News & Opinion

A federal district judge ruled that the government did not have to release more records of its spying program including rulings by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the names of cooperating telecom companies. Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the court and details of the spying on domestic phone calls that may be to foreign terrorists., and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) was seeking more details. The judge wrote that release of the

Police arrested two reporters, later released, from the Huffington Post and The Washington Post after a confrontation in McDonalds during the protest over the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed young black man in Ferguson, Kansas. The reporters were recharging cell phones and accessing WiFi and prompted the arrests by video recording the police during their questioning. Reporters are frustrated by the failure of the police to provide details of the young man’s shooting including

Federal district judge Claudia Wilken of Oakland, California ruled that college student-athletes are entitled to fair compensation for their efforts that generate revenue for their schools. She issued an injunction preventing the NCAA “from enforcing any rules or bylaws that would prohibit its member schools and conferences from offering their FBS football or Division I basketball recruits a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images, and likenesses in addition

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, has been waging a five-year-old battle with the CIA and Obama administration to discover details of torture of terrorists after 9-11 in violation of U.S. law and international treaties. And since gaining access to millions of pages on the topic from the CIA and Defense Department, she wants to make the information or at least the 510-page summary available to the public. (San Francisco Chronicle, August 9, 2014, by Carolyn Lochhead)

The en banc DC Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Agriculture Department’s meat labeling rules on July 30, ruling 9-2 that the department could require the industry to label the country of origin on meat products. The Court said there was an important public interest in informing consumers of the origin of their meat. (The Hill, July 29, 2014, by Benjamin Goad) The meat industry responded to the decision saying that the ruling would hurt