The Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Chinese Muslim dissidents who want to be brought to the United States after their release from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Justice Department, in its filing Friday, urged the high court to refuse to review a Circuit Court decision overturning a lower court which had ordered the Uighurs brought to Washington, D.C. and immediately set free. The dispute has become a central issue in President Obama's promise to close ...

The presidential candidate was greeted last Monday at the airport by a jubilant throng, chanting "Azerbaijan is awake, and is supporting its son!" That slogan, shouted in the Azeri language, might sound a little discordant, given that Mir-Hossein Moussavi is running for President not of Azerbaijan, but of Iran. But the enthusiasm of his home-state crowd in East Azerbaijan may help explain — at least in part — why Moussavi is currently the strongest challenger to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ...

If you doubt that President Obama has changed American politics, consider that we are about to have the first Supreme Court confirmation hearing in almost a quarter-century that does not revolve, in one way or another, around Roe v. Wade. The appeals-court judge Sonia Sotomayor has ruled on just three cases that dealt, indirectly, with abortion. She has written a lot about racial preferences, though. That is one reason the country is set to have a knock-down, drag-out fight ...

As any of the millions of young people who have roamed the Continent with a pack on their back and Eurail pass in hand can attest, there is something quintessentially European about traveling by train. Or was. European airline deregulation 12 years ago has turned hopping on a plane into a bargain-basement no-brainer. Thanks mostly to the increased competition, improved services and lower prices spawned by regulatory liberalization, air travel in Europe grew at an average annual rate of ...

Republicans kept the pressure on the president's Supreme Court pick Friday, pushing the idea that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is an activist judge who will bring a leftist agenda to the bench. Meanwhile, the White House tried to soften remarks Sotomayor made in 2001 that have rankled conservatives, who say her assertion that her experiences as a Latina woman might make her judgments more sound than those of a white man brands her as a racist. "I'm sure she would have ...

With its white sand and clear, blue water, Trinidad's Matura Beach looks like a postcard. It's a far cry from its recent past, when leatherback sea turtle carcasses littered the ground and kept tourists away. "Twenty years ago, this was a graveyard," Suzan Lakhan Baptiste said of the six-mile stretch of beach near her home. "The stench was horrendous. You could smell it for miles," she said. Saddened and frustrated, Baptiste launched a crusade to help end the ...

What if science made a pill to protect us from addiction — keeping us from smoking cigarettes, getting fat or abusing drugs and alcohol? According to encouraging results from several lines of study, it seems that day may be closer than we thought. Researchers in labs around the world are now developing vaccines to inoculate people against dangerously addictive substances such as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. Within "one to 10 years, and closer to one year," says Dr. ...

Saying cheese has acquired new gastro-cachet. a temperature-controlled cheese room is the latest must-have at fine-dining restaurants around the world. So are cheese sommeliers , who compile multicourse cheese menus, regale diners with tales of bucolic settings and artisanal production methods, and pepper their tableside conversation with terms like hand-stretched and cave-aged. Love cheese? Put these restaurants on your itinerary. 1 Le Bouchon Breton: Located in Spitalfields, London, this brasserie de luxe, www.lebouchon.co.uk/breton/index.php, is already renowned for its impressive Gallic ...

Microblogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month over month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year. View the 10 ways Twitter ...

John Travolta is too distraught over the death of his son last January to help promote the movie he shot with Denzel Washington last summer, Washington said Friday. Travolta plays a deranged ex-inmate who takes hostages on a New York subway in "The Taking of Pelham 123," which hits theaters June 12. His son Jett, 16, was found unconscious on January 2 while on vacation with his family in the Bahamas' West End. He was taken to a hospital, where ...