donal brown

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with a school administration of a Morgan Hill, California high school  in leaving in place a ruling that they acted correctly in asking students to remove shirts with images of American flags during Cinco de Mayo. The administration was concerned that given a history of tension and fighting between whites and Hispanics that the shirts might incite violence and a federal appeals court agreed with them. (Reuters, March 30, 2015,

Ars Technica used a public record request to obtain the entire data base of 4.6 million reads of license plates between 2010 and 2014 made by the Oakland Police Department. An Ars Technica analysis showed that the police could use the data to make a number of valid conclusions about the private lives of the license plate owners. Last August the ACLU and EFF failed in a quest to obtain a single week’s of license

AP CEO Gary Pruitt has proposed that international law be changed to make killing journalists or taking them hostage a war crime. He said wearing “PRESS” on vests no longer protects journalists but instead makes them targets. Over a 1,000 journalist have died since 1992. Pruitt said terrorist groups don’t want the media around since the groups use the social media to get their message across. (Associated Press, March 30, 2015, by Kevin Chan) Syria

The Federal Aviation Administration is allowing commercial drone flight without airspace clearance. The leeway is only granted to the 50 plus companies already granted exemption from the rule banning commercial drones. (ComputerWorld, March 24, 2015, by Martyn Williams, IDG News Service) Amazon is protesting government regulation contending that approval given to them to test deliveries by drones came too late as it has developed new models making the approval useless. (Bloomberg Business, March 24, 2015,

The Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that an insurance company is not compelled to defend an orthodonic business whose employee posted libelous statements about a competitor online. The court held that the applicable insurance policy precluded coverage for acts done with intent to injure. (Law360, March 19, 2015, by Jeff Sistrunk) “…S&B [Sletten & Brettin Ordodontics] argued that by enumerating defamation while excluding coverage for intent-to-injure claims, the policy created an ambiguity that