smb (06/27/82)
expire (properly) does not run setuid 'news'; normally, it's invoked as root by cron. But when it recreates the history file, the owner then becomes root. If your cron has umask set non-zero, this will cause a non-writable history file to exist, defeating duplicate detection and preventing expire from ever deleting such articles. The cleanest fix I can think of is to have expire set the ownership of the new file.