Honoring

To My Friends, who are only honored on Veterans Day: I am, My Friends, sorry that I used my guilt over my lack of esteem to have allowed others to have trivialized your death in the past. I am, My Friends, sorry that I used my anger of missing you to have allowed a nation to minimize your death. I am, My Friends, sorry that I used my insecurities of not having a friend like you again to have allowed others to not honor our friendship after your death. I am, My Friends, sorry for being disconnected from my emotions, for not accepting myself as I am, to have shared the pain of your death with your family.

I would like to correct an oversight in the script of the extravaganza honoring our refurbished Statue of Liberty. Elizabeth Taylor's introduction of Frank Sinatra gave credit to the great feeling of patriotism a special short film aroused in World War II. What the script did not mention was that this prize short, "The House I Live In," which featured Sinatra's song, was written by Albert Maltz, whose honors at the time were later ignored when...

As a former POW held in Germany, I feel compelled to raise my voice in opposition to the itinerary of the President. While my train made its way to Stalag Luft I, I saw trains loaded with war materiel, going in the other direction to supply Nazis fighting us. Carefully placed at intervals in these trains were freight cars with freshly painted Red Crosses on them, in the hope that air attacks might be warded off, enabling the supplies to reach the...

Enter the trophy room at Southern Methodist University and feel what it must have felt to walk into a palace in which the royal family has hastily abdicated. Monuments to a lost civilization stand and remaining artifacts tell of great triumphs, but Heritage Hall, as it is housed in meticulously kept, red-bricked Gerald J. Ford Stadium, is a mausoleum. And it doesn't tell the whole story.

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa. As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair.

Elizabeth Taylor, the glamorous queen of American movie stardom, whose achievements as an actress were often overshadowed by her rapturous looks and real-life dramas, has died. She was 79. Hospitalized six weeks ago for congestive heart failure, Taylor died early Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with her four children at her side, publicist Sally Morrison said. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article said Mickey Rooney played Elizabeth Taylor's trainer in "Lassie Come Home.

Robert Linderman wants you to know he isn't a scammer. Oh sure, he may be general counsel for Freedom Debt Relief, California's largest debt-settlement company, and he may be vice president of the Assn. of Settlement Companies, an industry group. And he readily acknowledges that there are some bad apples in the debt-settlement business, taking people's money without doing much if anything to get them out of a financial hole. But Linderman says most debt-settlement companies are honorable enterprises that only want to help people return to fiscal health.

The extraordinary Bel-Air Kirkeby Mansion, the beloved home of the late Carlotta and Arnold Kirkeby, is getting every bit of the attention it deserves. Next Thursday the CHIPS (Colleague Helpers in Philanthropic Service) lead off with a major fund-raiser "Inside the Gates," giving benefactors a chance to thrill at the vistas and the mansion, restored to all its grandeur by Los Angeles' top designers. Offspring Carla Kirkeby and her brother Arnold C. Kirkeby are the generous instigators.

For Americans with a terminal diagnosis, death increasingly comes in the places and ways they say they want it - at home and in the comfort of hospice care. But for a growing number of dying patients, that is preceded by a tumultuous month in which they endure procedures that are often as invasive and painful as they are futile. New research finds that the proportion of Medicare patients dying in hospice care nearly doubled from 22% in 2000 to 42% in 2009, an apparent bow to patients' overwhelming preference for more peaceful passings free of heroic measures.

NEAR the 18th hole of the Bighorn golf course in Palm Desert, publishing tycoon Duane Hagadone laid out his vision for a dream home to his architect. It would be set high on the bald mountain rising near the green yet be so inconspicuous that he'd have to point it out even to golf buddies.