"Family Jewels" now belong to the whole family

The "Family Jewels" papers, over 700 pages of CIA responses to a request for identification of "activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency's charter," were released by the Agency June 26. Another collection of historical documents, known as the CAESAR, POLO, and ESAU papers, which deal with the Soviet Union and China, were also released.

You can find the documents several places on the web, including:

--the CIA FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) page: http://www.foia.cia.gov/
--the National Security Archive at George Washington University : http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm
--National Public Radio: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11417938.

In response to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University in April, the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Education, and Justice were directed to meet with educators, mental health experts, law enforcement, and state and local officials to discuss the broader issues raised by these events. The officials have summarized their findings in this "Report to the President on Issues Raised by the Virginia Tech Tragedy".

There is also a link to the report on our "Government Information in the News" page on the Library website, where you can look beyond the headlines and find links to other official reports you might see/hear/read mentioned in the news.

Those Urban Legends Email Messages

Do you ever wonder if that email message that has been forwarded to you by a friend or colleague is true? One place to check out the authenticity of a message that has been forwarded from email address to email address is at the Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com. (Snopes is the surname of a family of characters who appear throughout the works of American writer William Faulkner. See the Faulkner Glossary for more information about the Snopes family.) Barbara and David P. Mikkelson have maintained the Urban Legends Reference Pages since 1995. Entries usually summarize the email claim in a sentence, indicate the true or false status, include a significant portion of the email message, discuss the facts pertaining to the message, and provide additional references for further exploration. The Urban Legends Reference Pages can help you critically evaluate information and determine whether or not to incorporate it into your personal knowledge base.