As we alerted readers in a special bulletin earlier this month, the State Department has released rules for the DV-2000 green card library. The lottery entry period will be from October 1st to October 31st. As has been the case for the last four years, Siskind, Susser, Haas & Devine is making available to the public its free lottery web page. The page has the detailed question and answer document sent out to our subscribers last week as well as a sample application and envelope. We also have an online form for using our firm to handle the application. As we always remind our readers, diligence, reasonable intelligence and a decent command of English should be all that is necessary to properly enter the lottery on your own. Our services will mainly be attractive to a) people who don't trust the mail systems in their home country and want to have their applications posted from inside the US and to have their notification packages sent to a US address, b) those who don't know which address they will be at for the next year (and it is advisable not to depend on the package to be forwarded to you) and who want to use our firm's return address instead, c) those who don't speak English well and are concerned they will not be able to follow the directions (and about a third of all applications are rejected because people did not properly follow directions) and d) people who are just too busy to worry about doing it themselves. Siskind's Lottery Center is at http://www.visalaw.com/lottery_page.html.

In other lottery news, several lucky people received surprises in the mail in late July and early August. Several months after it appeared that all DV-99 lottery winners were notified, the State Department mailed another batch of winner notifications. We do not know if this is the final group to be notified, but we will alert our readers if we hear anything further.