Public records

It's a sunny summer for government in New York, where Gov. David Paterson has signed off on a bundle of updates to the state's open records and meetings laws.

Faced with spreading criticism, the mayor of Buffalo agreed Thursday to restore basic crime details that have vanished from the police computer that reporters use.

The names of school teachers who are simply accused of sexual misconduct, and not found responsible for it or punished, should not be made public, the Supreme Court of Washington state has found.

A Tennessee judge ruled on Tuesday that a private prison company based there is subject to public records laws, according to The Associated Press.

Two U.S. senators introduced legislation this week that would remove the Smithsonian's exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and the Sunshine Act, according to the Washington Post.

Pennsylvania State University waited three months to publicly report a sexual attack on a female student, originally terming the incident an “assault on a female, ” the school's Daily Collegian reported.

The attorney general of Rhode Island filed a lawsuit against the city of Cranston on Wednesday over alleged violations of the state's public records law, The Providence Journal reported. 

Patrick Lynch is suing on behalf of a local radio disc jockey who waited months for the city to produce records on long-distance phone calls and other matters, The Journal said. The disc jockey, John Bina, is currently running for a position on the city council.

Two Detroit newspapers are fighting indicted Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's attempts to depose their reporters amid his ongoing legal woes.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick this week lost one round of the ongoing legal battle in his steamy text-message scandal, when a county judge agreed to unseal the transcript of a closed mid-May hearing in his criminal case.

Sixteen years after the rape and murder of a University of Georgia student, with no suspects and no fresh leads in the case, the police files can still be considered part of a pending investigation and so withheld from the public, the state Supreme Court has ruled.