Daily News Channel
The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been pursuing a divide-and-conquer strategy against dissent, using specific carrots-and-sticks to appease and repress the country’s complicated collection of tribal, ethnic and religious interests.
Logging onto Facebook as a resident in the Golan Heights, should you enter Syria or Israel as your home country? Decades of war and occupation have not provided an answer to that question — but the social networking Web site now permits both options, sparking fears about an anti-Facebook cyber-war
The New Jersey officials and their associates charged in a federal probe of public corruption exchanged hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in parking lots, restaurants, boiler rooms and bathrooms, an acting U.S. attorney said Thursday.
A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports.
The United States and Syria found a lot of "common ground" on which to cooperate in the Middle East, the State Department’s top Middle East official said after talks in Damascus. But envoy Jeffrey Feltman on Saturday warned to “keep expectations in check” as Washington and Damascus re-engage after several years of strained relations.
For a disputed border crossing between two warring nations, the snowy hillside town of Majdal Shams is pretty quiet. There have been no major battles in the Golan Heights since the 1973 October War, when the Syrian army nearly recaptured the town from Israel, which had occupied the territory in the 1967 war. Instead of hostile fire, all that passes across the border these days are apple harvests and the occasional bride.
The U.S. government will dispatch two officials to the Syrian capital to explore Washington’s relationship with Damascus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Tuesday. “There are a number of issues that we have between Syria and the United States, as well as the larger regional issues that Syria obviously poses,” she said.
The U.N. nuclear agency said it found traces of uranium from samples retrieved at a Syrian site suspected to be the location of a nuclear site, according to a report posted Thursday on the Institute for Science and International Security Web site. The site was bombed by Israeli aircraft in September 2007, and the report said Syria says the missiles that destroyed the building at the site were the source of the uranium particles.