Spotlight
After two unexpected pregnancies at a sanctuary for retired research chimpanzees, other females have been put on birth control and the males are getting another round of vasectomies.
The first recent pregnancy at the Chimp Haven Inc. facility near Shreveport in northwest Louisiana was discovered on Valentine's Day when a worker noticed Flora, a 29-year-old chimp, was carrying a newborn.

Israeli officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.
Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack. The U.S. has been working with the Israelis for months to convince them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran's nuclear program.

Chinese architect Wang Shu, whose buildings have been praised for their commanding presence and careful attention to the environment, has won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prize's jury announced Monday.
The 49-year-old architect joins Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano and Eduardo Souto de Moura in receiving the honor that's been called architecture's Nobel Prize. Wang, the first Chinese architect to receive the honor, is recognized for the museums, libraries, apartment complexes and other structures that he has designed in China.

The April 1 auction of more than 5,000 Titanic artifacts a century after the luxury liner's sinking has stirred hundreds of interested calls, with some offering to add to the dazzling trove already plucked from the ocean floor.
Auctioneer Arlan Ettinger said his New York auction house, Guernsey's Auctioneers & Brokers, has heard from some descendants of the more than 700 survivors, including one offering papers found on the floating body of a passenger.

Daniel Macias is the face of Silicon Valley seldom seen by those who don't live there.
When he was 19, he wasn't starting what would become one of the world's most successful tech companies, like Mark Zuckerberg did at that age when he founded Facebook. Macias spent his 19th birthday behind bars, where he'd been sentenced for assault.

Following a captivating championship and the addition of Danica Patrick, the last thing NASCAR wanted was a glitch.
And certainly not a full-on delay that pushed NASCAR into a lunchtime slot Monday for its biggest event of the year.

Oil prices fell below $109 a barrel Monday in Asia after a 14 percent gain this month that was driven by signs of an improving U.S. economy and fears of an Iran supply cut.
Benchmark crude for April delivery was down 86 cents to $108.91 per barrel late afternoon Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.94 to settle at $109.73 in New York on Friday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday its teams have succeeded in entering the central Syrian city of Hama for the first time in over a month.
A Red Cross spokesman in Geneva said a joint team of the ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent brought an emergency delivery of food and other items for 12,000 people.

It's a desert oasis that hangs its priciest paintings on casino walls, where neon signs are a point of pride and themed-hotels pay tribute to architecture's golden eras. Still, Las Vegas' cultural offerings have long taken a back seat to the glamour and crudity of its most notorious vices. People come here to party, the stereotype goes, not broaden their artistic horizons.
Now a new $470 million arts complex is daring to challenge that. The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, a gleaming art deco-inspired jewel in a downtown redevelopment zone, hopes to reintroduce Las Vegas as a cultural destination in its own right.

For the past two decades, the U.S. space agency has been practically obsessed with Mars. It has hardly missed an opportunity about every two years to fling robotic spacecraft at the red planet.
This summer, the most high-tech rover ever, Curiosity, will land near the Martian equator in search of the chemical building blocks of life. The more scientists study Mars, the closer they get to answering whether microbial life once existed there, a clue to the ultimate question: Are we alone?
