* Amid the post-earthquake wreckage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, American and Turkish rescuers discovered a 7-year-old girl in a collapsed Caribbean supermarket. She "proudly told them she had made it through with hope and leathery fruit snacks." (From The New York Times)
* The White House held two meetings on Dec. 22 to discuss possible terrorist attacks on American targets that might occur Christmas day. President Obama met with officials from the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security; his homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, gave talks on Yemen, which had received intelligence suggesting an attack on a U.S. target on Christmas. Officials didn't coordinate to examine possibly overlapping or related information from the two meetings.
* Afghanistan's government is offering incentives for members of the Taliban to defect: jobs, security, education and other social benefits.
* In 2004, a billionaire from Israel named Isaac Tshuva bought the legendary Plaza Hotel in New York City for $675 million. (To put this amount in perspective--even the cinematic juggernaut "Avatar" hasn't yet hit the $500 million mark in domestic theaters.) F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, lived at the Plaza for a while; Fitzgerald's fondness for the hotel was so great that Ernest Hemingway told him he should "leave his liver to Princeton and his heart to the Plaza." After Tshuva bought the building and began selling condo units in it, the recession came and the Plaza's value plummeted--one resident, the owner of Apartment 409, sold his condo unit for $8.5 million less than it had cost just 16 months before.
* Musician Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were old friends and self-proclaimed soul mates long before either became famous. Smith met Mapplethorpe after she--a self-described "country mouse"--traveled from New Jersey to Brooklyn to visit friends. She arrived at her friends' apartment to find that they had moved away, but found Mapplethorpe in a back bedroom that afternoon, asleep and "cloaked in light." The two became inseparable, poor bohemians who would go to the museum on one ticket (one of them would get to see the exhibit and describe it to the other, who would wait outside). Smith would later disapprove of Mapplethorpe's association with Andy Warhol, whom she distrusted, and she would also later feel removed from the shocking photography that Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, would later become known for. "I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality," she writes in her new book about the duo, "Just Kids."