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: Bob Woodward in the WaPo
Dec 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
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 27, 2006
Chinese and Japanese scholars on Wednesday finished the first in a planned series of historical study groups ordered by their governments amid fresh efforts to mend strained ties and reduce bitterness between the former World War II enemies.
Twenty academics — ten each from China and Japan — met in Beijing for two days focusing first on the basic format and dates of future talks, said Shinichi Kitaoka, a University of Tokyo professor and head of the Japanese delegation.
Source: CNN/AP
Dec 27, 2006
The cremated remains of a convicted murderer must be removed from Arlington National Cemetery under a new federal law.
The provision ordering the removal of Russell Wayne Wagner's remains was included in a veterans' health care and benefits bill that President Bush signed into law on Friday.
Wagner, a Vietnam veteran, was convicted in 2002 of stabbing to death Daniel Davis, 84, and Wilda Davis, 80, in their home in 1994. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Dec 27, 2006
But for some quick action, Gerald R. Ford's presidency, and his life, could have ended amid gunshots outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel on the afternoon of Sept. 22, 1975.
As Ford emerged from the historic Union Square hotel's Post Street entrance at 3:30 p.m. after addressing a World Affairs Council audience, he paused before getting into his limousine to wave to the crowd across the street.
In a flash, two shots rang out. The first narrowly missed the 38th pr
Source: NYT
Dec 27, 2006
When he died two Sundays ago, Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in disgrace, facing the prospect of trials for human rights abuses and for illicitly accumulating a $28 million fortune.
His closest associates, however, have seized upon his death as an opportunity to rehabilitate his tattered image and rewrite the recent history of Chile.
The widespread publication on Sunday of a farewell letter from General Pinochet to “all Chileans, without exception” was perhaps the most notab
Source: Independent
Dec 27, 2006
In the dying days of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Antoni Ruiz found out for himself what thousands of others had already suffered for being gay. Now, 31 years later, Mr Ruiz and a dwindling band of others who suffered General Franco's ruthless repression of homosexuals, may finally be offered compensation by the state.Antoni, then just 17, from Valencia, eastern Spain, told his mother he was homosexual and his family sought advice from a nun. "She went strai
Source: Guardian (UK)
Dec 27, 2006
Picking through centuries-old rubbish, masonry and discarded body parts beneath an abandoned Tuscan church, an Italian historian believes she has solved one of history's great crime mysteries.For more than four centuries, researchers have puzzled over the fact that Francesco I Medici, the son of the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, died within hours of his wife in October 1587. Legend had it they were poisoned by his brother and successor, a cardinal.
Modern historian
Source: NYT
Dec 27, 2006
He was 93, making him the oldest former president, surpassing Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, by just over a month.
His death was announced late Tuesday night in a statement issued by his wife, Betty Ford, which gave no details. Further family announcements today gave no cause of death, but he had been in and out of the hospital since January 2006, most recently in October at the Eisenhower Medical Center for medical tests. He returned to his home in Rancho Mirage after five days o
Source: NYT
Dec 27, 2006
Gerald R. Ford and Marie Antoinette did not have much in common, but he shared her frustration about having been misquoted, which probably cost both of them their jobs.
In Hollywood’s latest biography of the French queen, she denies having callously suggested that breadless peasants eat cake instead. “I never said that,” the actress Kirsten Dunst pouts. “I wonder why people keep saying I did.”
Mr. Ford never explicitly said “Drop Dead” to New Yorkers during the city’s f
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Dec 27, 2006
beral academics may best remember Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States, unfondly because of the pardon he granted to his former boss, Richard M. Nixon, over Mr. Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal.
Mr. Ford, who died on Tuesday night at the age of 93, held the presidency for just under 2½ years and was defeated in his bid for re-election by Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was a short tenure in which issues affecting higher education did not feature prominently. Mr. For
Source: AP
Dec 27, 2006
The presidential pardon of Richard Nixon's Watergate misdeeds defined Gerald Ford's singular presidency. That's not exactly what Ford had hoped. He saw Nixon's pardon as the first step toward being elected to the presidency on the merits of his own work. And there was no way Ford could focus on the nation's business as long as Nixon's legal fate remained unresolved. A criminal trial could take years, and Nixon would not wait out that time quietly, Ford wrote in his autobiography.
