Entries for May 29, 2007

Golf great Tiger Woods jetted into Washington today to promote his upcoming AT&T National Invitational tournament as a potentially "historic" event meant to honor service members and their families. The tourney, to be held through the week of Independence Day at suburban Maryland's Congressional Country Club, promises to be a classic Washington event, mixing celebrities and politicians with athletes and thousands of military personnel, who can attend for free.

Woods's education foundation will be the beneficiary. The patriotic emphasis is unusually pointed for a professional sporting event, but Woods did not hesitate to play it up big at a news conference.

The popular social networking website Facebook.com unveiled a major new initiative to boost its traffic and membership last weekend with the "Applications" feature, in which members can add functionality to their profiles, like music and movie players, that are programmed and offered by third parties.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's campaign hit the ground running, offering a feed of news and video that Obama's supporters can add to their page. As of 4 p.m. today, 6,778 people had signed up.

Obama is the only candidate to have taken advantage of this new functionality so far, but more are sure to come as the other catch on. The Illinois senator had a major advantage on this front in the form of staffer Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook who still servers as a consultant for the site. The actual coding for the feature was done by two volunteers, Hughes told News Desk today.

"We've seen our traffic steadily increase daily" since the function launched, Hughes said. "We're all pretty happy with how it's been doing."

While the increased visibility doesn't hurt, Hughes said an equally important aspect in leveraging social networks for political support is the ability to give supporters online tools to promote the candidate more easily.

First up: Reminding people which of their friends live in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other states where they could use a little nudging to get out and vote.

--Chris Wilson

Of the more than 800,000 individuals whom the Department of Homeland Security charged in the immigration courts in the past three years, only 12 have been accused of terrorism-related crimes, according to a new report out today from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

An additional 114 cases were categorized as "national security" cases, according to TRAC's analysis of millions of records, many obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

President Bush's announcement today that the United States will impose new economic sanctions on Sudan comes as welcome news to the large and growing chorus of activists who have repeatedly called for U.S. intervention in the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

For more on what is happening in Darfur, what can be done to stem the killing, and how domestic activism has shaped the international response to the genocide, see the Q&A with John Prendergast in this week's issue of U.S.News & World Report, available here on usnews.com.

This morning's top stories:

• President Bush will announce new economic sanctions today against the Sudanese government in an effort to force its hand in putting an end to the bloodshed in Darfur.
• The Iranian government has formally charged an Iranian-American academic who was arrested during a visit to Iran early this month with endangering Iran's national security. Haleh Esfandiari's arrest has been widely condemned in the United States.
• The prominent antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, wrote in a column on the liberal blog Daily Kos yesterday that she is retiring from the movement out of disillusionment and because of poor health.
• A hotel in Australia that markets itself to gay men has won the right to limit the number of guests who are heterosexuals or lesbians in an effort to create a comfortable environment.