Prize

GENEVA - Seven lines of blanks. From 1999 to 2005. There will be no Tour de France winner in the record book for those years. Once the toast of the Champs-Elysees, Lance Armstrong was formally stripped of his seven Tour titles Monday and banned for life for doping. As far as the Tour is concerned, his victories never happened. He was never on the top step of the podium. The winner's yellow jersey was never on his back. The decision by the International Cycling Union marked an end to the saga that brought down the most decorated rider in Tour history and exposed widespread cheating in the sport.

LAKE HELEN, Fla. - Inside the cinder-block clubhouse of American Legion Post 127, seven women sit around a table clipping coupons to send to military families overseas, teasing one another over the clicking of billiard balls at the pool table across the room. It seemed almost a shame for politics to intrude on such a generous and communal scene, but the outcome of the race between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney could well hinge on the decisions of the people in this room and others like them here in Volusia County.

MIDDLEBURG HEIGHTS, Ohio - Republican nominee Mitt Romney's awkward comment during the second presidential debate that he had received "binders full of women" as Massachusetts governor when he requested more female job candidates went fully viral Wednesday, drawing snickers from voters but also fueling a broader fight between the two campaigns over the key support of women. Romney's remark was just a sliver of the discussion Tuesday night about issues relevant to women, as the candidates tussled over subjects such as contraception and unequal pay. The battle escalated Wednesday, as President Obama worked to reclaim his advantage among women - and as the Romney campaign returned to its core argument that the Republican is better suited to manage women's top concern, the economy.

LONDON - British writer Hilary Mantel has won the prestigious Booker literary prize for a second time with her blood-soaked Tudor saga Bring Up the Bodies . Mantel, who took the £50,000 ($82,000) award in 2009 for Wolf Hall , is the first British author, and the first woman, to achieve a Booker double, joining double winners Peter Carey of Australia and J.M. Coetzee of South Africa. "You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize, and two come along at once," Mantel said as she accepted the award at London's medieval Guildhall on Tuesday night.

Last year's awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize was a rarity, as it was divided among three women: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen. Match up previous female winners of the award, which was first presented in 1901, with the year they were honored. 1. Jane Addams. 2. Emily Greene Balch. 3. Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams. 4. Shirin Ebadi. 5. Wangari Maathai. 6. Rigoberta Menchu. 7. Alva Myrdal.

LONDON - While some Europeans swelled with pride when the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, howls of derision erupted from the continent's large band of skeptics. To many in the 27-nation bloc, the EU is an unwieldy and unloved agglomeration overseen by a top-heavy bureaucracy devoted to creating arcane regulations about everything from cheese to fishing quotas. Set up with noble goals after the devastation of World War II, the EU now appears to critics to be impotent amid a debt crisis that has widened north-south divisions, threatened the euro currency and plunged several members, from Greece to Ireland to Spain, into economic turmoil.

In May, Lar Lubovitch was awarded the prize for best choreography at the 20th annual Benois de la Danse, one of the most prestigious honors in the dance world. Lubovitch was the first American choreographer ever to win the prize, presented at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. So it was extra-special that Lar Lubovitch Dance Company performed the piece that earned him that honor, Crisis Variations, when the popular Dance Celebration series opened its 30th season Thursday night at the Annenberg Center.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, a cause of pride for a government that had disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award, an exiled critic. National television broke into its newscast to announce the prize - exceptional for the tightly scripted broadcast that usually focuses on the doings of Chinese leaders. The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners, praised Mo's "hallucinatory realism" saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.

NEW YORK - A Frenchman and an American shared the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for inventing methods to peer into the bizarre quantum world of ultratiny particles, work that could help in creating a new generation of superfast computers. Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland opened the door to new experiments in quantum physics in the 1990s by showing how to observe individual atoms and particles of light called photons while preserving their quantum properties. Quantum physics, a field about a century old, explains a lot about nature but includes some weird-sounding behavior by individual, isolated particles.

It was a volatile night of surprises and rectifications at the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards Sunday night. Homeland , a twisty, high-stakes story of contemporary treason, was the big winner, ending Mad Men 's four-year run as king of television drama. Damian Lewis and Claire Danes, Homeland 's leads, reinforced the upset by sweeping the top acting honors for the drama category. Danes' win had been widely predicted but Lewis, a British actor who first gained attention on American TV as the hero of HBO's Band of Brothers , had been almost completely overlooked in a field that included Breaking Bad 's Bryan Cranston and Downton Abbey 's Hugh Bonneville.