The capital of Syria has the illusion of calm. But do not trust appearances. In fact, trust is a very precious commodity in Damascus nowadays. The city, according to residents, is swarming with secret police. Nobody dares speak out against the government. In central districts of the capital, the number of street peddlers seem to have quadrupled. The scuttlebutt is that the extra sales force are being employed by the government to spy on and even beat ...

Iran's judiciary has postponed the blinding of a man as punishment for throwing acid in the face of a young woman in 2004, after she rejected his offer of marriage. The delay came in the face of mounting outcry both inside Iran and in the West over the sentencing, which is permissible under qesas, a principle of Islamic law allowing victims analogous retribution for violent crimes. The case has stirred passionate interest in Iran since 2004, when Majid ...

Happily married for 10 years, Richard Sharrard, a dance instructor, and Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and writer, blend in nicely enough with their neighbors in the middle-class community of Long Beach, Calif. But the couple's life-style is far from ordinary: Sharrard and Tessina are openly and unapologetically bisexual. During their unusually flexible marriage, Sharrard has enjoyed liaisons with half a dozen men, while Tessina has taken two female lovers. "It's the best of both worlds," declares Sharrard, who thinks nothing ...

In May, David Steward, a former president of TV Guide, and his partner Pierre Friedrichs, a caterer, hosted an uncomfortably crowded cocktail party at their Manhattan apartment. It was a typical gay fund raiser--there were lemony vodka drinks with mint sprigs; there were gift bags with Calvin Klein sunglasses; Friedrichs prepared little blackened-tuna-with-mango-chutney hors d'oeuvres that were served by uniformed waiters. Billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. was there; David Mixner, a gay activist and longtime friend of Bill Clinton's, was ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading French daily Le Monde. Despite the end of the 48-year state of emergency, signed this week by President Bashar al-Assad, protests were continuing Friday. It is just one more outward sign of the sinking faith in the regime's durability. Decrees are signed, but "security forces don't obey ...

On March 17, Ibrahim Shareef, the head of the anti-government activist movement Waad, was snatched from his home at gunpoint by what his family describes as Bahraini security forces. Thrown into a waiting sport utility vehicle, he was driven off into the night. Today he's still missing, whereabouts unknown. As the island kingdom's Sunni regime continues to crack down on anti-government activists and prominent Shi'ites, Shareef and more than 460 others are believed to be in government custody. ...

Mahmood Al Yousif is so influential in Bahrain that he's widely known as the "Blogfather." Neither publicly pro- or anti-government, the moderator of the popular blog "Mahmood's Den" is the rare public figure who actively discourages the Sunni-Shia tension that has plagued the tiny Gulf Kingdom for decades. But on Tuesday morning, Al Yousif apparently was dealt the same fate meted out to many prominent activist. In a pre-dawn raid, police seized the popular moderator of the ...

The uprisings sweeping the Arab world haven't only toppled dictatorships. Gone, too, are the old stereotypes of Arab women as passive, voiceless victims. Over the past few months, the world has seen them marching in Tunisia, shouting slogans in Bahrain and Yemen, braving tear gas in Egypt, and blogging and strategizing in cyberspace. Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, became known as "The Leader of the Revolution" after she posted an online video call to arms, telling young ...

When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office. That tacit policy has now ...

A 22-year-old woman whose claims that she was abused in a trailer in rural West Virginia in 2007 helped send six people to prison now says she made up the story, her lawyer said Wednesday. "She is recanting her entire story," attorney Byron Potts told reporters in Columbus, Ohio, about his client, Megan Williams, who moved there after the incident. "She says it did not happen. She fabricated it." He added, "She wanted to get back at her boyfriend. She ...