Author: Reporter

Even for the Thunder Bay area, a perilous swath of northern Lake Huron off the Michigan coast that has devoured many a ship, the Ironton’s fate seems particularly cruel. The 191-foot cargo vessel collided with a grain hauler on a blustery night in September 1894, sinking both. The Ironton’s captain and six sailors clambered into a lifeboat but it was dragged to the bottom before they could detach it from the ship. Only two crewmen survived. The gravesite long eluded shipwreck hunters. Now, the mystery has been solved, officials with Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Alpena, Michigan, said...

Dr. Seuss fans might find their hearts growing three sizes this coming holiday season with the release of a sequel to the 1957 classic children’s book “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” The new book picks up one year after the original, and like the first, teaches a valuable lesson about the true spirit of the holiday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House Children’s Books announced in late February. The sequel entitled “How the Grinch Lost Christmas!” is not based on a newly discovered manuscript by Seuss — whose real name was Theodor Geisel — but was written and illustrated...

On a winter’s day in 1984, a briefcase stuffed with classified government documents showed up in a building in Pittsburgh, borne by someone who most certainly was not supposed to have them. That someone was 13-year-old Kristin Preble. She took the papers to school as a show-and-tell project for her eighth grade class. Her dad had found them in his Cleveland hotel room several years earlier and taken them home as a souvenir. As a different sort of show and tell unfolds in Washington over the mishandling of state secrets by the Trump and now Biden administrations, the schoolgirl...

A low credit score can hurt your ability to take out a loan, secure a good interest rate, or increase the spending limit on your credit card. Some reasons for a low score are out of your control, such as unexpected medical debt or a lack of credit history. Credit rating agencies are working to improve access to credit by giving people more time to pay medical bills before the debt appears in reports, and by removing other debt completely. They are also making it easier to count rent, utility payments, and other recurring bills — a boon for...

President Joe Biden said on February 27 that “history matters, and Black history matters” during a White House reception marking Black History Month, a forceful declaration that comes after the state of Florida blocked a new advanced course on African American studies from being taught in its high schools. “It’s important to say from the White House for the entire country to hear: History matters. History matters and Black history matters,” Biden said, to murmurs of agreement from the roughly 400 people inside the East Room of the White House. “I can’t just choose to learn what we want...