Washington, D.C.: Feds will meet deadline for hiring airport screeners

More than 47,000 federal recruits in the fight against terrorism will be in place this coming week, as newly trained security screeners begin working at 424 airports nationwide.

Steven Kelman, professor of public management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said the eight-month rush to meet a congressional deadline was probably one of the biggest mobilizations of a civilian government agency in history.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress ordered the federal government to take over the screening duties and set a deadline of Nov. 19 for workers to be in place at 424 commercial airports.

Five other airports – San Francisco, Kansas City, Mo., Rochester, N.Y; Tupelo, Miss.; and Jackson Hole, Wyo. – will continue to use private companies under government supervision.

North Korea: North Korea threatens to end missile moratorium

North Korea on Saturday repeated its threat to resume missile test-launches if Japan didn’t atone for abuses committed during its colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

Since 1999, North Korea has been under a self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile test flights. At its first summit with Japan on Sept. 17, North Korea said it would extend the moratorium until after 2003.

The North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said Saturday that the communist state has no reason to stick to that promise because Japan is not honoring its summit agreements.

North Korea demands that Tokyo apologize and compensate for its brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 until its World War II defeat in 1945.

North Korea says it is developing long-range missiles to defend itself from U.S. military threats.

Germany: Report: CIA tried to recruit associates of 9-11 terrorists

Nearly two years before the Sept. 11 hijackings, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency began persistent efforts to recruit as an informer a Syrian-born Hamburg businessman with links to al-Qaida and the key hijackers, the Chicago Tribune said.

The CIA’s attempts to enlist Mamoun Darkazanli were initiated in late 1999, at a time when three of the four Hamburg students who would later pilot the hijacked planes were first learning of the hijacking plot at an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan.

Darkazanli, 44, has acknowledged knowing the three pilots, Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, with whom he attended the same radical Hamburg mosque.