It wouldn't be true to say that Holden Caulfield, the disaffected loner in The Catcher in the Rye, was always a stand-in for his creator, the disaffected loner J.D. Salinger. But there are times when Caulfield speaks that you just know it's Salinger talking. Like when the teenager imagines running off to Vermont and pretending to be a deaf-mute. "Then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life," he vows, "and they'd leave me alone." ...

Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long says if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade's worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people who have gone through them — he makes the case for that controversial conclusion in a new book, Evidence of the Afterlife. Medicine, Long says, cannot ...

Imagine a protected park half the size of the continental U.S., covering a sea-life-loaded swath of the Pacific Ocean and the 607 tropical islands therein. The park's inhabitants live mostly in traditional villages and still remember how to do things much of the world has forgotten, such as make clothes from scratch and live off the land. This park would, in fact, encompass an entire country — the Federated States of Micronesia — and if ...

Karima El Mahroug, the woman at the center of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's latest sex scandal, says that when she was 9 years old, she was raped by two men, then told by her mother to keep quiet because she feared how Karima's father would react if he discovered she wasn't a virgin. When Karima was 12, her father spilled a pan of boiling oil on her after she told him she had converted from Islam ...

The saying goes that life imitates art. But that's the last thing you want when you write crime fiction. You never want to see the things you write about mirrored back to you in real life.

A Saudi court sentenced a female journalist Saturday to 60 lashes for her work on a controversial Arabic-language TV show that aired an episode in which a man bragged about his sex life, two sources told CNN.

Arizona police are looking for a man who they allege ran down his daughter and her friend because he believed his daughter had become "too Westernized." Peoria, Arizona, police said Wednesday that Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, struck his 20-year-old daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, and her friend Amal Edan Khalaf with a vehicle he was driving in a parking lot Tuesday afternoon. Faleh Hassan Almaleki was angry with his daughter "as she had become too 'Westernized' and was not living according ...

If you're craving a quick hit of optimism, reading a news magazine is probably not the best way to go about finding it. As the life coaches and motivational speakers have been trying to tell us for more than a decade now, a healthy, positive mental outlook requires strict abstinence from current events in all forms. Instead, you should patronize sites like Happynews.com, where the top international stories of the week include "Jobless Man Finds Buried Treasure" and "Adorable ...

German writer Herta Mueller, whose work has dealt with the hardships and humiliations of life in an oppressive dictatorship, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature Thursday. The Romanian-born Mueller, 56, was recognized by the Swedish Academy as a writer who "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." She became only the 12th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901. Mueller made her writing debut at 29 after ...

Israel will release 20 Palestinian female prisoners and detainees in a deal to obtain a recent proof-of-life videotape of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli Security Cabinet announced Wednesday.