|
National Stories
The often-embattled Department of Veterans Affairs won the war but may lose an embarrassing battle over its handling of Freedom of Information Act litigation. In what seems a rather noteworthy ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman first sided with the VA in rejecting a FOIA challenge by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, but then raised the possibility of sanctioning the VA for its actions. “This Court…is deeply troubled by the VA’s litigation conduct in the case: inaccurate declarations were left uncorrected for months despite the fact that already-executed declarations to the contrary existed but were withheld, apparently as a litigation tactic,” Friedman stated. Friedman further ordered the VA to “show cause why a sanction under 28 U.S.C. § 1927, in the form of attorneys’ fees and costs, should not be awarded for the additional time and effort CREW’s attorneys were required to expend due to the VA’s tactics.”
McClatchy
A private nonprofit government watchdog group will soon work with congressional committees to help them oversee federal spending and programs. The Project on Government Oversight presently offers lunchtime seminars to train Hill staffers in skills they need to conduct oversight research, from working with whistleblowers to digesting inspector general reports. Given the relative success of its existing program, POGO began developing an expanded version of the seminars more than a year ago. The group offered its first training session in 2006. POGO officials said they saw a need for oversight instruction among congressional staffers after several approached the nonprofit for help in filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
Washington Examiner
In politics, it is sometimes better to be lucky than good. Republicans and Democrats, and groups sympathetic to each, spend millions on sophisticated technology to gain an advantage. They do it to exploit vulnerabilities and to make their own information secure. But sometimes, a simple coding mistake can lay bare documents and data that were supposed to be concealed from the prying eyes of the public. Such an error by the Republican Governors Association recently resulted in the disclosure of exactly the kind of information that political committees given tax-exempt status usually keep secret, namely their corporate donors and the size of their checks. That set off something of an online search war between the association and a Washington watchdog group that spilled other documents, Democratic and Republican, into the open.
New York Times
On September 25, 1690, the first colonial newspaper in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published. Although some English newspapers and single-page broadsides had been available to read before, this was the first true multi-page colonial newspaper. However, it was suppressed after its first edition. The British governor forced publisher Benjamin Harris and printer Richard Pierce to close down the newspaper for “reflections of a very high nature” and for failing to obtain a correct printing license. Harris hoped to publish the Boston newspaper every month, but his September 25th edition remained the only issue printed.
Poynter
|