The Washington Post reports that law enforcement sources indicate no sealed indictment has been filed against Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. "The Justice Department, at least for now, appears to be drawing a distinction between those who were government employees or contractors and were required by law to protect classified information and those who received and published the material," The Post furthe reports.
The Miami Herald reports that the latest military hearings for Guantanamo detainees are going to be closed to the press. "Officials have not been able to explain why the Pentagon is unprepared to fulfill its transparency pledge. First Amendment attorney Dave Schulz said he had been seeking assurances from the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel that reporters would be able to watch captives argue for their freedom since soon after the Pentagon published its 23-page PRB procedures in May 2012," the Herald further reports.
Click on over to Page 29 of b, a publication of the Baltimore Sun, on how the next frontier for LGBT rights in Maryland (after establishing same-sex marriage) is the fight for trans rights. b reports: "Maryland, like 34 other states, lacks laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity--laws that would protect transgender people ... and others who transgress traditional notions of male and female."
One positive development: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that transgender people were protected from job discrimination by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, b also reports.
Four wrongfully convicted women were freed today after being convicted of ritualistic sex abuse, The Huffington Post reports. Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project and writing in the Huffington Post, said the exonerations were possible because of Texas' "new law, known locally as the 'Junk Science Writ,' allows inmates to overturn their convictions and seek new trials when outdated and/or unreliable forensics were used by the prosecution to convict them." Other states should follow Texas' lead, Godsey argued.
I wrote a piece for The Stamford Advocate on how the gala season has exploded on the "Gold Coast" of Lower Fairfield County, Connecticut. One source told that me that 50 years ago there would only be one or two galas in the autumn and only one or two galas in the spring. Now there are two or three galas per week:
Fairfield County charities turn to galas to raise funds
Flowers flown from abroad. Live animals. Goody bags with luxurious gifts. Back in the financial world's heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, fundraising galas in Fairfield County were "hugely extravagant," says Elaine Ubiña, a photographic chronicler of the philanthropic scene with the website Fairfield County Look.
"Hedge funds ... the whole world of finance, everybody was just doing incredibly well and had less regard for the kind of money they were spending on the events," Ubiña said. "They knew there was always somebody who would underwrite" the lavishness of parties.
While the embellishments arranged for galas have been stripped down from years past, that has not meant any slackening in the number of special events put on by charities in Fairfield County and the rest of the greater New York City area.
"The competition is really fierce," said Christopher J. Riendeau, senior vice president of the Stamford Hospital Foundation.
Riendeau said that there are only five ways for nonprofits to raise funds: special events like galas, runs and golf outings; annual giving campaigns; large gifts of $25,000 or more from donors; planned giving in which nonprofits are named in donors' estate plans; and grants given by corporations and foundations.
As major gift-giving has decreased, more regional charities are undertaking special events, Riendeau said.
"The special event dollar, particularly on the corporate sponsorship side, is not infinite," Riendeau said. "It's definitely finite. I worry that we're going to get to this super-saturation point."
According to 2012 data from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fairfield County's $1.3 billion in giving ranks it 10th in the nation.
Read the full piece here.
Major League Baseball and the National Football League are arguing in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that Aereo's steaming service of free broadcast TV could drive sports television away from free broadcast TV onto platforms that consumers have to pay for, Broadcasting & Cable reports.
"'If copyright holders lose their exclusive retransmission licensing rights and the substantial benefits derived from those rights when they place programming on broadcast stations, those stations will become less attractive mediums for distributing copyrighted content. The option for copyright holders will be to move that content to paid cable networks (such as ESPN and TNT) where Aereo-like services cannot hijack and exploit their programming without authorization,'" the sports leagues argued according to B&C.
Broadcasters argue that Aereo's service violates their copyrights in their programming.
The Knoxville Daily Sun has run a report on the Tennessee Bar Association's position in favor of merit selection to fill judicial vacancies. The bar association's board of governors also voted to support a constitutional amendment "that provides for gubernatorial appointment, legislative confirmation and retention elections for judges." The governor has said he would consider the merit of candidates for his appointments, if the constitutional amendment is adopted by voters in the election a year from this month, according to the report.
BuzzFeed has a profile of Mary Bonauto, a lawyer without whom marriage equality might never have happened.
Here's why, according to BuzzFeed: "The lawyer brought marriage equality cases in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. She argued the case to the justices in Massachusetts who brought marriage equality to the United States. She won the first decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act’s federal definition of marriage, and the first appellate decision too — a ruling that forced the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. If there’s been a big moment in marriage equality’s long march to reality, Bonauto was probably there.And it’s no secret either: The movement’s other leading lawyers openly credit Bonauto for making the success possible."
Gretchen Morgenson, a columnist for The New York Times, writes that the approval of a $8.5 billion settlement between Bank of American and 22 investors in mortgage-backed securities could set the standard for what duty trustees have to protect investors. Morgenson writes: "Trustees for asset-backed securities have a duty to ensure that the companies administering them, known as servicers, do right by the investors who own them. But testimony in the case, known as an Article 77 proceeding, indicates that during months of settlement talks, Bank of New York Mellon did not do all it could to ensure that all investors holding the Countrywide securities got the best deal possible from Bank of America. If the settlement is blessed by the justice, Barbara R. Kapnick, the standard for acceptable behavior by a trustee on behalf of investors will be low indeed. Her ruling will undoubtedly be cited as a precedent for other similar mortgage matters waiting to be heard."
The Wall Street Journal reports that the 22-year-old Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which curbs the phone calls allowed to consumer phone calls, has seen an uptick in litigation in recent years: "Since 2012, more than a dozen companies, including Papa John's International Inc., Bank of America Corp. and a Jiffy Lube International Inc. franchisee, have agreed to more than $200 million in settlements in TCPA suits. Four-fifths of all federal TCPA cases filed in or transferred to federal court have occurred in the past five years, according to a search of court records."
If companies use auto-dialers to call cell phones without consent, they "can be on the hook for $500 to $1,500 a call," the WSJ also reports.
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