Memorial | featured news

Oscar Pistorius was to hold a private memorial service Tuesday for the girlfriend he is charged with murdering. Slain model Reeva Steenkamp was cremated and mourned at a family service last week while Pistorius was in custody during a weeklong hearing on whether he should be released on bail.

Death already has a surprisingly vivid presence online, with improvised memorials and outpourings of grief for loved ones on social media, and the unintentional mementos the departed leave behind in comments, photo streams and blog posts.

Promising that “change can come if you don’t give up,” President Obama, the man who is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the civil rights movement, on Sunday called on Americans to use the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help push for progress in today’s economically tough times.

The plot of land known for a decade as "the pile," "the pit" and "ground zero" opened to the public Monday for the first time since that terrible morning in 2001, transformed into a memorial consisting of two serene reflecting pools ringed by the chiseled-in-bronze names of the nearly 3,000 souls lost.

View a 180 degree panorama of the World Trade Center site

Tourists and Washingtonians were about to get their first up-close look Monday at the memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1981, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The starkness of her design, as well as her ethnicity as an Asian American, fueled controversy over her victory. Politicians, art critics and veterans excoriated her, and she was forced to defend her work before Congress. A little more than two decades later, when a jury convened in New York City to decide which of more than 5,000 submissions would become the winning design for the 9/11 Memorial, Lin’s presence on the panel served as a reminder of the difficulties of aligning public art, private grief and main street opinion in the wake of a national tragedy.

President Barack Obama and thousands of ordinary West Virginians honored the late Robert C. Byrd at a memorial service in the late senator's home state Friday.

Thousands and possibly tens of thousands of mourners, many of them black-clad young women carrying roses, overwhelmed security forces today at Tehran's largest cemetery to gather around the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose videotaped shooting at a June 20 demonstration stunned the world.

Michael Jackson's glimmering casket took center stage at the Staples Center, sitting for more than two hours as celebrities memorialized the King of Pop under the watchful eyes of millions. And when the ceremony was over, it was gone.