If human rights workers and journalists are ever allowed into the besieged southern Syrian city of Dara'a near the Jordanian border, what horrors will they find? Syrians always had good reason to avoid rebelling against their authoritarian regime, ignoring early calls to join the Arab Spring. The stakes — as the world can now see through the spotty news from social media and smuggled amateur video — were always going to be extremely high. On Monday, the government ...

A new generation of historians finds new meanings in the past The American . . . seems to bear lightly the sorrowful burden of human knowledge. In a word, he is young . . .The American has never yet had to face the trials of Job. —George Santayana, 1920 The Fourth of July speech today is seldom the shapely purple cloud of bombast that it once was. That style is nearly extinct. The old eagle-screaming rhapsody, the Everlasting Yea, ...

Death and taxes are always with us, and so are arguments about whether nations ever have the right or duty to intervene in the affairs of others. The case for "humanitarian intervention," under a variety of names, has been asserted at least since the great powers threw their weight behind Greece's struggle for independence in the 1820s, but in its modern form was developed during the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, when it appeared to many that armed force was ...

Mention the term "euthanasia," and the first thing most people think of is the epic assisted suicide battle of the 1990s starring Jack "Doctor Death" Kevorkian. But the issue of whether human beings — and more pointedly, doctors — have the right to help others die has been in the public discourse since before the birth of Christ. The Hippocratic Oath, which scholars estimate was written in the fourth century B.C., includes the unambiguous statement: I will ...

Oral sex can get most men's attention. The topic becomes considerably more relevant, however, when coupled with a new study linking the human papillomavirus to an increased risk of a kind of oral cancer more often seen in men. The study, which appears in this week's New England Journal of Medicine , shows that men and women who reported having six or more oral-sex partners during their lifetime had a nearly ninefold increased risk of ...

The human rights group Amnesty International is calling on Nigeria to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir if he attends an African Union Summit there on Thursday.

A new cell phone application allows users to carry out a virtual dissection of a human body. The iPhone app, called "Anatomy Lab," has been developed by researchers from the University of Utah and provides images of a real human cadaver. Utah professor Mark Nielsen told CNN that the application is aimed at medical and anatomy students who might not have the opportunity to dissect a real human body, but it's also proving a hit with medical practitioners. "A ...

"This better be good." It was 5:45 a.m. and like many West Wing staffers on Friday, Deputy White House Spokesman Bill Burton had been awoken by a phone call, in this case from an ABC News correspondent, Yunji De Nies, who told Burton that President Obama had just won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. "That is good," quipped Burton. A few minutes later, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called the President to wake him up with the news, which ...

When President Barack Obama came to Cairo in June and made his address to the Muslim world, reaction in Egypt was wildly positive. Many Egyptians had fallen in love with the new young American president with an Arabic middle name. Some even picked up the "Yes we can" slogan. His appeal was fueled by an almost unanimous dislike for his predecessor, George W. Bush, widely perceived in the region as a Christian fundamentalist leading an anti-Muslim crusade. But that was ...

The surprise decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize elicited swift reaction Friday, with some hailing the choice and others expressing astonishment and skepticism. Praise came from Afghanistan's president, the Israeli defense minister and even a senior official from Hamas -- the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza. Yet an Egyptian human rights activist said he was "shocked" that Obama won. And the Internet hummed with a range of views. Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- whose ...