Everybody Missed Fidel Castro's April Fool's Joke
In today's tour of state-run propaganda, Fidel Castro makes an April Fool's joke, China's media champions censorship, and a Syrian radio host defects from the country.
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Russia, one of the few remaining friends of Bashar al-Assad's regime, just sent the Syrian government some advanced antiship missiles.
In today's tour of state-run propaganda, Fidel Castro makes an April Fool's joke, China's media champions censorship, and a Syrian radio host defects from the country.
Bashar al-Assad agreed on Monday to withdraw his troops from Syrian cities by April 10, but nobody really thought he'd do it until, surprisingly, they actually started withdrawing.
U.S. officials are calling it "humanitarian support," but a new push to directly intervene in the fighting in Syria sounds a lot like the opening of a proxy war.
An international coalition gathered in Istanbul to address the situation in Syria will offer millions of dollars in aid and communications equipment to help overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
Neighbor-on-neighbor violence between Sunnis and Shiites is breaking out across Syria, according to reports, and some fear sectarian strife could spread beyond the country's borders.
In today's tour of state-run propaganda, Mali goes off air, Iranian media betrays its favorite U.S. presidential candidate, North Korea's Andy Warhol is profiled by CNN and propaganda gets out of control in the Middle East.
The U.N. says Syria has agreed to Kofi Annan's plan to end the violent crackdown in its country, at the same as reports that government troops have entered Lebanon to attack rebel fighters.
The EU announced on Friday that Asma al-Assad will have her assets frozen and her travel banned along with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's mother, sister, and sister-in-law, which perhaps puts an end to Mrs. al-Assad's tacky (and expensive) online shopping sprees.
Lebanese farmers were likely confused Wednesday evening when they noticed that Syrian heavy artillery guns were firing shells onto their land.
Residential neighborhoods in the suburbs of Damascus are now the scene of violent clashes between government forces and rebels move closer to the Syria capital.
Much of the news out of Syria has been the cruelty of Bashar al-Assad's forces in their attacks against his own people, but now, thanks in part to YouTube videos, Human Rights Watch has found out that opposition forces are also capable of torture and executions of their own.
A fire-war and heavy fighting has broken out in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Monday--something that President Bashar al Assad had hoped to avoid.
As the uprising in Syria enters its second year, demonstrators on both sides of the conflict came out (some more willingly than others) to note the important date.
Now that we know way too much about Bashar al-Assad's personal life, we need to extend a warning so that his regime doesn't end up knowing too much about yours.
Syrian opposition activists quietly watched President Bashar al-Assad trade crisis-management tips with Iran and order Right Said Fred songs from iTunes as they secretly accessed his email until Assad shut down his account after a totally separate hack by Anonymous.
While the U.N. ups its casualty count yesterday in the Syrian conflict to 8,000, we learn today of more gruesome ways Bashar al-Assad is targeting fleeing refugees.
The fighting in Syria has taken an especially brutal turn as some 47 people, all women and children, have been reported killed in a massacre in the opposition stronghold of Homs, just as the U.N. envoy Kofi Annan said negotiations were on the "right track" to stop the slaughter.
Talks between the former U.N. secretary general and the president of Syria have so far proved fruitless, while an Arab League summit on the matter elicits a war of words between Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Four brigadier generals from the Syria army have left the country and pledged their support to the rebel army fighting against president Bashar al-Assad.
U.S. officials are searching hard for signs that the inner circle of Bashar Al-Assad may be fracturing, as at least one high ranking minister has apparently defected to opposition.
On the heels of U.N. Humanitarian Chief Valerie Amos's visit, the Syrian Red Crescent entered the devastated Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs on Wednesday.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday that military action was an option in dealing with Syria, but he and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey sounded really reluctant about it in their testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The situation in the battered Syrian region of Baba Amr is either a massacre or a massive cleanup effort, depending on whom you ask about it, which is why all eyes are on United Nations Humanitarian Chief Valerie Amos as she visits to Homs Wednesday.
