Le Ballon Rouge (1956) is a French short film directed by Albert Lamorisse. It won an Academy Honorary Award and tells the story of a lonely boy in Paris who forms a magical bond with a red balloon that follows him through the city.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar used a commemoration of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet uprising to reaffirm his country’s place in Europe, following years of pro-Moscow policies under his predecessor Viktor Orban

The formal adoption of our national motto in 1956 was motivated by Americans’ urgency to declare our opposition to the deadly Marxist philosophy of communism and socialism. In 1962, Congress voted to display "In God We Trust" permanently above the Speaker’s rostrum as a rebuke to the godless Soviet Union. That unanimous vote was by voice, because not one representative from either party opposed it. Two weeks ago, we held a vote on the House floor to condemn the Marxist philosophy of socialism and safeguard election integrity with voter ID. But this time, 192 Democrats voted AGAINST the resolution. This is no longer your father’s Democratic Party.

The field of artificial intelligence was officially born at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, where John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence.” Key founders include McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, who presented the first AI program, the Logic Theorist. Alan Turing laid the theoretical groundwork earlier with his 1950 paper and the Turing Test, asking if machines could think. So it’s more a group effort than one inventor. The original founders didn’t complete it at all. They set up the field and built early programs that solved math problems or played checkers, but the tech hit big limits. There were two “AI winters” where funding dried up because results didn’t match the hype. What we use today, like ChatGPT, comes from deep learning and neural networks that really took off around 2012 with AlexNet. That work was led by Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, decades later. The Dartmouth group laid the vision, but modern AI is a completely different approach built on massive data and computing power they couldn’t dream of.