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A large cache of secret police documents citing IraqÂ’s repeated use of chemical weapons and its genocidal campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq will be opened to the public for the first time as a result of a recent acquisition by the Archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder, according to curator Bruce Montgomery. The collection, known as the Captured Iraqi Secret Police Files, also details IraqÂ’s top leadership, security and intelligence agencies, and collaborators.

A new way of preparing future college teachers at the University of Colorado at Boulder that is viewed as a national model will be the topic of an all-day conference on Feb. 16. Top administrators and faculty from nine Colorado colleges and universities will attend the event, including CU President John Buechner and CU-Boulder Chancellor Richard Byyny. The Preparing Future Faculty program links doctoral students at CU-Boulder with professors at other Colorado colleges and universities.

Police at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the City of Boulder want anyone who is the victim of a crime, on campus or off, or who encounters suspicious activity to feel comfortable reporting such incidents immediately without fear that their names will appear in published news reports.

Alan Cass, probably best known as the “Voice of the Buffs,” retired Jan. 31 as director of the Coors Events/Conference Center and assistant athletic director after a 38-year career at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Cass, who says he is “moving on to a different phase of university life,” will continue to announce CU men’s basketball and football games, coordinate the Boulder campus’ three annual commencement ceremonies and serve as curator for the Glenn Miller Archive, to which he has devoted nearly 20 years.

A $5 million Earth-orbiting satellite designed and built by a team of University of Colorado at Boulder students, faculty and engineers is currently slated for launch from CaliforniaÂ’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on Feb. 4.

* The Universities Space Research Association, which selected SNOE for development and flight, is a consortium of U.S. universities administering the Student Explorer Demonstration Initiative program for NASA. There are 82 participating universities in USRA.

In response to student feedback, the University of Colorado at Boulder has developed a new “limited-privacy” option for students who don’t want their names and addresses released for use in directories or mass mailings. Effective Feb. 2, students will be able to protect themselves from mass mailings while continuing to allow public access to certain kinds of information if they select the “limited-privacy” option for their records maintained by the campus.

Physics doesn't have to be boring and a new site on the World Wide Web featuring cartoon characters and action-filled experiments aims to prove it. The site was developed by physics professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is intended for non-scientists and students of all ages. It allows users to conduct more than 30 interactive "virtual experiments" on their computer screens and then get an explanation of what they are seeing.

A slight wobble in starlight provides evidence of a planet orbiting a distant star, and what next? The question of whether there is other life in the galaxy is revived. But why has it taken so long for astronomers to verify the existance of other worlds, suspected since long before recorded time? And what is the next step in determining whether there is life on another planet? The discovery of several new planets beyond our solar system during the last two years will be the topic of a new star show at Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The University of Colorado Libraries’ new web-based catalog, Webcat, has made CU-Boulder a leader in providing access to its print, multi-media and CD-ROM resources. “No other library has put its entire catalog on the World Wide Web for everyone to access,” said Lori Arp, head of the reference department at Norlin Library. With 1.7 million records, the catalog provides information about the University of Colorado Libraries’ 12 million print, media and CD-ROM resources. Media resources include audio-video materials, microfiche and microfilm.