On Monday, attorneys for Rolling Stone, its publisher and author Sabrina Rubin Erdely will square off in court against Nicole Eramo, a UVa administrator once tasked with aiding student survivors of sexual assault.
Daily Progress
The Petersburg mayor’s efforts to get speedy approval for a plan to hire a turnaround consultant have sparked controversy after they led him to try to curtail the city manager’s job responsibilities. In an email sent on Wednesday to Interim City Manager Dironna Moore Belton, Mayor W. Howard Myers told her that her authority to hire, fire and make spending allocations had been “rescinded.” However, it was unclear what authority Myers might have to redefine Belton’s job duties. Reached by phone on Friday, Myers declined to comment on the controversy in detail, saying only that he took the action because Belton was “delaying from moving forward with respect to the direction of council.” Myers said he could not be more specific because the issue was a “personnel matter,” and referred questions to recently hired City Attorney Joseph E. Preston, who also declined to comment, citing the same reason.
Progress-Index
National Stories
A lot of people were upset about the leaked 2005 tape of Donald Trump saying he could just grab women “by the pussy,” but it turns out some folks were even more upset with the FCC for letting TV channels play the footage, according to a new Freedom of Information Act request. VICE News’s Jason Leopold filed the FOIA request and found that 23 people made complaints to the FCC over the weekend, upset with the networks’ decisions to play the uncensored tape on loop.
VICE News
After grappling with state officials for months over the cost of providing copies of his emails while in office, ex-Delaware Treasurer Chipman L. “Chip” Flowers Jr. seemed comfortable with the resolution. Mr. Flowers petitioned the Delaware Attorney General’s Office over a year ago alleging the Office of the State Treasurer (OST) violated the Freedom of Information Act multiple times while handling his request for over 19,000 emails sent and received through his state account from 2011 to 2015. On Sept. 30, Chief Deputy Attorney General Danielle Gibbs issued an opinion that the OST overestimated the more than $15,000 in costs to fulfill the request, but discounted several other claims received from Mr. Flowers on Aug. 4, 2015.
Delaware State News
The NYPD will have to post its full patrol guide online under legislation passed by the City Council Thursday. The guide — which contains a slew of rules and procedures for cops to follow on everything from conducting a stop and frisk to handcuffing students at school or responding to a bicycle crash — will also have to be publicly updated within 24 hours whenever the department makes a change. “There is no reason for secrecy,” said Councilman Dan Garodnick (D-Manhattan), who sponsored the measure. The guide can be obtained from the NYPD by filing a Freedom of Information Law request, which can take months or longer. Several websites have published parts of it, but those versions may be wrong or out of date.
New York Daily News
After resisting months of calls from Bernie Sanders and others to release the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street banks, some of Hillary Clinton’s full remarks are apparently now available for all to see, with just weeks until Election Day. We say “apparently” because the transcripts were published by WikiLeaks as part of its ongoing release of emails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal Gmail account.
NPR
Editorials/Columns
We can know — and do, thanks to the federal Freedom of Information Act and hard-working colleagues in Norfolk and San Diego — that: • a Navy destroyer squadron commodore misled investigators checking accusations of sexual harassment; • a cruiser captain was drunk in public, harassed female officers and misused government vehicles; • the captain of an amphibious assault ship was so violently and profanely abusive that he shocked and alarmed his petty officers and felt free to give female sailors advice about their sex lives. Those weren’t good career moves. But at least we know, and know that the Navy addressed the problem. On the other hand, in Virginia, if a school principal hits on teachers, or a county administrator is canned for mismanagement, or a police chief reprimands an officer for abusing a suspect, that behavior and the response to it can remain a deep, dark secret forever. Our state FOIA says all those are personnel matters that are basically none of your business.
Daily Press