The morning after Pastor Rick Warren interviewed both major presidential candidates at his evangelical church in Orange County, he delivered a Sunday sermon urging his congregation to judge Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain on how their characters would affect their decisions as leaders.

Ted Koppel's four-part documentary covers old territory on the global effects of China's economic boom. But the cultural upheaval taking place in the communist nation is a revelation.

The Democratic icon is 76, and the median survival rate for patients with his type of brain tumor, an aggressive glioma, is 15 months. The usual treatment involves surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Seven percent of Americans say they or someone in their household decided to tie the knot in the last year so they could receive healthcare benefits, a poll finds.

Neither Elizabeth Edwards, whose cancer is incurable, nor the presumptive Republican presidential nominee would be covered by his policy, she asserts.

If we were visited by aliens from a distant planet, would we fall on our knees and worship them as gods? The difficulty of getting here from even our nearest neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, constitutes a filter through which only beings with a technology so advanced as to be god-like (from our point of view) could pass. The capabilities and powers of our interstellar visitors would seem more magical to us than all the miracles of all the gods that have ever been imagined by priests or theologians, mullahs or rabbis, shamans or witch doctors.

Officials braced for protests as a lawmaker posted on the Internet a controversial video about what he sees as the threat of Islam to Europe. Some Muslims say they expected worse.

Green communities, online and in your 'hood

BILLINGS, Mont. -- Facing a bruising fight over climate change, the coal industry is on the political offensive this election year to ensure that no matter who wins in November, so does coal.

Jon Healey correctly points out that the debate over intellectual-property theft is complex because we are often dealing with "non-real properties." These properties cost nearly nothing to produce, and an infinite number of people can use the same property at the same time. And yet, we still want to treat them as if they were "real" property.