Murdered lawyer points accusatory finger two days after his death.
In a twist right out of a Mario Puzo novel, a Guatemalan lawyer killed in a shooting Sunday reappeared on a posthumous videotape yesterday claiming the person who ordered his killing is Guatemala’s president, Alvaro Colóm. On the video, Rodrigo Rosenberg claims he ran afoul of important government officials after representing businessman Khalil Musa, who was slain in March along with his daughter. Rosenberg says Musa was killed for refusing to help launder drug money at Guatemala's Rural Development Bank, which is mostly government owned. President Colóm dismissed the accusation, saying, “First of all, I am not a murderer. Second, I am not a drug trafficker, and everything he says there is totally senseless.” Colóm has reportedly asked the UN and FBI to investigate Rosenberg’s killing, but the country has been thrown into a state of unrest, with many calling for the president to step aside until the issue is resolved. It’s just the latest blow for Guatemala, which has suffered a CIA-backed coup, numerous corrupt governments, and the recent rise of powerful drug cartels. As yet President Colóm has shown no intention to step aside, but Rosenberg’s accusations—factual or not—are extraordinarily damaging. Speaking of himself in the past tense, Rosenberg says: “I was a 47 year old Guatemalan, with four beautiful children, with the best brother one could ask of life, with wonderful friends, and with an overwhelming desire to live in my country.”
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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