Girl won Hannah Montana tickets with fake essay describing dad's death in Iraq

"An essay that won a 6-year-old Texas girl four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert began with the powerful line: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." While gripping, it was not true, and now the girl may lose her...

Birth of the Flicks

"On this day in 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumiere demonstrated the first movie projector, the cinematographe, in Paris, France. It projected its images out onto a screen, unlike Thomas Edison's kinetograph, which was a...

Quebec City's 400th birthday stays under radar

"Quebec City was a cobblestone key to establishing a European settlement in North America, but its 400th birthday is approaching with the stealth of Gen. James Wolfe's infantry scaling the city's cliffs some 250...

Slavery abolished in America

"Following its ratification by the requisite three-quarters of the states earlier in the month, the 13th Amendment is formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution, ensuring that "neither slavery nor involuntary...

Happy Birthday Mr. Chomsky

"It's the birthday of the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, born in Philadelphia (1928), who started out as a linguist at a time when most linguists believed that language is something children only learn...

Santa's been extra good to some boy or girl

"A Norman Rockwell painting of Santa Claus perched on a stepladder sold for $2.17-million (U.S.) at auction. The painting, “Extra Good Boys and Girls,” is the original of a Saturday Evening Post cover from...

Jihads of the West

"It was on this day in 1095 that Pope Urban II, while on a speaking tour in France, called for the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. There was no imminent threat. Muslims had occupied Jerusalem for...