World
Conservative book ban push fuels library exodus from national association that stands up for books
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — After parents in a rural and staunchly conservative Wyoming county joined nationwide pressure on librarians to pull books they considered harmful to youngsters, the local library board obliged with new policies making such books a higher priority for removal — and keeping out of collections.
But that’s not all the library board has done.
Campbell County also withdrew from the American Library Association, in what’s become a movement against the professional organization that has fought against book bans.
This summer, the state libraries in Montana, Missouri and Texas and the local library in Midland, Texas, announced they’re leaving the ALA, with possibly more to come. Right-wing lawmakers in at least nine other states — Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — demand similar action.
Part of the reason is the association’s defense of disputed books, many of which have LGBTQ+ and racial themes. A tweet by ALA President Emily Drabinski last year in which she called herself a “Marxist lesbian” also has drawn criticism and led to the Montana and Texas state library departures.
“This is the problem with the American Library Association, it has changed from an organization that helped communities and used common sense into one that just promotes a view,” said Dan Kleinman, a blogger and longtime ALA critic.
Widely disputed books over the past couple years include Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer,” Juno Dawson’s “This Book Is Gay,” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” the ALA points out.
In northeastern Wyoming’s Campbell County, a coal-mining area where former President Donald Trump got 87% of the vote in 2020, library board meetings have been packed and often heated for over two years now.
After a local outcry over a drag queen story hour and an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute library officials over books in the library’s children’s section, a library board with several new members appointed by the County Commission withdrew from the ALA last year.
“We were the first library in nation to do this. And now it has progressed to something to something I couldn’t even have imagined,” library board member Charles Butler said. “And all we were ever worried about was the sexualization of children.”
The nonprofit American Library Association denies having a political agenda, saying it has always been nonpartisan.
“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
The ALA won’t say how many libraries are members of the group but denied any “mass exodus.”
The troubles come as individual membership in the ALA is down 14% since 2018 to about 49,700, the lowest since 1989, according to figures on the organization’s website. The ALA attributes the decline to suspended library conferences during the pandemic.
While librarians pride themselves about being open to different perspectives and providing access to different kinds of materials, political leaders telling them to part with the ALA runs against that, said Washington University in St. Louis law professor Gregory Magarian.
Magarian has been following Missouri’s departure from the ALA amid a debate over who may take part in local library “story hours” and new state rules that seek to limit youth access to certain books deemed inappropriate for their age.
“When you see state governments kind of replacing that type of control by librarians with greater control by politically motivated, politically ambitious, politically polarized government officials, I think that’s really troubling for the prospects for free access to ideas,” Magarian said.
In Campbell County, recent library policy changes remove the ALA’s “Library Bill of Rights,” which states: “A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.”
The new policy says the library system takes seriously keeping “obscene sexually explicit or graphic materials” out of youth sections and can apply that priority in the routine “weeding” of damaged, unused and out-of-date books.
When library Director Terri Lesley expressed doubts about doing that, the board asked her to resign. After she refused, the board voted 4-1 to fire her.
“If we just start moving books, it is really putting the library staff in a bad position legally,” Lesley said at a library board meeting just before her firing July 28. “This raises First Amendment concerns with no right to appeal or challenge books that have been weeded.”
She singled out MassResistance, an anti-LGBTQ+ group, and Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal advocacy group, for working together on the library policy changes, a claim supported by a July 19 post on the MassResistance website.
Lesley won an ALA award last year for “notable contributions to intellectual freedom” and “personal courage in defense of freedom of expression.” She did not return a message seeking comment and Butler and ALA officials declined to comment on her firing.
“People should be running their own libraries based on common sense, community standards and the law,” said Kleinman, the ALA critic and blogger. “And if library directors don’t want to go along with that? Goodbye.”
Kleinman last month launched an alternative to the ALA, the World Library Association, which he said will offer new policy guidelines for libraries.
“We’re going to return things to commonplace, community standards,” Kleinman said.
Butler and Campbell County Library Board Chairwoman Sage Bear, who did not return phone and email messages seeking comment, have joined as “team members” of the World Library Association. Butler said he hoped the new association will eventually offer librarian continuing education that Campbell County can no longer provide through the ALA.
So far, state library associations — private, professional organizations that resemble the American Library Association, but on a state level — are sticking with the American Library Association. Wyoming librarians don’t always see eye-to-eye with the ALA but the Wyoming Library Association has no plans to cut ties, President Conrrado Saldivar said.
Wyoming librarians are being “constantly critiqued” but they — not the ALA — are the ones who control their collections based on community needs, Saldivar added.
“ALA is not telling our library workers, our collection development librarians, you have to have this book in your library collection,” Saldivar said.
Republican Gov. Mark Gordon looks to be on the same page, criticizing as a “media stunt” a recent letter from 13 state lawmakers and Wyoming’s secretary of state asking him to pull the Wyoming State Library from the ALA.
“The letter implies that Wyoming citizens — Wyoming parents — are not capable of deciding how best to govern themselves and need the self-appointed morality police to show them the way,” Gordon said in a statement.
He called for discussion about the ALA’s “organizational drift” but is keeping the Wyoming State Library in the ALA, at least for now. Whether still more states and communities decide to leave remains to be seen amid what Caldwell-Stone described as a new push to question the group’s very existence.
“We have to question whose agenda is served by taking away library service from the people and taking away the liberty to make ones own choices about one’s own reading,” she said. “Because that’s what we’re here for.”
