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NEWS For Immediate Release July 25, 2003 Contact: Mark Gould, PIO Director312-280-5042 CIPA Decision/Response: A statement from ALA President Carla D. Hayden and the ALA Executive Board July 25, 2003 The American Library Association (ALA) has a long-standing commitment to ensuring access to information for all. It advocates for a free and open information society and for equitable access to knowledge and information resources in all formats for all people. In December 2000, Congress passed an appropriations bill that included a requirement that any library receiving federal E-Rate or Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funds would be required to...

KIROVSK, Murmanskaya Oblast - The 30,000 inhabitants of this Arctic town in the middle of the vast Kola Peninsula pride themselves on being happy and hospitable. There are reasons for this: For an industrial town, the multicolored buildings look refreshingly pristine and the view is panoramic, especially this time of year, when the sun always hangs in the sky, except for an occasional dip behind the barren and breathtaking Khibiny mountains. But life hasn't always been so idyllic. Like hundreds of other outcroppings in Stalin's gulag system, Kirovsk was designed as a labor camp of death and detainment. It is...

A Boeing 727 cargo plane which caused panic among US intelligence agencies after mysteriously disappearing from Angola's main airport turned up last week in Guinea, the Guardian can reveal. The plane, which was feared to be in the hands of international terrorists, was spotted on June 28 in Conakry, Guinea's capital, by Bob Strother, a Canadian pilot. It had been resprayed and given the Guinean registration 3XGOM. But at least the last two letters of its former tail-number, N844AA, were still showing. The plane, which was recently converted into a fuel tanker, was said to be owned by a member...

America's norther neighbor continues to serve as a favorite operational base and transit country for terrorists. An American courtroom just witnessed the first conviction ever of a Canadian citizen in the War on Terror. Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, 21, originally from Kuwait, pleaded guilty to several charges of planning attacks against American interests outside the United States. The charges include conspiracy to kill US nationals, destroy US property abroad with weapons of mass destruction, kill American employees while on duty, and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. The WMD, in this case, was dynamite. According to Canadian newspapers, Jabarah was...

China Reports Two Confirmed SARS Cases 7 minutes ago By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer BEIJING - China reported two confirmed SARS (news - web sites) cases on Friday and said one of two other people suspected of having the disease has died, apparently the first SARS fatality in the country since July. Hundreds of people have been quarantined. The confirmed cases both had worked in laboratories in Beijing for China's Centers for Disease Control and were probably infected there, Xinhua said. They were identified as a 31-year-old man from Beijing and a 26-year-old woman in central Anhui province, the...

Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor of Italian origin who led a distinguished life, was at the Auschwitz concentration camp hospital one day due to high fever caused by an infectious disease. He later wrote in his memoirs that when confronted with Soviet soldiers: "They neither greeted nor smiled; they seemed to be tormented by the guilt of why this crime had to happen." The trial of one of the perpetrators of another heinous crime, the massacre of 30,000 Iranian political prisoners in 1988, is currently taking place in a Swedish court. What happened in 1988 was a ruthless, bloody, and...

"Exotic animal dealer who had monkeypox has Q fever - But S. Milwaukee man probably caught rare, flu-like ailment while inspecting cows, not selling pets" _______________________________________________________ The South Milwaukee pet dealer at the center of the monkeypox outbreak has now been diagnosed with a second rare animal-borne disease: Q fever, which he likely got from his job as a federal meat inspector. He also still has four prairie dogs that he refuses to euthanize even though public health officials want him to in the interest of preventing future monkeypox infections. Scott Knapp, owner of SK Exotics, disclosed his new illness...

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

Damn, I hate it when I've been had and I've been had big time. In 1982, while I was working for Congressman Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, a man came up to a me during a gathering in Albuquerque and introduced himself as Terrance J. Wilkinson. He said he was a security consultant and gave me a business card with his name and just a Los Angeles phone number. A few weeks later, he called my Washington office and asked to meet for lunch. He seemed to know a lot about the nuclear labs in New Mexico and said he...

