■ UNITED STATES
Contest-winning essay faked
An essay that won a six-year-old girl airfare for four and four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert began with the powerful line: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." While gripping, it was not true -- and now the girl may lose her tickets after her mother acknowledged to contest organizers it was all a lie. "We did the essay and that's what we did to win," Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. "We did whatever we could do to win." She had identified the soldier as Sergeant Jonathon Menjivar, but the Department of Defense has no record of anyone with that name dying in Iraq. "We regret that the original intent of the contest, which was to make a little girl's holiday extra special, has not been realized in the way we anticipated," said Mary Drolet, the CEO of Club Libby Lu, the contest sponsor.
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