Ye
Source: Times Online (UK)
Dec 27, 2006
The magnificent historic villa that was the home of Benito Mussolini when he was the all-powerful Duce of Italy has been reopened to the public after nearly 30 years of restoration.
The nine buildings and gardens of the Villa Torlonia, which were largely built in the 19th century by the Torlonia princes of the Vatican aristocracy, will now house an art museum dedicated to the Roman school of 20th-century painting.
The complex will also house a high-tech playground and
Source: http://www.taipeitimes.com/
Dec 27, 2006
A Cambodian genocide museum yesterday called for help in preserving the deteriorating bones of more than 8,000 Khmer Rouge victims salvaged from its mass graves.
Rous Sophea Ravy, deputy director of the Choeung Ek Genocide Museum on the outskirts of the capital, said the thousands of skulls and other bones currently housed at the site needed to be preserved or risk deteriorating into dust.
She said curators of the private company JC Royal, which took over the site in Ma
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Dec 27, 2006
The State Department said today that it will modify the latest
Nixon-era volume of the official Foreign Relations of the United
States (FRUS) series to include the amount of the 1970 U.S.
intelligence budget after Secrecy News pointed out that this
number had previously been disclosed in an earlier volume of
FRUS.
According to an editorial note in the latest FRUS volume
published last week,"The President [Nixon] stated that the
United States is spending a total of about [dollar amou
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 27, 2006
Chinese and Japanese scholars on Wednesday finished the first in a planned series of historical study groups ordered by their governments amid fresh efforts to mend strained ties and reduce bitterness between the former World War II enemies.Twenty academics — ten each from China and Japan — met in Beijing for two days focusing first on the basic format and dates of future talks, said Shinichi Kitaoka, a University of Tokyo professor and head of the Japanese delegation.
Source: Regnum News Agency (Moscow)
Dec 27, 2006
274 works of art stolen in July 1993 from the Azerbaijani National Museum of Arts were found in the United States, APA agency informs. According to head of the national Interpol Central Bureau Mamed Mikailov, six guidelines were sent to Interpol member-countries in connection with the theft. The stolen works of art were found after activity carried out together with Washington, Wiesbaden and other national central bureaus. According to him, persons involved in the crime were found.
Source: Baltimore Sun
Dec 26, 2006
The Queen Mary luxury liner, which went from monarch of the sea to tourism tool over the years, has become a royal headache.
The owner of the lease to operate the 72-year-old ship and her 365-room on-board hotel was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year in a dispute over $3.4 million in back rent with the city of Long Beach. The city purchased the Queen Mary in 1967 to help it compete for visitors.
Now, a court-appointed trustee is trying to sell the 66-ye
Source: MosNews
Dec 26, 2006
Moscow museum dedicated to a Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who was condemned by the Orthodox Church for his works, was largely destroyed last week, AFP reports.
The museum celebrated the life and work of Mikhail Bulgakov, author of “The Master and Margarita” a work of fantasy and satire telling us about the devil coming to Communist-era Moscow.
The Orthodox Church called the book published only 26 years after Bulgakov’s death in 1940 “the fifth gospel, that of Satan.
Source: AP
Dec 26, 2006
Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, has died, his wife, Betty, said Tuesday. He was 93.
"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," Mrs. Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage. "His life w
Source: NYT
Dec 26, 2006
After 11 years, the hunt for Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic may well be the most frustrating, infuriating and fruitless around.
The two, wanted for the most heinous crimes of Bosnia’s bloody civil war from 1992 to 1995, have managed to elude thousands of Western peacekeepers and local police forces with what is widely suspected to be the collusion of the Serbian military. Reality and myth have grown indistinguishable as stories have emerged of their possible hide-outs and of
