Faculty emails and unpublished university research can be deemed “proprietary” and withheld under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the Virginia Supreme Court announced last week.

The law was called into question in 2011 when the American Tradition Institute and Virginia Del. Robert Marshall filed a request for emails of Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist and former University of Virginia professor.

According to the Washington Post:

Lawyers for U-Va. turned over about 1,000 documents to Marshall and ATI, led by former EPA attorney David Schnare, but withheld another 12,000 papers and e-mails, saying that work “of a ...

Starting May 1 we will begin accepting applications for candidates for the IRE Board of Directors. Seven of the board’s 13 seats are up for election.

For the first time this year, elections for the IRE Board of ...

Jill Riepenhoff, a projects reporter at The Columbus Dispatch, and Tisha Thompson, an investigative reporter for WRC-Washington D.C., use consumer and professional complaints to fuel their investigations. In these audio clips the two reporters offer advice on where to look for complaints and how to use them.

In Columbus, Ohio, landlords allowing homes to become rundown is a major problem. Riepenhoff used complaints from homeowners and court documents to create The Columbus Dispatch’s “Legacy of Neglect” series.

She found the subject of her story, chronic offender Joseph S. Alaura, from court documents. He had gone to court multiple ...

By Nikhila Henry, The Times of India

Can the dead talk? In rare cases they do.

Mudassir Kamran, a 25-year-old Kashmiri student hanged himself in a single bed hostel room at English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, India on March 2, 2013.

A day before, the scholar was summoned to a nearby police station and questioned on counts of “harassing” a fellow male student, Vasim Salim. Some administrative staff of the university worked with the police in this round of questioning.

While this at first seemed ...

Minnesota counties 'screen out' most child abuse reports | Minneapolis Star Tribune

Minnesota’s counties received nearly 68,000 reports of child abuse or neglect last year but closed most of those cases without investigation or assessment.

A review of state and federal data by the Star Tribune shows that the number of child abuse reports being screened out without any protective action rose last year to the third-highest rate in the country.

In all, the state screened out more than 48,000 such abuse reports last year ­— and authorities often made their decisions after only gathering information from a phone ...

Land Quest is an experiment in cross-border investigative journalism by two European, two Kenyan and one American journalist that seeks to redefine both the focus and the audience of development reporting.

The data reveals Kenya as the battlefield between two competing financial interests: the flow of aid money from Europe to Kenya, and multinational profits from Kenya to Europe. Aid money flows into Kenya to help strengthen institutions and private companies, from agro-industrialists to oil barons.

The project, funded by a grant from the European Journalism Centre, is designed to raise awareness about the need for developed and developing countries ...