When Syrian tanks and soldiers poured into the rebellious southern flashpoint city of Dara'a last month, the Twittersphere lit up with wry comments like "Hey army, that's Dara'a, not the Golan!" mocking the fact that the same army shooting its own people hadn't fired a bullet in decades to liberate the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war and still the center of the long-simmering conflict between Israel and Syria. In fact, Damascus has long ...

South Lebanon Sunday witnessed its deadliest day since the month-long Israel-Hizballah 2006 war when 10 Palestinian demonstrators were reported shot dead and another 112 wounded as Israeli troops opened fire on protests along the border fence. The casualties came as a massive crowd of Palestinians gathered at Maroun er Ras, a small hilltop village overlooking the border with Israel, to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when the state of Israel was established. By Sunday night, the militant Lebanese Shi'ite group ...

Not unto glamorous "Holy Russia" but into the drab, mechanized Soviet Union came last week the first Reigning Sovereign to enter Moscow since the days of Tsar Nicholas the Last. The visiting potentate was His Majesty, King Amanullah of Afghanistan, styled by his Moslem subjects, "The Peace of God." Accompanied by his Queen, Thuraya, "The Starry One," he is now completing a tour of the Occident which has taken him on state visits to Rome, Paris, Berlin, London and ...

The women and children waited until early morning of April 28 and then they fled in their hundreds. Most of the Syrians walked the few short kilometers from their hometown of Tall Kalakh, a cluster of low-slung cream-colored homes scattered on a gently sloping hill, toward the sleepy Lebanese village of Al-Boqia'a just across the river that demarcates the border, a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Some carried whatever they could fit into a few plastic bags, ...

BALDEMAR VELASQUEZ President, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO The key problem is making felons out of everyone who is here without documents. What people miss is that includes 1.6 million children. Who thinks of this crazy stuff? These measures are just horrendous. We've taken enough bad-mouthing from these talking heads on radio and TV. If this House bill passed, I would be a criminal. And I wouldn't stop what I'm doing, so I'd be one of the first people arrested. ...

For the past six weeks, Pakistan has echoed with ferocious opposition to the CIA's covert drones program that targets al-Qaeda and Taliban militants hiding in the tribal areas along the Afghan border. Ever since Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani issued a rare and fiercely worded condemnation of a March 17 drone strike, his criticism of the U.S. has been repeated by the prime minister, opposition politicians, and media commentators alike. And in that time, the ...

Men in border-patrol caps tackle a young Mexican to the ground amid jagged rocks and cacti. "You need papers to come to this country. This is not a game!" shouts one agent as he yanks the man's arms behind his back, almost tearing them from his shoulders. It looks like a scene on the U.S. border that would get human rights groups yelling. But actually, it is a game, and it takes place in the mountains of ...

In the early hours of Friday, April 8, while Washington and the media focused on a possible government shutdown, the Iraqi army assaulted a camp of Iranian civilians, called Camp Ashraf, murdering at least 28 residents and wounding hundreds more. Though the Iraqi government has claimed that only three people were killed and describes the events as an attempt to reclaim farmland, a U.N. inspection team found 28 bodies, including those of women, and determined that most ...

For years, Iraq's increasingly pro-Iranian government has threatened to evict the 3,400 Iranian members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq , a fiercely anti-Tehran group, from its sprawling former military base at Camp Ashraf, some 40 miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and 50 miles from the Iranian border. Despite the heated rhetoric, however, Baghdad has never fully articulated how it will uproot the exiles — who refuse to leave their decades-old enclave — beyond saying it ...

On March 3, Sonam Tshering, a Buddhist monk, was sentenced to three years in prison in the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. His crime? Trying to smuggle $2.50 worth of chewing tobacco into Bhutan from India. In January, Bhutanese police caught the 24-year-old carrying 48 packets of tobacco while traveling from an Indian border town back home. Tshering was detained for more than a month, and, after a week-long trial, found guilty by a district court of violating ...