National Stories
Former Denver Post reporter Jeffrey A. Roberts has been named executive director of the Colorado Freedom of information Coalition. The appointment was announced Friday. The coalition advocates for transparency in Colorado's state and local governments. The Associated Press is one of its member organizations.
NECN
Opponents of the proposal to build a wind farm in Nantucket Sound have sued the U.S. Coast Guard in federal court, saying the agency failed to respond to a request for public records as required by law. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound filed the suit Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., making it the latest legal action against federal officials and agencies connected to the approval of Cape Wind. "We have filed (Freedom of Information Act) requests with numerous federal agencies that are defendants in many of the lawsuits that are being filed," alliance president Audra Parker said. "The Coast Guard is the only federal agency that hasn't provided documents. This is well over two years ago."
SouthCoast Today
Secret courts. Secret emails. Phone surveillance. Drones. The list of cloak-and-dagger tactics employed by the Obama administration — and those that preceded it — keeps growing, as NSA leaker Ed Snowden feeds classified materials to the media and other reports show the extent of the U.S. government's more opaque dealings. The latest was a report by The Associated Press that said the administration had military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Usama bin Laden’s hideout transferred to the CIA, where they would be harder to uncover by the press and public. If this were any other administration, perhaps the fallout would be minimal. But President Obama ran on a message of open government. When he was sworn into office in 2009, he declared his presidency would be “the most open and transparent in history.” Now in his second term, those claims have been challenged by a host of revelations — from controversies over secret mails to the steady drip of information about NSA surveillance. FoxNews.com takes a look at six controversies that have clouded the transparency message.
Fox News
Former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones has won a $338,000 jury verdict in a defamation case against a website operator involving third-party postings accusing her of sexual excesses. Her August 2010 amended complaint said the article named the school where Jones teaches and alleged that she has had sex with every Bengal football player and suffered from chlamydia and gonorrhea. Karamian himself posted a comment saying, “Why are high school teachers freaks in the sack?” she alleged.
National Law Journal
Asiana announced Monday that it will sue a San Francisco TV station that it said damaged the airline's reputation by using bogus and racially offensive names for four pilots on a plane that crashed earlier this month in San Francisco. An anchor for KTVU-TV read the names on the air Friday and then apologized after a break. The report was accompanied by a graphic with the phony names listed alongside a photo of the burned-out plane that had crashed at San Francisco International Airport on July 6, killing three and injuring dozens.
Politico
A Colorado judge denied a request by a Fox News journalist on Friday to view a notebook accused movie theater gunman James Holmes sent to his psychiatrist that reportedly detailed his plans to commit mass murder. New York-based reporter Jana Winter had sought access to the notebook as she fights subpoenas seeking to force her to divulge confidential sources that she used in a story about its contents while a court-imposed gag order was in place.
Reuters
The Justice Department on Friday proposed curbing the ability of prosecutors to seize reporters' records while investigating leaks to the media, after complaints that journalists' rights were violated in recent high-profile cases. A revised set of guidelines proposed by the department said that search warrants would not be sought against journalists carrying out "ordinary news-gathering activities."
Reuters
Saturday night’s not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial will enable the neighborhood-watch volunteer to resume his case against NBC News for the mis-editing of his widely distributed call to police. Back in December, Zimmerman sued NBC Universal Media for defamation over the botched editing, which depicted him as a hardened racial profiler.
Washington Post
Fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden controls dangerous information that could become the United States' "worst nightmare" if revealed, a journalist familiar with the data said in a newspaper interview. Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published the documents Snowden leaked, said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday that the U.S. government should be careful in its pursuit of the former computer analyst. "Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had," Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinean daily La Nacion.
Reuters
After interviewing nearly three dozen people in the George Zimmerman murder case, the FBI found no evidence that racial bias was a motivating factor in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, records released Thursday show. Even the lead detective in the case, Sanford Det. Chris Serino, told agents that he thought Zimmerman profiled Trayvon because of his attire and the circumstances — but not his race. Serino saw Zimmerman as “having little hero complex, but not as a racist.” The Duval County State Attorney released another collection of evidence in the Zimmerman murder case Thursday, including reports from FBI agents who investigated whether any racial bias was involved in Trayvon’s Feb. 26 killing.
McClatchy
Guess who doesn't get radar tickets in Colorado? Politicians / State senators and representatives in Colorado have special license plates that just happen not to be in the DMV database. So, if they speed, they never receive a citation.
CNET News
When Kansas lawmakers handed Gov. Sam Brownback the power to pick appeals court judges, they wanted to make the process more public and accountable. The governor is certainly learning about the accountability part. He’s run into a whirl of criticism because he won’t — as he confirmed on Thursday — tell the public who has applied for a newly created seat on the Kansas Court of Appeals.
Kansas City Star
The proceedings of a New York state commission designed to examine public corruption and campaign finance practices will not necessarily take place in public, its director said after the 25-member panel met Wednesday behind closed doors and without public notice. The panel is advisory in nature, its executive director Regina Calcaterra said, and is exempt from requirements under the state Open Meetings Law. While government bodies can enter executive session to discuss sensitive matters, including investigations, the law requires public notice whenever a quorum of a public body gathers to conduct public business.
Albany Times Union
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