The New York Times foreign correspondent and current chief of the newspaper's Baghdad bureau receives the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary doctor of laws degree from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Given annually to a courageous journalist, the award honors the memory of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an early Colby valedictorian and a revered abolitionist publisher who was killed in Alton, IL., in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob.

Burns has been arrested in China and Mozambique for his reporting activities and had to hide from Saddam Hussein's secret police after escaping arrest in Iraq. He covered the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the end of apartheid in South Africa and was the Times' first Islamic affairs correspondent from 1998 to 2001.

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