@Denverheadlines Friday

	Highs	Lows	Friday Sun and clouds mixed. High 92F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph. Friday night Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low around 65F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
	92° F	65° F
	33 C	18 C
			Sunrise: 5:59 am    Sunset: 8:10 pm    Moonrise: 2:22 am    Moonset: 5:10 pm

• The Colorado Democratic Party has hired a woman who helped with Barack Obama's first presidential campaign to be its next executive director.  Jennifer Koch will replace Alec Garnett, who is seeking the seat of term-limited House Speaker Mark Ferrandino.  Koch, of Littleton, grew up in Summit and Routt counties. She was the northeast deputy political director for Obama's first presidential campaign and also served as deputy White House liaison for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• A Colorado felon classified as a high-risk parolee is back behind bars, accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in Aurora. Raheem Hawkins, 20, was on parole at the time of the alleged rape after serving time in the state Department of Corrections for robbery and forgery.

• Thirty years after the slaying of a 22-year-old University of Colorado journalism student who was dating a daughter of actor Robert Redford, Boulder police are again asking people to help find the suspect.

• Denver is looking to expand its curbside composting program to 2,300 more homes in January with a goal of 20,000 customers by 2026 — an ecological pursuit that only a handful of Colorado cities have undertaken.

• Denver police have written more tickets for public marijuana use so far this year than in all of 2012, but the crime is rarely punished, according to new statistics from the city.  Though Colorado voters in November legalized marijuana use by adults, consuming marijuana in public remains illegal, under both state law and Denver municipal ordinance. It brings a $100 fine under the state law.  According to figures provided by the Denver Department of Safety, police in the city wrote just 20 tickets for public marijuana consumption during the first half of 2013. Fifteen of those tickets came in May and June. Officers wrote only eight tickets in all of 2012, all but one of those pre-legalization.

• Colorado is not becoming overrun by bears, it just seems that way because technology allows for news of encounters to travel in an instant.

• Colorado's roughly 32,000 state workers need a 3.8 percent raise to catch up to their counterparts in the private sector, the state Department of Personnel and Administration said Thursday.  The state also needs to pick up a larger share of workers' medical- and dental-insurance premiums, along with merit pay, according to a letter to the governor and General Assembly from Kathy Nesbitt, the agency's executive director.

• Denver Mayor Michael Hancock's campaign finance reports for 2012 filed in February contained vastly inaccurate numbers — showing the campaign had raised $94,000 more than it actually had and spent $20,000 more than it actually did.  Hancock's team blamed the work of Meg Lyda — a former political appointee who was contracted by Hancock For Denver to raise money for the campaign.  Lyda could not be reached for comment Thursday.  She was fired in June for "poor performance" at fundraising, Hancock's press secretary Amber Miller said.

• Lightning strikes often in Colorado, but rarely are the casualty counts as high as they were last month.  Eight people working in a farm field near Wellington were injured July 18, and a dozen soldiers were injured Wednesday at Fort Carson, far eclipsing the typical annual total of 13 lightning-strike injuries in Colorado.  According to the National Weather Service, from 1980 to 2012, 412 people reported injuries from lightning strikes and there were 91 fatalities.

	Highs	Lows	Monday Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms during the afternoon. High 81F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%. Monday night Isolated thunderstorms during the evening. Mainly clear skies after midnight. Low 59F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
	81° F	59° F
	27 C	15 C
			Sunrise: 5:55 am    Sunset: 8:14 pm    Moonrise: 11:59 pm    Moonset: 1:38 pm

• More people in Colorado than ever before are attempting to legally carry a concealed gun, and by no small margin.  It's 87 percent more.  And while 2012 saw a sizable increase from 2011 of permit seekers, that figure pales in comparison to this year.  From January to June, 31,518 background checks were processed for concealed-carry permits by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, according to bureau data. For the same period last year, there were only 16,886 processed.

• Parsons Corp., an international engineering firm, last week unveiled its proposed $3.5 billion project to ease traffic on Interstate 70 through the central mountains.   

• The city of Boulder is set to adopt a goal of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. Meeting that new goal, which is expected to be adopted by the City Council next year, will require an "unprecedented level of action," a city staff memo said. The goal is aimed at Boulder doing its part to cut man-made emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that have been linked to climate change.

• Three decades after they were introduced as a crime-fighting tool, electronic ankle bracelets used to track an offender's whereabouts have proliferated so much that officials are struggling to handle an avalanche of monitoring alerts that are often nothing more sinister than a dead battery, lost satellite contact or someone arriving home late from work.

• Colorado churches are on alert after a man made threats against Roman Catholic and Mormon Latter Day Saints churches.

• After five ATM robberies in Colorado Springs this July, a sixth incident happened Saturday night when a man tried to steal from a woman making a transaction.

• Michelangelo exhibit follows Da Vinci exhibit to Denver Pavilions