility of a future municipal utility to push aggressively towards responsible development of natural gas. Expertise from the University of Colorado, federal labs, as well as the numerous local companies and entrepreneurs developing leading-edge energy technologies could help Boulder in its work to curb climate change and support a robust clean energy market.
The city’s Energy Future team anticipates holding the first meeting of the natural gas community working group shortly after the Nov. 5 election. Members of the community, stakeholders and industry personnel who are interested in participating are encouraged to contact Heather Bailey at 303-441-1923 or baileyh@bouldercolorado.gov.
More information about the Energy Future project and associated municipalization exploration study is available at www.BoulderEnergyFuture.com.
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