World
Iran's supreme leader calls on Muslims to assist Lebanon in confronting Israel
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on Muslims on Saturday “to stand by the people of Lebanon and the proud Hezbollah with whatever means they have and assist them in confronting the … wicked regime (of Israel).”
In a statement after the Israeli army said it had killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Khamenei said: “The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront,” state media reported.
He has been transferred to a secure location inside the country with heightened security measures in place, two regional officials briefed by Tehran told Reuters.
The sources said Iran was in constant contact with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and other regional proxy groups to determine the next step after Israel announced that it had killed Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on south Beirut on Friday.
Nasrallah was killed alongside Hezbollah’s commander of the southern front, Ali Karaki, and a host of other senior Hezbollah members in a strike on Hezbollah’s military headquarters in the Lebanese capital.
Khameini in hiding: Decision comes after emergency meeting
On Friday, Khameini held an emergency meeting with top advisors in Tehran, as per the New York Times citing Iranian sources.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi accused Israel of using several US “bunker buster” bombs to strike Beirut on Friday.
“Just this morning, the Israeli regime used several 5,000-pound bunker busters that had been gifted to them by the United States to hit residential areas in Beirut,” he told a UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East.
Further, US President Joe Biden directed the Pentagon to “assess and adjust as necessary US force posture” in the Middle East, according to the White House.
“He has also directed his team to ensure that US embassies in the region take all protective measures as appropriate,” a statement read. The White House said Biden was briefed “several times” on Friday about the Middle East. An official added that Vice President Kamala Harris was also briefed.
World
North Korea expands list of crimes punishable by death: report
North Korea is expanding its list of crimes punishable by death, according to reports.
Supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s regime expanded the list of offenses warranting the death penalty from 11 to 16 via revisions of criminal law, according to Yonhap News Agency.
New offenses warranting execution as a punishment include: anti-state propaganda and agitation acts, illegal manufacturing, and the illicit use of weapons are included in the new codes.
KIM JONG UN PROMISES TO ‘STEADILY STRENGTHEN’ NORTH KOREA’S ‘NUCLEAR FORCE’
The legal modifications were codified via multiple amendments between May 2022 and December 2023, according to a report from the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU).
The tightening of the criminal code is intended to strengthen the Kim regime’s grip on the population through its continued monopolization of the marketplace and military.
Earlier this month, North Korea promised to refine its weapons development and strengthen its nuclear capabilities.
NORTH KOREA’S KIM JONG UN REPORTEDLY ORDERED DOZENS OF OFFICIALS EXECUTED AFTER DEADLY FLOODS
Kim Jong Un made the comments Monday at a state event celebrating the country’s 76th anniversary.
“The obvious conclusion is that the nuclear force of the DPRK and the posture capable of properly using it for ensuring the state’s right to security in any time should be more thoroughly perfected,” the dictator said.
“DPRK” is an abbreviation for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Kim Jong Un warned that the United States’ increased involvement in the region has forced the regime to pursue more powerful weapons as a deterrence mechanism.
“The DPRK will steadily strengthen its nuclear force capable of fully coping with any threatening acts imposed by its nuclear-armed rival states and redouble its measures and efforts to make all the armed forces of the state, including the nuclear force, fully ready for combat,” the supreme leader said.
The 14th Supreme People’s Assembly, the unicameral legislative body of the country, amended the national constitution last year to enshrine nuclear weaponization as a core principle.
World
Eight killed in Russian drone attacks on medical centre in Sumy, Ukraine
The second attack hit the hospital in northeastern Ukraine as patients evacuated, authorities and witnesses say.
At least eight people have died in two consecutive Russian drone attacks on a medical centre in the northeast Ukrainian city of Sumy, Ukrainian officials have said.
The first attack on Saturday morning killed one person, and it was followed by another attack while patients and staff were evacuating, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on his Telegram channel that Russia had hit the hospital using Shahed drones, stating that eleven people were injured.
Sumy lies just across the border from Russia’s Kursk region where Kyiv launched a shock offensive on August 6, which it says is aimed partly at creating a “buffer zone” inside Russia.
Regional prosecutors said the first attack in Sumy on Saturday took place at about 7:35am (04:35 GMT), hitting the hospital where there were 86 patients and 38 staff.
The second attack took place at about 8:25am (05:25 GMT) as rescuers and police were providing assistance and evacuating patients at the scene, prosecutors said.
Dobrobat, a volunteer group that helps repair damaged homes, wrote on Facebook that its volunteers were working at the scene when the second attack came.
It posted a video showing thick smoke, explosions and people rushing to shelter as sirens wailed.
“People are just lying on the street dead,” a volunteer said, filming himself at the scene on his phone.
‘Victory plan’
In Russia, the Defence Ministry said Saturday that air defences overnight had shot down four Ukrainian drones over the Belgorod region and one over the Kursk region, both areas bordering Ukraine.
On Thursday, Zelenskyy visited the United States to lobby support for Ukraine, meeting with US President Joe Biden and Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris to detail what he has described in recent weeks as his “victory plan”.
He had previously described the five-point plan as a “bridge” towards a strong enough negotiating position for Ukraine to force Russia to end the war on Kyiv’s terms.
Before the meeting, Biden announced an additional $8bn in military aid for Ukraine, a package including the provision of Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) munitions to “enhance Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities”.
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