Transparency News 4/7/14
State and Local Stories
Have you been to Virginia Regulatory Town Hall lately?See which regulations are seeking public comment to proposed changes. For instance, regulations related to criminal history record information use and security are at the bottom of the page linked below.
Virginia Regulatory Town Hall
Dick Harman has brought a stable, grandfatherly presence to WCVE's "Gavel-to-Gavel" coverage of Richmond City Council meeting as the show's host for 26 years. The 74-year-old says he's attended at least 600 government meetings. Last week, City Council President Charles Samuels recognized Harman for his years of service. Style Weekly asked the veteran host for any insight he's picked up along the way.
Style Weekly
Reporter Katy Burnell Evans of The Daily Progress received the First Amendment Award and the newspaper took home 20 other journalism honors Saturday at the Virginia Press Association’s annual conference in Short Pump. The First Amendment Award is a statewide honor recognizing journalists, newspapers or citizens “who, in an extraordinary way, seek to advance, defend or preserve the First Amendment,” according to the press association’s website. The press association’s Freedom of Information Committee honored Evans for her series of stories on Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control following the arrest of a University of Virginia student by agents who mistook sparkling water for beer purchased underage.
Daily Progress
Despite restrictions imposed by a legal opinion, Big Brother is still watching you. More specifically, your license plates. Throughout Hampton Roads, 45 cameras snap rapid-fire pictures – hundreds of them per hour – of every license plate that passes within their view. Each photo is stamped with the date, time and location of the vehicle. In most cases, the images are stored for periods ranging from 24 hours to 30 days. Elsewhere in the state, mainly Northern Virginia, they’re kept for as long as two years.
Virginian-Pilot
One family’s documents at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library have shed light in recent years on questions about Wilson’s time at the Paris peace talks and his command of the presidency after suffering a major stroke. Kept by his doctor and friend, they also help humanize him, a century later. This gem of a collection, the Grayson papers, is the kind of material the Staunton WWPL is hoping to share more widely with the world as it moves toward a digitization project with the University of Virginia Press and online access to major scholarship.
News Leader
National Stories
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey refuses to make public emails and other documents that might show if he took part in his office’s lawsuit against a drug companythat Morrisey’s wife lobbies for in Washington, D.C. The drug distributor, Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health, contributed to Morrisey’s inauguration party last year, and the company’s executives wrote checks to Morrisey’s campaign — before, as well as after, the November 2012 election. The lawsuit, which Morrisey inherited from ousted Attorney General Darrell McGraw, alleges that Cardinal Health helped fuel Southern West Virginia’s problem with prescription drugs by shipping an excessive number of pain pills to the region.Charleston Gazette
The Justice Department’s practice of making bulk requests for email in criminal investigations has come under fire from a pair of federal judges who say the volume of irrelevant information swept up poses an intrusion into Americans’ privacy. In the past year, U.S. magistrate judges John Facciola in Washington, D.C., and David Waxse in Kansas City, Kan., have rejected or modified a number of applications for warrants to search people’s emails and other electronic communications at Internet firms such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
Wall Street Journal
Journalists and members of the public would no longer have access to court documents in cases where the defendant avoided conviction under a measure passed 18-1 by the Alaska Senate. The bill is among the latest attempts by state lawmakers to restrict access to court case records, particularly electronic documents, in balancing the rights of those charged with crimes against the free flow of information in a democracy. The Alaska bill, now pending in the House, would bar access by the public to court records in criminal cases in which defendants are acquitted or charges are dismissed. The records are now open to anyone in an online database called CourtView and at Alaska’s courthouses, said Andrew Sheeler, a board member of the Alaska Press Club and a police, courts and city beat reporter for the Ketchikan Daily News.
Poynter
The largest school district in Idaho has banned from its curriculum an award-winning bookabout the struggles of a Native American teenager after complaints by parents that the novel was rife with profanity, racial epithets and anti-Christian rhetoric. The school board in Meridian, Idaho, voted 2-1 this week to keep the book, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," off a supplemental reading list for 10th graders, meaning it will not be part of the curriculum at the high school, said school board clerk Trish Duncan.
Reuters
Editorials/Columns
The Virginia Supreme Court is weighing whether a professor’s emails are, as a Prince William County circuit court ruled, “proprietary” and therefore exempt from the state’s FOIA. The lower court ruled that proprietary records are those “owned or in possession of one who manages and controls them.” This has alarmed the media organizations, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the AP, the Newspaper Association of America, Reuters, Atlantic Media and several others. In the climate change debate, the media should have one interest only: the unvarnished truth. Rooting for one side or the other out of misguided ideological sympathy serves no one’s best interests, least of all those of the press itself. The case before the Supreme Court offers an urgent reminder of that important principle.Times-Dispatch
