Today’s issue of The State Register contained two meetings that violated the public notice requirements of West Virginia’s open meetings act. One meeting was of the Consolidated Public Retirement Board and the other was the WVDEP’s meeting on the water pollution plan for the Cheat River watershed. As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental [...]

Another installment of some work that drew our attention this week. In the wake of the publication of a staggering amount of classified information related to the war in Afghanistan by Wikileaks, Propublica.org talked to Neil Sheehan, the former New York Times reporter (and Pulitzer Prize winner for his book about Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie) [...]

For years, one of the biggest problems with data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory was that it seemed hopelessly out of date. Historically, figures publicly released lagged about two years behind. Companies reported annual releases the following July. EPA took months to compile it into various reports and make it available. That all [...]