Still more good news today! The appellate court in Missouri agrees with The BRAD BLOG!

The stories that were censored in Kansas over the weekend, regarding allegations of wrongdoing by the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities, have now been un-censored:

Late Sunday night, The BRAD BLOG exclusively ran the censored stories in full --- in First Amendment solidarity with the two censored papers --- in the belief that the stories are in the public interest. Looks like the appellate court agrees with us.

As we've got our hands more than full, we'll leave it to the folks in Kansas now to deal with the substance of the story itself (which was/is quite troubling). In any case, we'll consider this a happy ending. For a change.

UPDATE 3/6/06: Appellate judge overturns ruling! Story now un-censored! Glad we were right on this one from the get-go! Details...

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Ed Note: Since running this story originally, the Google cache has also now been purged of the censored documents. Fortunately, we screen-captured and ran the text in full for each story below, as we believe them to be in the public interest. We have retained all of the original links to the locations of the story, despite their having been scrubbed.

A judge in Kansas City, Kansas, on Friday issued a temporary restraining order requiring that two area newspapers remove articles from their website which reported on alleged malfeasance by the Board of Public Utilities (BPU).

Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Kelly Moorhouse found in a 3-page order [PDF] that the stories were based on privileged attorney-client information, which was leaked to the newspapers, and that publication of any portion of it would cause "irreparable harm" to the BPU.

The Kansas City Star and The Pitch, a local news weekly, both reported about the forced removal of the material and their intention to appeal the rare judicial decision to censor their reporting. A story was also run about the matter by AP.

At the end of this article The BRAD BLOG will run the Kansas City Star's short article in full since it has been ordered removed --- foolishly in our opinion, particularly in the Internet age when such stories are instantly archived, as was this one, by Google's cache engine --- and appears clearly to be in the best interest of the public and their right to know about how their public utilities are being run...