editorials and opinion

The five Guantanamo detainees who are about to be charged with the 9/11 murders had planned on being tried by military commissions because, as they see themselves, they are soldiers, not criminals.

The recent discovery of water on the moon could provide us with something that's been in short supply since the first lunar landing in 1969: A reason to go back.

Apparently the water doesn't amount to very much -- one estimate suggests that a ton of lunar rock from the right place might yield 32 ounces of water, which means the moon is still a very, very dry environment.

Americans are attending college in record numbers. According to a Pew Research Center study, 11.3 million Americans ages 18 to 24 attended college in 2008, continuing an upward trend that began 30 years ago.

WASHINGTON - The real tragedy in the Ft. Hood massacre is that like the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it could have been prevented with even the slightest cooperation among government agencies that had reason to suspect things were not right with Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

Amid the maze of apartment buildings that comprised my childhood neighborhood you could walk one block south of where I lived, cross the street and head about 100 feet east to spend time with one of the community's most colorful and unusual residents -- a tree.

The European Union can't be accused of being dazzled by celebrity and star power in its choices for its first president and first foreign minister under the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty.

A group of Islamic nations, led by Algeria and Pakistan, is lobbying to bring before the U.N. General Assembly a proposed treaty banning mockery of religion, according to the Associated Press. The pact would, in effect, be a global anti-blasphemy treaty and an obvious and alarming threat to freedom of expression.

When Mac Taylor, the California Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared this week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised.

At a time when our country is sick, it shouldn't surprise that one our sickest places is our nation's capital.

The poverty rate of Washington, DC, almost 20 percent, is one of the highest in the nation. Its child poverty rate is the nation's highest..

DC's public school system, with a graduation rate of less than 50 percent, is one of the worst in the country.

The government-funded -- but independent -- U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, made up of 16 physicians and public-health experts, did what it was supposed to, and indeed should be done routinely under any health-care-reform plan, a periodic examination and re-evaluation of current medical practice.