For 65 years, Elisabeth Mann has carried with her the pain only a Holocaust survivor can know. The only one in her Hungarian Jewish family to make it out of the Nazi death camps, life for a long time felt like punishment. Branded in her mind are the images of, for example, a pile of babies set ablaze, snarling dogs and the laughter of an SS officer pointing to the black smoke of incinerated bodies that filled the sky. And ...

The Pulitzer Prize winners for 2009 were announced Monday, with The New York Times capturing five of the awards. The Times garnered wins in the categories of breaking news reporting, investigative reporting, international reporting, criticism and feature photography. In the arts, "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout won for fiction, "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II" by Douglas A. Blackmon won in the general nonfiction category, and "American Lion: Andrew ...

A major United Nations anti-racism conference was thrown into further disarray Sunday when more countries joined a U.S. boycott. Australia and the Netherlands were the latest to pull out of next week's meeting in Geneva, amid a growing dispute over a document said to single out Israel for its racism. Washington says despite numerous redrafts of the controversial document, due to be adopted at the conference, it remains unhappy, and says it violates American principles of free speech. Canada, ...

Bo the Portuguese water dog made his White House debut under cloudy skies Tuesday afternoon, spending several minutes taking his new family on a lively romp over the South Lawn with frequent stops for hearty sniffs at his new surroundings. Bo landed on all four feet at his fourth home in his six short months of life, fulfilling President Obama's campaign promise to get his daughters a dog in return for all the time he spent on the road during ...

The celebrating over Sunday's daring rescue of Richard Phillips, the ship captain held hostage by Somali pirates, didn't last too long at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged Monday that the kind of Navy snipers who took out the three captors are only a stopgap way of dealing with pirates now sailing the Gulf of Aden. "There is no purely military solution to it," Gates told an audience of the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. "It is ...

Conservationists have found a new population of orangutans in a steep, mountainous corner of Indonesia -- a discovery that significantly adds to the number of the endangered red-haired primates. About 65,000 orangutans are thought to remain in the wild, limited to rain forests on two islands in Malaysia and Indonesia: Borneo and Sumatra. The latest population was found in the eastern edge of Borneo, with conservationists counting 219 nests. Even by conservative estimates, that raises the total number of the ...

A new poll shows that two-thirds of Americans surveyed think the U.S. should lift its travel ban on Cuba, and three-quarters think the U.S. should end its five-decade estrangement with the country. According to the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted April 3 to 5, 64 percent of the 1,023 Americans surveyed by telephone thought the U.S. government should allow citizens to travel to Cuba. And 71 percent of those polled said that the U.S. should reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, ...

Thousands of followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr rallied in Baghdad on Thursday to mark the sixth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. They rallied at Firdous Square, where Hussein's statue was pulled down on April 9, 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The protesters carried Iraqi flags, religious banners and posters for al-Sadr. They chanted religious songs. Hazem al-Araji, a senior aide to the radical Shiite cleric, called on the Iraqi government ...

Had she been born a generation earlier, Kim Hoffman might have had a shotgun wedding. As it turned out, she and Steve Miller took the time to plan their dream nuptials -- outdoors, on an organic farm, and with their 10-month-old daughter in tow. A pre-marriage birth certainly wasn't what her father wanted for his only daughter, said Hoffman, of Oakland, California. But seven months into her relationship with Miller, the unplanned pregnancy simply changed life's course. "We would have ...

Google has released a new Web-based version of Gmail that gives iPhone and Android phone users a more sophisticated version of the online e-mail service, including access to messages that's faster and that works even when offline. Google demonstrated the Web-based mobile version of Gmail last week and announced its availability Tuesday on the Google Mobile blog. "You'll notice that it's a lot faster when performing actions like opening an e-mail, navigating, or searching. And if the data network ...