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Shawna Stone doesn't try to hide her transsexuality, and she says a Colorado Springs police detective wanted to try something different with her in exchange for having an old assault charge dropped. John Dicker of the Colorado Springs Independent breaks the wall of silence the police threw up around the case and asks questions about whether the public trust has been betrayed.

Todd Haynes, director of "Far From Heaven," is a different filmmaker, who's opted to live in a Portland, Ore., Craftsman bungalow amid three lots' worth of verdant vegetation. He's a genuine critics' favorite, a poster boy for independent film. But what really sets Haynes apart from other moviemakers is "a devotion to the cinematic theme of homosexuality that goes beyond merely having fey characters," Byron Beck writes in Willamette Week. "He's made only a handful of films--all critical, if not all commercial, successes. And each of them, in its own way, looks at life through a lavender lens. "

Yusuf Bey and his "family" are a group of entrepreneurs and reformed ex-cons who operate a patchwork of businesses and non-profits throughout the city of Oakland. They're also that city's most prominent Black Muslims, treated with noted deference by the East Bay's political and media elite--in part because they claim to be positive role models for African-American youth. East Bay Express staff writer Chris Thompson rips off that mask in part one of his special report "Blood & Money," showing that Bey and some of his followers have left a trail of violence, brutality and fraud that stretches back nearly a decade.