The Brief Writer

As reported in the Houston Chronicle, a jury cleared a news photographer of the charge that he interfered with police by refusing to stop photographing an arrest during the city's Mardi Gras party in 2007.

Prosecutor April Powell told jurors that Nick Adams, then a photographer for the Galveston County Daily News, stepped within the "perimeter of safety" officers had established while effectuating an arrest.

Adams's defense attorney said that the digital index in Adams's camera showed that police had deleted some of the camera's pictures while Adams was in custody.  He said that the deleted images would have shown that Adams was clearly outside Powell's "perimeter of safety."

Former chief operating officer of Monster Works, James Treacy, has been indicted for securities fraud in connection with the backdating of stock options.  The United States Attorneys' Office for the Southern District of New York issued a press release stating:

TREACY conspired with other former senior executives at Monster to systematically backdate stock option grants to Monster employees between 1997 and 2003, in an effort to provide profitable options to employees without recording the required compensation expenses, thereby falsely inflating Monster's earnings. As a result, Monster’s public filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") between 1997 and 2005 fraudulently understated the company’s compensation expenses by a total of more than $300 million.