On a warm, cloudless night in August, with half the world watching, 84,000 people stood in a stadium along the South Platte River and launched a man toward history.  

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Facing the unprecedented demands of simultaneous wars fought by volunteers, the Army has sent wounded and drug dependent soldiers back into battle, sometimes overruling the recommendations of physicians.  

Post / Hyoung Chang

Javad Marshall-Fields foresaw his future. He had survived two bullet wounds, watched his friend die and agreed to testify against one of the gunmen who shot three people at a July 4 party. Now he was at a sports bar, where a stranger called him by name, identified him as a witness and warned, "You're a marked man." "They are going to kill me," Marshall-Fields told his friends. He was right.  

Colorado attorney regulators are moving forward with an ethical-misconduct case against the former Larimer County assistant district attorneys who prosecuted Tim Masters, according to a source close to the 8-month-old inquiry.  

RJ Sangosti | The Denver Post

If all goes according to plan, border changes will lead to the biggest border prison boom in decades.  

Post / Craig F. Walker

Andrea Garcia stood outside a duplex in the Swansea neighborhood, eyed a snarling pit bull and prayed this would be the day she'd get Cristina Reyes excited about school.  

Working-class families take on crippling debt loads to seize their piece of the American dream. They overpay for starter homes. They take on extreme mortgage rates to avoid making a down payment with money they don't have.  

Post special / Kirk Speer

Sinners are welcome at Heritage Christian Center. From the senior pastor, who spent his evenings in bars before he was saved, to the former drug addict directing traffic in the parking lot, the church holds itself out as a place of forgiveness and healing.  

Post / Craig F. Walker

As Colorado, other states and federal officials increasingly look to toll roads to spur growth or clear clogged highways, a review of 23 new turnpikes nationwide shows that a clear majority are failing to meet revenue projections to justify their costs.  

Denver Post / Glenn Asakawa

Standing nearly 60 feet over 13th Avenue in the cantilevered prow of the Denver Art Museum's upwardly jutting, angled addition, Daniel Libeskind stopped during a recent tour to point out a slit in the side of the  

Post / Glenn Asakawa

A teenager serves life in prison because authorities found his fingerprints at the scene of a murder. But jurors doubted he killed the victim, and police failed to fully investigate other key suspects.

"I'm just a ghost now," writes Sam Mandez, who was 14 at the time of the crime in 1992 and had no previous violent offenses.  

Post / Andy Cross

Dave Walborn lifted his son upright, all 32 pounds of him, slipped one hand behind his lolling head and gazed into the open but vacant blue eyes. He spoke out loud the words that would move him and the boy's mother, Kerri Bruning, one step closer to an excruciating decision. "Dylan, it's OK if you want to go," he said.  

Post / Craig F. Walker

History measures great nations in centuries, yet the course of countries can change forever in the span of five years. On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States wassubject to an unprecedented attack that claimed 2,973 lives. Any notion that we could isolate ourselves from the world evaporated. Wars were launched that are still playing out with no sure end.  

Denver Public Schools board members called the district's scores this year in the Colorado Student Assessment Program "unacceptable" but are holding firm in the hope that reforms will kick in and begin raising scores.  

Post / RJ Sangosti

One year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a place of quiet desperation. Thousands of homes remain empty, some still stripped to their skeletons; others hold the toys, china and molding furniture ruined by floodwaters.  

Post / Glenn Asakawa

Most numbers are playthings to Ryan Kramer. He was once bored on an airplane and memorized pi out to 40 decimals. His iPod holds 5,000 songs. His hero, Lance Armstrong, competed against 25- and 30-year-old professional cycle racers when he was 14. His own IQ is 181. He started college at the University of Colorado four years early.  

Ruwaida Ibrahim claps her hands and jumps up and down in the middle of the homeless camp, where she lives with about 600 other people.Two strangers with a car and a camera have agreed to take her to her home a half-mile away.Ibrahim, 53, wants to be photograph in front of the home she owned for a year after moving from southern Indonesia for her government job. She never got a picture of the house that sits about 1,500 feet from the beach "I have no memories," she says in broken English. "  

Post / Craig F. Walker

Tall Afar, Iraq - The soldiers marched half-step - boots thudding softly, rifles barely rattling - and stood silently by the airstrip at twilight. Nobody had ordered them here. Yet more than 200 massed to send off their dead. A few hours before, insurgents in Tall Afar had killed four of their comrades - including two from the