With a handful of medical marijuana dispensaries moving toward opening in the Roaring Fork Valley, the state of Colorado is looking to change the rules governing medical pot, which would make dispensaries much harder or impossible to operate by limiting the number of people they are able to serve.

    Since 2000, people in Colorado with medical conditions that could be alleviated with marijuana, and who get approval from a physician and register with the state, can possess up to two ounces of the otherwise illegal dried bud and grow up to six of the otherwise illegal plants.

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Sarah Palin’s unexpected announcement that she will resign as Alaska’s governor at the end of this month left political experts scratching their heads — and one likely Republican presidential candidate cornered — at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival on Friday afternoon.

“I’m dumbfounded,” said CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer. “I have no idea what this is about and I think it will catch most people by surprise.”

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Imagine Yo-Yo Ma jamming out on Guitar Hero or hitting the high notes on Rock Band. Intrigued?

Well it was Yo-Yo Ma who was indeed the original Guitar Hero, or should I say violin hero. Thanks to Ma’s talented movements measured by world-famous composer and pioneer in the application of the technology of music, Tod Machover, our world is currently blessed with the musical stylings of tweens and drunken college kids everywhere strumming on fake guitars and belting out horrid sounds on Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

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EL JEBEL — The suicide rate in the Roaring Fork Valley is disproportionately high and after another life was taken here earlier this week, the head of the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation remarked that “it feels like an epidemic.”

Kris Marsh, president and CEO of the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation, said mental health services in Aspen need improvement and the time is now.

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There was plenty of red-meat foreign policy rhetoric during “An Afternoon of Conversation” in the Benedict Music Tent on Thursday during the Aspen Ideas Festival.

In addition to former Secretary of State James Baker suggesting the United States should aim nuclear weapons at the “flaky and crazy” hard-line mullahs in Tehran, the new Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said the country would “take whatever actions are necessary to protect its citizens” from a nuclear-armed Iran.

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