By HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — Two reports released Monday provide a mixed but compelling outlook on the wave of book removals and challenges as the annual Banned Books Week begins for schools, stores and libraries nationwide.

The American Library Association found a substantial drop in 2024 so far in complaints about books stocked in public, school and academic libraries, and in the number of books receiving objections. Meanwhile, PEN America is documenting an explosion in books being removed from school shelves in 2023-24, tripling to more than 10,000 over the previous year. More than 8,000 were pulled just in Florida and Iowa, where laws restricting the content of books have been passed.

The two surveys don’t necessarily contradict each other.

The library association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded 414 challenges over the first eight months of 2024, with 1,128 different titles criticized. Over the same time period last year, the office tallied 695 cases, involving 1,915 books. The ALA relies on media accounts and reports from librarians and has long acknowledged that many challenges may not be included, whether because librarians preemptively withhold a book that may be controversial or decline to even acquire it.

Challenges have surged to record highs over the past few years, and the 2024 totals so far still exceed the ALA’s numbers before 2020. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, also cautioned that the numbers predate the start of the fall school year, when laws that had been on hold in Iowa will again be in effect.

“Reports from Iowa are still coming in,” she said. “And we expect that to continue through the end of the year.”

The library association defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” The ALA doesn’t keep a precise figure of how many books have actually been withdrawn.

According to PEN, bans are tallied through local media reports, “school district websites, and school board minutes, as well as organizational partners” such as the Florida Freedom to Read Project and Let Utah Read. The library association relies primarily on local media and accounts from public librarians. And the two organizations have differing definitions of “ban,” a key reason their numbers vary so greatly. For the ALA, a ban is the permanent removal of a book from a library’s collection. Should hundreds of books be pulled from a library for review, then returned, they are not counted as banned, but listed as a single “challenge.”

For PEN, withdrawals of any length qualify as bans.

“If access to a book is restricted, even for a short period of time, that is a restriction of free speech and free expression,” says Kasey Meehan, who directs PEN’s Freedom to Read program.

The ALA and PEN both say that most of the books targeted have racial or LGBTQIA+ themes, whether it’s Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queen,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” or Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy.” While some complaints have come from liberals objecting to the racist language of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and other older works, the vast majority originate with conservatives and such organizations as Moms for Liberty.

The Iowa law, passed last year in the Republican-controlled statehouse, bans school libraries from carrying books that depict sex acts. The law also requires schools to publicize its library collection online and provide instructions for parents on how to request the removal of books or other materials. Many districts already had those systems in place.

After LGBTQIA+ youth, teachers and major publishers filed legal challenges, a federal judge in December put a temporary hold on key parts of the law, but it was lifted by a federal appeals court last month in an order that left room for challengers to seek a block again.

Records requests filed by the Des Moines Register with Iowa’s 325 districts showed nearly 3,400 books had been removed from school libraries to comply with the law before it was paused. In Davenport, which is among Iowa’s 10 largest districts and serves more than 12,000 students, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kabobe’s “Gender Queer” and Morrison’s “Bluest Eye” were among the nine books taken out of circulation.

After the law passed, staff were instructed to review books in their care available to students, district communications director Sarah Ott wrote in an email.

“If any books were preliminarily identified as potentially violating the new law, building staff referred the books to district administration for official review,” according to Ott. The district administration uses a process that was already in place to review materials and ensure compliance with the law, she said.

Banned Books Week, which runs through Sunday, was established in 1982 and features readings and displays of banned works. It is supported by the ALA, PEN, the Authors Guild, the National Book Foundation and more than a dozen other organizations. Filmmaker Ava Duvernay has been named honorary chair, and student activist Julia Garnett, who has opposed bans in her native Tennessee, is the youth honorary chair. Garnett was among 15 “Girls Leading Change” praised last fall by first lady Jill Biden during a White House ceremony.

“We observe Banned Books Week, but we don’t celebrate,” Caldwell-Stone said. “Banned books are the opposite of the freedoms promised by the First Amendment.”

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Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

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This story corrects the name of author Maia Kobabe.

By ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man accused in the apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump at a golf course in Florida left behind a note saying that he intended to kill the former president and kept in his car a handwritten list of dates and venues where Trump was to appear, the Justice Department said Monday.

The new allegations were included in a detention memo filed ahead of a hearing Monday at which the Justice Department was expected to argue that 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh should remain locked up as the case moves forward.

The details are meant to buttress prosecutors’ assertions that Routh is a threat to public safety with a premeditated plan to kill Trump — a plot officials say was thwarted by a Secret Service agent who spotted a rifle poking out of shrubbery on the West Palm Beach golf course where Trump was playing.

The note was placed in a box dropped off months earlier at the home of an unidentified person who did not open it until after last Sunday’s arrest. The box also contained ammunition, a metal pipe, building materials, tools, phones and various letters. The person who received the box and contacted law enforcement was not identified in the Justice Department’s detention memo.

One note, addressed “Dear World,” appears to have been premised on the idea that the assassination attempt would be unsuccessful.

“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job,” the note said, according to prosecutors.

