More Baby Steps Toward Peace?

A year has made a big difference in the lives of Ronald and Mikhail, with Ronald growing more mild and Mikhail more stubborn, say the parents of twin Soviet boys named after the world leaders. “According to the parents, their characters are different. Ronald is more mild and obedient, and Mikhail is stubborn and persistent,” the newspaper Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya said. The twins were born to Galina and Vyacheslav Sakharov of Moscow on Dec. 8, 1987. Both Ronald and Mikhail can walk a little and know how to say “mama” and “papa,” the newspaper said. They were given their names in honor of the treaty to abolish medium-range nuclear weapons, signed in Washington the day of their birth by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

--More baby talk comes from France, where singer-actor Yves Montand, one of the country’s most popular performers, celebrated the New Year by becoming a father for the first time. Valentin Giovanni Jacques was born New Year’s Eve to Montand’s girlfriend, 28-year-old Carole Amiel, at a private clinic in Nice. He weighed in at 9 pounds. Montand said he felt “a mixture of joy and worry. It is both strange, wonderful and moving. . . . All of a sudden, I feel a new responsibility. I say to myself, ‘I have a son,’ and at 67, life is beginning.” Montand has no children from his 33-year marriage with actress Simone Signoret, who died in 1985.

--He’s not ready to give up Watergate source “Deep Throat,” but Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward did reveal that the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was the confidential source for his best-selling insider’s look at the high court, “The Brethren.” In an interview published in the February issue of Playboy magazine, Woodward said he was willing to identify Stewart because the former justice is dead. Stewart died in 1985 at age 70. “I’m revealing his name now, for the first time, because it’s worth showing that there really are sources, people do talk,” Woodward said. “It’s not some reporter’s imagination or some letter that comes in the mail with no address, typed on a standard typewriter. You have relationships, you nurture them and they pay off.” Woodward said Stewart turned out to have “real intellectual disdain” for former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and former Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell, both appointees of President Richard M. Nixon. Woodward said Stewart’s animosities became clear as he worked on the book, and were probably the reason Stewart allowed him to have a behind-the-scenes look at the high court.