Picking up trash and pulling weeds may not sound terribly posh, but at a growing number of high-end resorts, where rooms often cost $400 or $500 a night, these activities are becoming yet another hotel amenity. One morning you can sleep in and order room service, and the next you can serve breakfast at a soup kitchen. The trend is part of a larger movement toward voluntourism, i.e., trips with a heavy focus on volunteering. But unlike programs ...

On Saturday morning, about 12 hours before the U.S. House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation to expand health-care coverage to almost all Americans, President Barack Obama did what he does best: He gave an inspirational speech meant to rally recalcitrant House Democrats. Many in the room credited Obama with swaying the last of the fence sitters. "A few members that were leaning no told me afterwards that they'd been moved to vote yes," Rep. Rob Andrews, a New Jersey ...

Fewer than 1% of America's 1.4 million troops are Muslims — and that number is really just the military's best guess, since just 4,000 troops have declared their faith in their service records. By all accounts, the percentage of Muslims who are outstanding, competent or misfit soldiers is proportional to that of every other ethnic group. But that logic is increasingly hard to hear in the aftermath of Major Nidal Hasan's killing spree at Fort Hood. ...

The naming of an honorary economic advisor to a small Southeast Asian country doesn't usually make news. But Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's designation of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as his financial mentor on Wednesday has sparked an international ruckus, with both countries trading trans-border barbs and recalling their respective ambassadors. Confused Here's the background. After Thaksin was deposed in a 2006 bloodless military coup and sentenced in absentia to two years' imprisonment for a conflict of interest conviction — a verdict he ...

For decades, the French considered it taboo to question whether immigration and foreign influences were diluting France's social and cultural character. Indeed, the topic was considered so toxic that no one in France besides extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen would even take it up in public. But times have changed. Twenty years after Le Pen's National Front party became a political force in France, its view that immigration is threatening the French national identity is starting to gain ...

Still struggling to line up the 60 votes that are needed to overcome a potential filibuster of health care reform, Senate majority leader Harry Reid sent a strong signal on Tuesday that President Obama is unlikely to be signing his top domestic priority into law this year, as Democrats had hoped. "We're not going to be bound by timelines," Reid told reporters as he emerged from a weekly lunch with Democratic Senators. He vowed to pass a bill "as ...

One of the criticisms most frequently lobbed at Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is that he has his facts wrong about the snows of Kilimanjaro. Yes, those immortal snows are vanishing , as Gore's global-warming documentary contends, but they've been receding since the early 1900s at least — long before the planet began to warm. Now that bit of fact-checking is looking a lot less convincing with the publication of a study on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the ...

It may not officially be part of his job anymore, but Senator Chuck Schumer, 58, is still very much focused on elections. The architect of the Democrat's 60-seat super-majority, who helped the party add a total of 14 seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections, is worried these days about how disappointed the Democratic base will be if Congress doesn't make a determined effort to pass health care reform with a public plan in it. Odds are good that ...

Ads for "Bernie Madoff Auction" sales have been popping up around the country in recent weeks, getting the word out in such places as Columbus, Ohio, and Charleston, S.C., by placing big stickers on the front page of local newspapers. The ads begin: "Due to losses caused by Bernie Madoff" and then detail such treasures as original art by Peter Max, Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell — as well as Rolex watches and "other flashy items" — that are ...

Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg — a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know — his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly old man who asked them what ...