The Who2 Blog

Senator John McCain has won the Republican primary in Florida. Hillary Clinton won easily in the Democratic race.The St. Petersburg Times ia a good spot for local reporting on the Florida results.

Margaret Truman Daniel died on Tuesday after a brief illness. Here’s how some major papers sum up her life:”Margaret Truman Daniel, 83, President Harry Truman’s only child, a mystery novelist whose early efforts as a singer famously led her father to threaten an unkind critic with a punch to the nose…” -The Chicago Tribune

After Caroline Kennedy’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama, some blogs commented that Kennedy “dropped her married name” to give the endorsement. This aroused our curiosity.Who2 has itself always listed Kennedy by what we believed to be her legal name, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. (She married businessman Edwin A. Schlossberg in 1986.)

The newspapers of Perth, Australia — hometown of Heath Ledger — continue to offer heavy coverage of the actor’s death.PerthNow, the local NewsCorp website, has a very busy story archive, with recent reports suggesting Ledger may have died of natural causes.

Democrat Barack Obama has won his party’s South Carolina primary with 55 percent of the vote. Obama also won a symbolic victory in Sunday’s New York Times: Caroline Kennedy endorsed him in an op-ed piece titled “A President Like My Father.” She is the daughter of former president John F. Kennedy.

Maria Sharapova has won the 2008 Australian Open. She defeated Ana Ivanovic, 7-5 and 6-3. It’s her third major singles tennis title, after Wimbledon in 2004 and the U.S. Open in 2006.

Mary Lou Retton turns 40 today.She was the first woman to appear on the front of a Wheaties box, says the cereal’s fun facts page. It happened in 1984. Babe Didrikson was the first woman athlete to appear on the package — in 1935.

Sometimes it’s nice to remember the days when amateur athletes were top dogs.The New York Times reports on Joe Burk, who “won honors on Thames and Pacific.” Dude rowed and played football at Penn, was a single-scull champ afterwards, then won the Navy Cross on a PT boat in World War II.

With Jenna Bush engaged to be married, this seems like as good a time as any to clarify a fact about her past: Jenna and her twin sister Barbara were born in Dallas.

Stunning news from New York: actor Heath Ledger, the star of the movies Brokeback Mountain and A Knight’s Tale, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday afternoon.

Republican Fred Thompson has dropped out of the 2008 presidential race. The Washington Post has details.That leaves five serious contenders for the GOP nomination.

Factoid of the day: On the same day that Communist icon Vladimir Lenin died — 21 January 1924 — TV

Tom Brady and the New England Patriots are now one win away from the first 19-0 season in NFL history.The Patriots beat San Diego on Sunday, 21-12. That punched their ticket to Super Bowl XXXX-somethingorother on February 3rd, where they’ll play the New York Giants.

Actress Susanne Pleshette has died at age 70. She had surgery in 2006 for lung cancer.

A Rosa Parks mug shot?

Chess champ Bobby Fischer has died in his adopted home country of Iceland. Here are the opening lines from selected obituaries:”Bobby Fischer, the eccentric genius and high school dropout who became the only US world chess champion, has died in self-imposed isolation…” – The Financial Times

News reports say eccentric chess champ Bobby Fischer has died in Iceland at age 64.This video (5 mins.) captures the turmoil of Fischer’s 1972 win over Boris Spassky. Fischer won the championship, but never defended it and gave up his title in 1975.

Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book and Gunga Din, died on this day in 1936.The year is surprising. Kipling seems like a figure from the olde Victorian Age, not someone who was still alive when Woody Allen and Willie Nelson were lads.

The Library of Congress has dug up some new photos of President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration.

Scholars at the University of Heidelberg say they have determined the true identity of the Mona Lisa “once and for all.”