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A member of the Arizona Senate's Ethics Committee has filed a formal complaint against Sen. Jack Harper (R-Surprise), arguing that Harper acted improperly when he issued a subpoena requiring that voting machines be released to a consultant hired by Phoenix New Times. Harper said he agreed to allow New Times to fund consultant Douglas W. Jones, a computer-science expert, after the Senate refused to pay for an investigation into a contested 2004 election. On Dec. 21, a judge refused to enforce a second subpoena for the individual ballots to be released to Jones, whose report on the machines is expected in a week. It is unclear whether Jones' report will be made public, or if it will be published first in New Times. According to the Arizona Daily Star, New Times Editor Rick Barrs "said he is not sure whether he will even give a copy of the consultant's report to Harper."

Continue ReadingSenator Tied to New Times Inquiry Draws Criticism

Gadi Dechter, who writes the City Paper's biweekly Media Circus column, found several examples of similar language between Michael Olesker's columns in the Baltimore Sun and work by other writers in the Sun, the New York Times and the Washingon Post. Dechter decided to pursue the story after a Dec. 24 correction of an Olesker column referred to a failure of attribution rather than plagiarism. The Sun's city editor initially told Dechter that there would be no further investigation of Olesker, so Dechter and a research assistant took on the process of checking language from Olesker's past columns against the LexisNexis database. "There was something unusual in the correction, as if it were just a mistake," Dechter says. "Olesker is kind of an institution here in Baltimore, so I set about checking it out." A story in the Sun this morning announced that Olesker had resigned.

Continue ReadingBaltimore City Paper Exposes Plagiarism By Sun Columnist