Belarus police arrest over 400 protesters; many are beaten

Police in Belarus cracked down hard Saturday on opposition protesters who tried to hold a forbidden demonstration in the capital — a human rights group said more than 400 people were arrested and many were beaten.

The demonstrators had hoped to build on a rising wave of defiance of the former Soviet republic's authoritarian government, led by President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994.

New Nobel literature prize winner transcends easy categories

With a reporter's eye and an artist's heart, Svetlana Alexievich writes of the catastrophes, upheaval and personal woes that have afflicted the Soviet Union and the troubled countries that succeeded it. Her writings, characterized by plain language and detail so visceral it's sometimes painful to read, won her this year's Nobel literature prize.

She is an unusual choice. The Swedish Academy, which picks the prestigious literature laureates, has only twice before bestowed the award on non-fiction — to Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell — and had never honored journalistic work with a Nobel.