On July 14, 2003, a Robert Novak column in The Washington Post outed the CIA-agent wife of vociferous Bush administration critic, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Thus was born the "Plame Affair" which quickly became a morality tale of how an out of control Bush Administration would do anything to justify its war in Iraq. A mere three days later, journalist David Corn, summarized the allegations that would color reporting on the Iraq War for the next three years and eventually lead to the indictment of a top aide to the vice president for lying to a grand jury: ((((THE OLD...

NEW YORK- The Zionist Organization of America is deeply concerned by a report that the Bush administration is interfering in Israel's internal affairs by trying to dictate changes in the make-up of the Israeli government coalition. Middle East Newsline reports (July 31, 2003): "U.S. officials said the White House has urged political figures in Israel to bring the opposition Labor Party into the Sharon government. The officials said such a prospect is regarded to have been bolstered by the recent election of former Prime Minister Shimon Peres to chair Labor. Peres has been an advocate of joining the ruling coalition....

Valerie Plame Wilson, the undercover CIA operations officer unmasked in July 2003, wants to buy a controlling share of Twitter. Her reason for doing so is to prevent President Trump from using the social media platform.Plame Wilson was an undercover operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction for the CIA before influential columnist Robert D. Novak exposed her and her husband, Joseph Wilson. Plame Wilson had previously been critical of then President George W. Bush’s statements about Iraq’s purchase of nuclear weapons-grade uranium and accused members of the Bush administration of conspiring to destroy her career by breaking a 1982...

FoxNews just reported that an agent for Saddam Hussein has been arrested in Chicago. .....developing....

Saddam Hussein ordered Iraq's central bank to withdraw $1 billion for his youngest son the day before the invasion to stop it falling into foreign hands, according to a leaked letter apparently written by the former dictator. In a hand-written note to the bank's governor, marked "top secret" and dated March 19, 2003, the former president told Isam Huwaish to give $920 million and 90 million euros to his son Qusay and another man, al-Mashriq newspaper reported yesterday. The Iraqi national broadsheet reproduced the letter, which appears to bear Saddam's signature. Saddam sent bank a hand-written note Employees of the...

On the CBS Evening News a bit ago, reporter David Martin broke an exclusive that the Iraqi leader who may have met with Mohamed Atta in Prague prior to his terrorist attack on 9/11 has been caught. It will be interesting to see if he says anything.

It is now emerging from intelligence sources that the reason the United States was able to give Saudi Arabia the heads-up it ignored on the terror bombings in Riyadh, is because the CIA had been intercepting communications between al-Qaeda operatives in Arabia and Iran. The hits themselves helped to clarify co-ordinates; and there is thus little doubt remaining in American minds that Iran is sheltering senior al-Qaeda leaders. The ayatollahs are most likely trying to integrate surviving al-Qaeda resources with those of Hezbollah, their own main horse in terror international. I read some hint of that into the strange remarks...

POTEAU — Authorities remain uncertain about the identity and significance of a man arrested in Sequoyah County who is of interest to several federal agencies. The man who identified himself as Juan Carlos Fals may have as many as 15 aliases, said Richard Gray, district attorney. Fals appears to have two social security numbers and has a record of arrests in Florida, but his booking photo in Sequoyah County does not match a photo taken by Florida authorities. “We don’t know who he is, but this thing has escalated and we may be sitting on a powder keg,” Gray said....

A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told US interrogators the meeting never happened, according to US officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the US in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague in the Czech Republic, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations. US officials caution that Ani may have been lying...

A federal judge in Washington yesterday lifted a contempt order and the threat of jail against a Time magazine reporter after he submitted to questioning by a special prosecutor who is investigating the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity to the columnist Robert Novak and other journalists. The reporter, Matthew Cooper, was questioned in a two-hour deposition about his contacts with I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, but only after Mr. Libby's lawyer assured Mr. Cooper's lawyer that Mr. Libby had waived a confidentiality agreement with the reporter. The deposition was given on Monday...

Mansoor Ijaz just reported Bin Laden is in Iran as of July.