By AP / KRISTEN GELINEAU SYDNEY) — Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died in a Western Australia nursing home Thursday at age 110. And though his accomplishments were many — including a a 41-year military career that spanned two world wars — the man known as “Chuckles” to his comrades in the Australian Navy was happiest being known as a dedicated family man. “We all loved him,” his 84-year-old daughter Daphne Edinger told The Associated Press. “It’s going to be sad to think of him not being here any longer, but that’s the way things go.” Choules was born March 3, 1901, in…

By: JENNY WILSON (2 hours ago) Topics: BATTLE OF PUEBLA, CINCO DE MAYO, CINCO DE MAYO HISTORY,FRENCH, HISTORY, HOLIDAYS, MAY 5, MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE, MEXICO,UNITED STATES, WORLD Dressed up in Mexican outfits, performers wait to perform during a Cinco de Mayo reception in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC, on May 5, 2010 Getty Images / Jewel Samad Contrary to what some may believe, it’s not Mexican Independence Day. (via TIME Photos) Cinco De Mayo is the holiday of tequila and tex-mex, shares a genre with Mardi Gras and St. Patrick’s day and has become hugely popular throughout the United States. But how many people actually know the history behind this springtime celebration? (More on TIME.com: See the top…

May 2, 2011 By Catherine Lutz A SINGULAR WOMAN The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother By Janny Scott Illustrated. 376 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.95. Pieces of the story of Ann Dunham, the mother of Barack Obama, we know already. A “white woman from Kansas,” as he referred to her at the Democratic convention in 2008, who married an African intellectual and had a son with him. A strict mother who roused that son before dawn to study. An anthropologist who spent years studying in Indonesian villages, several of those years without her son. A 52-year-old woman whose last year before succumbing to cancer was spent in part trying to…

May 4, 2011 By DENNIS OVERBYE In a tour de force of technology and just plain stubbornness spanning half a century and costing more than $750 million, a team of experimenters from Stanford University reported on Wednesday that a set of orbiting gyroscopes had detected a slight sag and an even slighter twist in space-time. The finding confirms some of the weirdest of the many strange predictions — like black holes and the expanding universe — of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. “We have completed this landmark experiment of testing Einstein’s universe,” Francis Everitt, leader of the project, known as Gravity Probe B, said at a news conference…