| Few fault their care at local VA center
RIVIERA BEACH — While massive failures in the care of wounded soldiers at Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Center drew national attention, the myriad concerns of local veterans have been Charleen Szabo's focus. The director of the Department of Veterans Affairs' palatial pink building on North Military Trail north of Blue Heron Boulevard had been on the job less than four months when news of the nightmarish conditions at the nation's largest military medical center broke in February, prompting veterans and their families across the country to question the services available to them. .
The Life and Letters of Jefferson County's Only Level 3 Sex Criminal
It opens in Hollywood, far from his current home in a trailer on the Olympic Peninsula. The year is 1993. A tall man, 26 years old with "doe-like brown eyes," sits in a bar working on a short story. He has ordered coffee, but it's difficult, Mart writes, for the young man to be "the only person not drinking, the only person paying attention to a list of lonely words instead of all the beautiful women." As if on cue, two lovely women arrive beside him at the bar. "Are you some kind of writer?" asks the brunette. "Yeah," the young man says. "Some kind." "What's your subject?" asks the redhead. "The glamour of illusion." They flirt for a while, but the two women end up rejecting the young man, a largely autobiographical character created by Mart in an attempt to tell the world about what, in real life, happened next: a series of "boundary crossings" that Mart believes caused him to be wrongly labeled as a sexual criminal and, ultimately, to be publicly announced as the only Level 3 sex offender in Jefferson County, a loosely populated slice of the Olympic Peninsula that includes the marinas of Port Townsend, the peaks of Mount Olympus and Mount Constance, and a long stretch of rugged Pacific Coast beach.
Public information in our nation flows in wrong direction
Americans increasingly suspect that the federal government is shrouded in secrecy. Studies into everything from the response to open records requests to access to federal records that historically have been open do little to relieve those suspicions. Just days before the March 11 start of Sunshine Week, reporters were barred from hearings that began Friday in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 14 terror suspects transferred last year from secret CIA prisons. During previous combatant-status review tribunals more than 550 were held between July 2004 and March 2005 news coverage was not prohibited. And a study by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government details how President Bush's December 2005 Freedom of Information Act executive order, which was supposed to improve agency disclosure, has done nothing to speed up FOIA response times.
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