It's been a big week of news for Russia, Iran, and Syria, which means their propaganda mills have been working overtime.
House Speaker John Boehner split with his fellow Republican John McCain in saying military action in Syria was "premature," a position similar to the one he took on Libya last year but that this time puts him on the same side of the debate as President Barack Obama.
Sen. John McCain will call on a repeat performance of the kind of military operation that dislodged Muammar Qaddafi from Libya in Syria, asking the U.S. military to begin air strikes to protect Syrian opposition forces.
Refugees who managed to escape the ruined city of Homs say Syrian troops are kidnapping and executing unarmed civilians attempting to escape from the war-ravaged area.
A photojournalist escapes from Homs with a leg full of shrapnel and horrific tales of indiscriminate murder. The head of the U.N. calls the reports coming out of the country "grisly."
Over a week after journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were killed by government shelling in Syria, their bodies are now in the hands of the Red Cross and en route out of the country despite an otherwise frustrating day for the humanitarian aid group.
Despite securing government approval, the Red Cross' seven-truck convoy of food and medical has been stopped from delivering aid, demonstrating again that no one should expect Syrian forces and President Bashar al-Assad to keep their word.
A bleak series of reports on retreating rebel forces in Syria depict a movement that's out-gunned, out-maneuvered and out of basic food and medical supplies.
Bluffing, the dangers of letting Iran play the victim, and the lack of buddy-buddy time with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu--it's all in The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with President Obama.
The International Red Cross and the Syrian Red Crescent have sent a seven-truck convoy of food and medical supplies to the city of Homs after rebel fighter drew from the city under siege.
The entire United Nations Security Council is doing something about the increasingly horrific situation in Syria.
The British foreign secretary announced today that the UK has closed its embassy in Syria and has sent home its entire diplomatic staff.
The United Nations is working on a new Security Council resolution designed to win support from China and Russia by focusing on the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
All kinds of things portend escalating war in Syria, such as the country's envoy storming out of a U.N. meeting on the country's crisis, but the quiet deposit of Syrian seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault carries a special kind of apocalyptic prediction.
Though there are multiple reports that journalists Paul Conroy and Elizabeth Bouvier have been safely removed from Syria, we're all just waiting for confirming YouTube documentation.
Calls for increased sanctions, including those targeting individual members of the Syrian leadership, have done nothing to deter the government's quest to crush opposition activists through increasingly violent means.
Mother Jones has published an in-depth look at a 718-page document supposedly leaked from intelligence forces inside the Bashar al Assad's regime that they're calling the "Syria hit list."
Stopping themselves short of 100 percent, Syrian television reports that 89.4 percent of Syrians approved the new constitution proposed by President Bashar al-Assad, and that 57.4 percent of the population turned up to vote.
As its citizens continue to be killed by their own military, the polls in Syria have opened today on a sham referendum that could keep President Bashar al-Assad in power until 2028.
After the International Red Cross opened up talks with the Syrian government, aid workers started to evacuate sick or wounded women and children from Homs on Friday.
There's nothing like a vague threat to show you mean business.
Wednesday night's GOP debate saw a lot of tough talk when it came to intervening in Syria, but a new report by the United States Central Command gives an ominous view of what destabilizing the Assad regime could do.
In a six and a half minute video posted to YouTube Thursday, Edith Bouvier, a journalist at Le Figaro, is pleading with the French government for her evacuation after she was hurt in the same shelling attacks that killed Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik.
It's sort of exciting that the United Nations has a secret list of Syrian officials that it may probe for war crimes in the International Criminal Court, but even they admit that the list (just like their resolution against Syrian violence) is worthless at the moment.
Following the deaths of Marie Colvin and photojournalist Remi Ochlik, there are new troubling reports that Syrian forces targeted journalists and even thought up pre-planned excuses for their deaths.
Two Western journalists — one French and one American — have reportedly been killed by military shelling in the besieged Syria city of Homs.
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