The veterans of the Olympic Games cede the victory dais to a younger generation of swimmers who tumble records as easily as turns By They are too young to know fear, but already have the work ethic of mature professionals; they have a young person's hopes and the obsessiveness of those that have perhaps not yet dreamed enough. Mere teenagers most of them, their racing bodies are rock hard, their eyes fixed on record ...

Breaking America's dependence on foreign energy supplies and suppliers who often don't like the U.S. is a driving force behind the search for alternative fuels. That includes electric cars, which wheezing Detroit has finally realized it needs to produce. But at Detroit's International Auto Show this month, the excitement surrounding the Big Three's announcements that they're shifting from gasoline to voltage has been tempered by another realization: most of the lithium used to make the batteries for ...

In April, I crossed into remote central Sudan's Nuba Mountains and found a land back on the brink of a forgotten war. Since then, the war has returned, and reports from the ground indicate mass atrocities repeating themselves. With the world preoccupied with dividing Sudan into two new countries next month following South Sudan's January referendum for independence, international leaders are understandably reluctant to become involved in yet another crisis in Sudan. But the world might not ...

In the last three years, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has often used his podium to talk to the nation about climate change. He has called it "the great moral and economic issue challenge of our time," comparing global warming skeptics to gamblers who "happily play with our children's future." It's not random that Australia's leader has been vocal on the issue: Despite being one of the more sparsely populated nations, Australia's 22 million inhabitants emit the ...

Carlos Martn Bar believes that his brother Ignacio knew he was about to be killed. The night before his murder Nov. 16, 1989, the 46-year-old Jesuit priest called his parents in Spain from his home on the campus of the University of Central America in El Salvador. On the phone, he tried to calm his father's concerns about his safety with a joke about being surrounded by the military and therefore well-protected. But, as it turns out, ...

Defiant and unrepentant, former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic made his first appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Friday, in a preliminary hearing during which he refused to enter a plea to the 11 counts against him — including genocide, extermination, and murder. The once formidable general, stripped of his military uniform and wearing a dark grey suit, had to be supported by two United Nations guards and lowered into the ...

Israel is bracing for more Arab Spring showers this Sunday, as Palestinians plan to mark the June 5 anniversary of the 1967 war with a new round of protests. That war left Israel occupying East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza , which could be the focus of Sunday's actions. Just two weeks ago, on May 15, "Nakba Day' demonstrations saw Palestinian refugees trying to breach Israel's borders in protest against the confiscation of their families' homes ...

"What if we offered a prayer for the soul of bin Laden?" The question was tossed into the meeting of the February 20 Movement like a hand grenade. But the young men and women gathered in the Moroccan Labor Union building in Rabat didn't duck for cover. Instead, they angrily challenged the questioner, a bearded, middle-aged man representing the Islamist prisoners who have joined from behind the bars with the secular youth movement calling for greater freedoms. "Are you out ...

How easy is it to buy illegal drugs on the Internet? Pretty darn easy, according to a new study by the United Nation's International Narcotics Control Board. The report, issued Wednesday, warns that drug traffickers are finding myriad ways to conduct their illegal transactions in cyberspace — leaving law enforcement officers struggling to keep up. The INCB study details the ways traffickers communicate with each other and with their clients, often commandeering unrelated chat rooms to set up deals, ...

For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA's claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: "During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails "? If we hadn't spent tens of billions of ...