Friday the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published a searchable database from a nationwide list of 24,500 teachers who have been punished for a wide array of offenses. The SHT requested the information from the Florida Department of Education and then waited for years to gain access to the list.
The list was gathered and maintained by the National […]

Twenty patients of an oncology clinic in the Dallas area were sickened by medical syringes contaminated with bacteria. The bacterium, called Serratia marcescens, can cause fever and chills but generally responds to antibiotics.
Some of the Dallas-area patients became so ill after the bacterial exposure that they required hospitalization.
However, Texas Department of State Health […]

Pennsylvania legislative leaders have paid out-of-state companies $466,000 this year to conduct focus groups and public-opinion surveys. Even though the polls have been paid for by taxpayer dollars, the politicians have refused to release the results.
Politicians are afraid of only two things; being publically embarrassed and being voted out of office. Release of […]

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.
After all what could be more upsetting than reading a report on safety problems? How upsetting is actually dying […]

Bridge inspection reports can legally remain secret, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office has decided.
Bridge maintenance is a life and death matter as so clearly proven by the recent I35 Minneapolis bridge collapse. In 1990, the Minneapolis bridge was inspected by the US Department of Transportation and found to be “structurally deficient.” In […]

In this recent story writer Frank Miele attacks the New York Times’ decision to publish classified military secrets. His argument is that publication endangered Americans and essentially amounted to treason.
The Open Records Project would agree with part of Miele’s argument but offer a caveat and some perspective.
Yes, it would seem that the […]

Presidents don’t have indefinite veto power over which records are made public after they’ve left office, a federal judge has ruled.
Some presidents might be embarrassed by their records in office. Public disclosure could tarnish their finely tuned “legacy.”
Following U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling, the presidential legacy belongs to the people who elected the […]

Iran’s judiciary has sealed off the offices of a popular news Web site critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies after journalists continued to update it despite official filtering, the Web site said. The site, when accessed via a link outside Iran, indicated it was last updated on Sept. 23.
In addition, two prominent pro-reform newspapers, […]

Gov. Chris Gregoire has refused to reveal the identities of some people who weren’t picked for seats on the state’s new “Sunshine Committee.”
The Sunshine Committee’s job is to sort through the more than 300 exemptions to the state’s Public Records Act and prepare a report by Nov. 15 in which it will recommend that the […]

Whether it’s a hernia repair or heart bypass, doctors with a lot of experience performing a given operation tend to have better results. The problem for patients in choosing a physician has been finding out which ones have the know-how.
In a little-noticed decision last week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of […]