This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: NYT
December 30, 2006
After the hanging, the body remains.
While the verdict and death sentence for Saddam Hussein were swift and unambiguous, it was much less clear on Saturday what would be done with his body.
Privately, both American and Iraqi officials say that the subject has been raised at the highest levels, but no decisions have been made. There is wide disagreement on the subject of his body, according to interviews with several top Western and Iraqi officials, nearly all of whom in
Source: NYT
December 30, 2006
Call it “The Supreme Court: The Missing Years.” A small team of legal historians is wrapping up the work of reconstructing the Supreme Court’s first decade, a period largely lost to history due to poor official records, misleading contemporaneous accounts and the fire that burned the Capitol, where the Supreme Court was located, in the War of 1812.
The task figured to be a challenge, but no one realized just how daunting it would be when the Supreme Court Historical Society conceive
Source: NYT
December 30, 2006
This year’s annual gathering of Gerald R. Ford administration alumni took place in June at the National Archives, where graying former officials socialized near a display of the Constitution.
Mingling with the retirees were two men still very much in power: Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, each of whom had served under Mr. Ford as White House chief of staff.
The setting had an apt symbolism. Since taking office as part of the Bush administration in 2001, both Vice Pr
Source: Richard Ben-Veniste in the WaPo
December 29, 2006
[The writer, former chief of the Watergate Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, is a partner in the Washington office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw.]
Upon taking office as president, Gerald Ford gave reason to believe that any decision regarding a pardon for his predecessor would be made carefully and deliberately. Nineteen days after taking the oath of office, he responded to a press inquiry about a possible Nixon pardon, saying that until any legal process was
Source: HNN summary of NBC report. Story: "Ford shared his feelings about Republican party"
December 29, 2006
NBC Nightly News reported this evening that Gerald Ford made disparaging remarks about Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in interviews with Michael Beschloss in the mid-1990s. The network played tapes from the interviews. Ford said he was disappointed Reagan had declined to campaign for him in 1976 in several key states, saying this cost him the election. Ford said he knew for a fact that both Barbara and George H.W. Bush supported abortion rights and was sad to see he wasn't braver in resist
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 28, 2006
The Treasury will next month publish a register of every national asset — ranging from Trident nuclear submarines to an offshoot of "Newton's Apple Tree" — in an attempt to identify assets that can be sold to fund government spending.
The National Asset Register is expected to show that the nation's assets, which include offices, land and equipment, total more than £300 billion. City estimates suggest that the true valuation could be as high as £1,000 billion if land value
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 29, 2006
The 300th birthday of Great Britain is to pass next year without any major celebrations.
January 16 sees the tricentenary of the Act of Union which merged the parliaments of England and Scotland in 1707.
Historians consider it one of the most important events in the nation's history, laying the foundations for imperial expansion a century later.
Source: BBC
December 29, 2006
The achievements of Scottish emigrants should be celebrated in a national museum, according to the SNP [Scottish Nationalist Party].
The party has called for a new museum to be created in Edinburgh to record the accomplishments of Scots such as philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
SNP Lothians MSP Kenny MacAskill said there were up to 80 million people across the world who claimed to be of Scottish descent.
Source: Guardian
December 29, 2006
Defence chiefs warned seven years before the Falklands War that the islands would be almost impossible to defend in the event of an Argentine invasion, according to official papers made public.
Files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, under the 30-year rule show that in 1975 Defence Secretary Roy Mason urged Prime Minister Harold Wilson to seek a "political solution" to the long-running dispute over the islands.
A Ministry of Defence briefi
Source: scotsman.com
December 29, 2006
HAROLD Wilson warned that an independence struggle by paramilitaries in Northern Ireland would unleash an "apocalyptic" bloodbath, plunging the UK into civil war.
The Labour prime minister made the dramatic prediction in previously secret documents released under the 30-year rule.
But other Whitehall files showed that, despite Mr Wilson's fears, the British government considered creating an independent Northern Ireland anyway.
In 1976, both the
Source: AP
December 28, 2006
Britain launched a virtual tour of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Downing Street office, giving web surfers a glimpse into the lives of the people who work behind the country's most famous front door.
The tour includes images of the Cabinet table, the Grand Staircase adorned with portraits of every prime minister, and the entrance hall, and can be accessed on the prime minister's website -- www.pm.gov.uk <http://ww
Source: Reuters
December 29, 2006
LONDON - Four men will appear in a central London court on Friday on extradition warrants from Rwanda where they are wanted on charges of taking part in the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 minority Tutsis were slaughtered.
Police said the men, all in their 40s and 50s, were arrested at their homes in coordinated raids in various parts of the country and were being held in a central London police station.
Source: Reuters
December 28, 2006
BUENOS AIRES - Police searched on Thursday for a man who has disappeared months after testifying he was tortured by a policeman during Argentina's military dictatorship, the second "Dirty War" witness to go missing.
Government officials said President Nestor Kirchner had postponed a planned trip to coordinate police efforts to locate Luis Gerez, a 51-year-old construction worker who vanished on Wednesday, according to family members.
Source: BBC
December 29, 2006
A former police officer who is alleged to have been a leader of a far-right death squad in Argentina during the 1970s has been arrested in Spain.
Rodolfo Almiron was detained near Valencia on a warrant to face murder charges in Argentina.
He is a suspected member of Triple A, the anti-communist alliance that operated under the governments of Juan Peron and then his widow Isabel.
Source: BBC
December 29, 2006
Britain will settle its World War II debts to the US and Canada when it pays two final instalments before the close of 2006, the Treasury has said.
The payments of $83.25m (£42.5m) to the US and US$22.7m (£11.6m) to Canada are the last of 50 instalments since 1950.
The amount paid back is nearly double that loaned in 1945 and 1946.
"This week we finally honour in full our commitments to the US and Canada for the support they gave us 60 years ago,&
Source: Newhouse News Service
December 28, 2006
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- With clean architectural lines and a broad glass front facing the Grand River, the building is a fitting reflection of the man -- open and without pretense.
On a breezy, sun-splashed day in September 1981, the former president stood before 40,000 people on a grassy slope in downtown Grand Rapids and spoke from his heart. Stretched out before him was a crowd that included celebrities, prime ministers and presidents.
"The high point of my life,
Source: NYT
December 29, 2006
Irish authorities were aware of three separate death threats against President John F. Kennedy when he visited Ireland in 1963, five months before his assassination in Dallas, according to government papers released in Dublin on Friday.
Two threats came in anonymous telephone messages to the police saying President Kennedy would be killed during the three-day visit, and a third was received by the news desk at a major newspaper group, Ireland’s Department of Justice said in declassi
Source: NYT
December 29, 2006
As he helped in recent years arrange the details of his own funeral, Gerald R. Ford reached out to an old adversary: Jimmy Carter, who defeated him for the presidency in 1976.
Mr. Ford asked whether his successor might consider speaking at his funeral and offered, lightheartedly, to do the same for Mr. Carter, depending on who died first.
The invitation was decades in the making, associates of Mr. Ford’s said. And, they said, it was typical for Mr. Ford, who came to his
Source: NYT
December 29, 2006
President Gerald R. Ford was never one for second-guessing, but for many years after leaving office in 1977, he carried in his wallet a scrap of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling. A pardon, the excerpt said, “carries an imputation of guilt,” and acceptance of a pardon is “a confession of it.”
Mr. Ford’s decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency. It also a
Source: Bob Woodward in the WaPo
December 28, 2006
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq
