Harry Houdini’s 137th Birthday – Google Doodle marks Harry Houdini’s 137th B’day. Catch here all the latest news and updated reports on Birthday Today 24 March.

Wish A very happy birthday to Harry Houdini! Google commemorating Harry Houdini’s Happy 137th Birthday The master of escapology, Harry Houdini! You are one of my greatest inspiration ever and forever!

Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz; March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomena.

Harry Houdini died of peritonitis, secondary to a ruptured appendix. Eyewitnesses to an incident in Montreal gave rise to speculation that Houdini’s death was caused by a McGill University student, J. Gordon Whitehead, who delivered multiple blows to Houdini’s abdomen to test Houdini’s claim that he was able to take any blow to the body above the waist without injury.

Bill Russell and fourteen others got Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Bill Russell is a former American professional basketball player who played center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Bill Russell is a five-time winner of the NBA Most Valuable Player Award and a twelve-time All-Star. Bill Russell was the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty that won eleven NBA Championships during Russell’s thirteen-year career.

Bill Russell gets Medal of Freedom

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is a decoration bestowed by the President of the United States and is – along with the equivalent Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress – the highest civilian award in the U.S. It recognizes those individuals who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” The award is not limited to U.S. citizens and, while it is a civilian award, it can also be awarded to military personnel and worn on the uniform.

Today President Barack Obama recognized 15 recipients with the Medal of Freedom. The Presidential Medal of Freedom was given at a ceremony at the White House.

President Barack Obama referred to the reciepients as
“the best of who we are and who we aspire to be.”

Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients 2011

Here is a list of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients

• Angela Merkel, German Chancellor
• Bill Russell, Basketball player
• Gerda Weissmann Klein, Author
• George H. W. Bush – 41st President
• John H. Adams, co-founder of Natural Resources Defense Council
• Jasper Johns, artist
• Jean Kennedy Smith, founder of VSA,
• John J. Sweeney, President Emeritus of the AFL-CIO
• John Lewis, U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district
• Maya Angelou, poet and author
• Sylvia Mendez, civil rights activist
• Stan Musial, Hall of Fame baseball player
• Dr. Tom Little (posthumous), Humanitarian activist
• Yo-Yo Ma, French-born American cellist, virtuoso, orchestral composer of Chinese descent
• Warren Buffett American investor, industrialist and philanthropist

We congratulate the recipients.

Readers can leave their message below.

Sargent Shriver died earlier this week at the age of 95.

The burial will be held Saturday in Hyannis, Massachusetts, at the same cemetery as his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

Students caught with weapons are expelled from L.A. Unified for at least one year, according to state and federal law. Since 2005, two students from Gardena High have been expelled for having firearms, district officials said.

There were no immediate reports of large casualties. The quake’s epicenter was 30 miles west of Dalbandin, a town in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Television reports from Quetta, the provincial capital and the most populous city in the area, appeared to show that it had been spared major damage.

The earthquake was centered in a critical area for both the U.S. and Pakistan. Baluchistan is a safe haven for the Afghanistan Taliban, whose leaders live in the region’s capital, Quetta. American officials for years have pressed, unsuccessfully, for Pakistan officials to move against militants in Baluchistan.

Any natural disaster that distracts the Pakistani army from counter insurgency operations along the western border will be of worry to U.S. officials. The Pakistani military is only now beginning to resume its combat operations after spending months leading recovery efforts after last summer’s floods which displaced millions from their homes in western and central Pakistan.

After watching Ted’s life turn around in an instant – finding work and being reunited with his mother, Ted has admitted to drug and alcohol addictions in the past, The rehab announcement comes just days after Ted and one of the adult daughters he abandoned 20 years ago got into a verbal spat that turned into a fist fight at the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood. Though no arrests were made, cops did briefly detain both Dad & Daughter.

Ted’s daughter claims the former radio announcer — who has been courted for voiceover work by dozens of Fortune 500 companies ever since a clip of him “Talking for Food” went viral earlier this month — has been regularly getting drunk since his unlikely rise to fame. Turns out, she was telling the truth/ Although Williams has publicly claimed that he’s been sober for more than two years, he admitted to Dr. Phil that that was a lie. In fact, he’s been drinking daily.

The boy was found in his room at home by a family member.

A friend of the family said that the teens with whom the boy held that final online char erased their comments soon after learning of his death, apparently feeling they had a hand in the matter. The family friend said these teens had pushed the victim to take his life.

The family was shocked by the incident and said they had seen no warning signals indicating that was planning to commit suicide.

The family friend said supervision of his online activity could have stopped the tragedy. “If an adult was in the area it would have been possible to monitor the things being said,” she said.

Earlier Tuesday, a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old were arrested for allegedly raping a 12-year-old girl who they met on Facebook.

The incident was revealed after the gir lbecame pregnant and had to have an abortion.

The killer has not yet been identified and there have been few leads. Cornwell had been missingsince Aug. 2009.

The bones were found this past weekend not far from where she went missing in Northern Georgia, according to CBS News reports. A website dedicated to finding Kristi Cornwell, www.kristicornwell.com, has been down today, likely due to a surge in traffic.

Her boyfriend, Douglas Davis reported that he was talking with her on her cell phone when he heard sounds of a struggle and the call ended suddenly. Davis and Cornwell had been dating about 7 weeks when she disappeared, and had met online in a Christian chat room

Five chairs fell 25 to 30 feet to the ground when a cable derailed, injuring at least six people. None of the injuries are believed to be life-threatening. The estimated 220 people remaining on the lift were stranded for several hours amid wind gusts of 30 to 50 m.p.h. as the resort’s ski patrol scrambled to evacuate them, using a pulley system to lower skiers to the ground. By mid-afternoon, the causes of the Sugarloaf accident were still unknown

It was created by writer Dan O’Keefe and introduced into popular culture by his son Daniel, a screenwriter for the TV show Seinfeld, as part of a comical storyline on the show. The holiday’s celebration, as shown on Seinfeld, includes an unadorned aluminum “Festivus pole,” practices such as the “Airing of Grievances” and “Feats of Strength,” and the labelling of easily explainable events as “Festivus miracles”.