Speaking at AAN's First Amendment Luncheon, Vanessa Leggett said she learned journalism "the same way an adolescent boy learns about sex -- groping and fumbling my way through, getting rejected and slapped occasionally." Slapping in her case included jail time for refusing to turn over materials from confidential sources to a Texas grand jury. "We must always work to ensure the free flow of information to the public," she said. "When the government gets involved, that can't occur."
Did the FBI and the Oakland Police conspire to ruin two environmentalists? In 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were arrested for a car bombing in which they were the only victims. A.C. Thompson of the San Francisco Bay Guardian examines the legal battle that has conspiracy theorists nationwide chomping at the bit.
An estimated 40 million Americans use peer-to-peer networks to share often unauthorized audio and video files. Judith Lewis of LA Weekly reports that the record and film industries, anxious for a solution to their copyright woes, look to "distributed networks" for a new model that will allow users to compensate artists, labels and studios for their downloads.
Q: Which employee on the eastern Washington state public payroll makes the most money? A: Washington State Cougar football coach Mike Price. With a salary of almost $440,000 in 2001, Price is far and away the highest-paid public worker in the region. How do we know? Tom Grant of The Local Planet Weekly compiled 60,000 public employee wages from eastern Washington and northern Idaho into a simple database small enough to fit on a floppy. Readers can e-mail the newspaper to receive a copy of the database. Requests began arriving before copies of the accompanying article even hit the racks.
There are new victims of Sept.11. After escaping terror in a brutal civil war, a refugee family booked on a flight to Sacramento were stopped in their tracks by new restrictions. No one told their son. This Liberian immigrant has waited 15 long years to be reunited with his refugee children and parents. He thought that was long enough, but he was wrong. Tom Walsh of the Sacramento News & Review talks to Amos Gbeintor.