An attorney for Routh didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday morning.

Cellphone records cited by the Justice Department indicate Routh traveled to West Palm Beach from Greensboro in mid-August, and that he was near Trump’s golf club and the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence “on multiple days and times” between August 18 and the day of the apparent attempted assassination.

He was arrested on Sunday afternoon after a Secret Service agent who was scoping the Trump International Golf Club for potential security threats saw a partially obscured man’s face, and the barrel of a semiautomatic rifle, aimed directly at him. The agent fired at Routh, who sped away before being stopped by officials in a neighboring county.

The Secret Service has said Routh did not fire any shots and never had Trump in his line of sight.

The Justice Department also said Monday that authorities who searched his car found six cellphones, including one that showed a Google search of how to travel from Palm Beach County to Mexico.

They also found a list with dates in August, September and October and venues where Trump had appeared or was scheduled to, according to prosecutors. A notebook found in his car was filled with criticism of the Russian and Chinese governments and notes about how to join the war on behalf of Ukraine.

The detention memo also cites a book authored by Routh last year in which he lambasted Trump’s approach to foreign policy, including in Ukraine. In the book, he wrote that Iran was “free to assassinate Trump” for having left the nuclear deal.

Routh is charged with illegally possessing his gun in spite of multiple felony convictions, including two charges of possessing stolen goods in 2002 in North Carolina, and with possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. More serious charges are possible in the weeks ahead.

By BHARATHA MALLAWARACHI, Associated Press

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Marxist politician Anura Dissanayake won Sri Lanka’s presidential election over the weekend, dealing a blow to a political old guard that has been widely blamed for the unprecedented economic crisis that hit the South Asian island nation two years ago.

Dissanayake, whose pro-working class populist campaign won him youth support, secured victory over opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, the runner up; and incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over the country two years ago after its economy hit bottom.

Dissanayake is the leader of National People’s Power alliance, and of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist political party that waged two unsuccessful armed insurrections in 1970s and 1980s to capture power through socialist revolution.

Early interest in politics

Born on Nov. 24, 1968 into an ordinary family in a paddy-growing central part of Sri Lanka, Dissanayake was politically active from his school days, taking part in student demonstrations against an agreement with India to grant a degree of self rule to Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority in an effort to resolve the demands for autonomy that later erupted into a decades-long civil war.

Dissanayake political involvement was further sharpened when he entered university to read for his science degree and joined the Socialist Students’ Union, the student wing of the JVP, which had already staged one armed insurrection in 1971 before giving up arms and entering politics.

In 1987, the JVP started its second armed insurrection after the government banned the movement, aiming at overturning the deal with India and overthrowing the government. Dissanayake went underground as the government stepped in to violently crush the insurrection, killing the group’s leader Rohana Wijeweera and nearly all of its top members.

Several thousands were killed by the JVP and government forces and their agents in the course of the insurgency and its suppression.

Parliamentary politics

Dissanayake entered public politics in 1993, working to rebuild the party under a new leader-in-exile, Somawansa Amarasinghe. The party won its first seat in Parliament in 1994, signalling its re-entry into democratic politics.

Dissanayake became national organiser of the Socialist Students’ Union in 1997 and the same year, he was added to to the Central Committee of the JVP. One year later, he joined the party’s politburo.

Dissanayake was elected to Parliament in 2000, and when the JVP entered an alliance with President Chandrika Kumaratunga, he briefly served as agriculture and irrigation minister.

That alliance was formed to oppose a cease-fire agreement signed between then-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the now-defeated Tamil Tiger rebels to resolve the separatist conflict that had blown into a full scale civil war.

Later, Dissanayake and the JVP backed former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to militarily defeat the rebels in 2009.

He was elected JVP leader in 2014, after a party schism in which a radical left wing broke off to form a new party.

A new coalition

Having realised that it was not possible to come to power through his party alone, Dissanayake formed the NPP in 2019, bringing together 21 groups including political parties, youth groups, women’s groups, trade unions and other civil society groups.

Since the formation of the coalition, Dissanayake has moved away from his far leftist stance. Although he remains head of a Marxist party, he now says that he supports a free market economy.

He ran for president as the head of the NPP for the first time in 2019, losing to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was forced to flee two years later because of protests driven by the country’s economic crisis.

Vows to end austerity and corruption

Dissanayake enters office with a raft of promises to improve standards of living and clean up government.

His main campaign theme was accountability, promising that politicians and officials will be held responsible for their actions. He’s also promised to end corruption and privileges for politicians and retired presidents.

But supporters are also counting on him to ease up on the punishing austerity imposed by the country’s deal with the IMF. He’s promised to keep the deal alive with changes, given its importance to the ongoing economic recovery. He’s also pledged to encourage local businesses instead of relying solely on foreign investments.

For the country’s Tamil minority, Dissanayake’s election offers little hope. During the campaign, he rejected devolving more power to the north and east, where most Tamils live, and investigating incidents during the civil war that U.N. investigators said could amount to war crimes. Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed during the final months before the Tamil Tiger rebels’ defeat.