Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Shi'ite Hizballah, vowed Saturday that members of his organization indicted last week for assassinating a former Lebanese prime minister would never be turned over to an international tribunal. In a 75-minute televised address in Beirut, Nasrallah attacked the credibility of the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon, using video footage to back his claims that it is biased against Hizballah and serving the interests of the United States and Israel. "We know ...

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 ...

Location, in real estate and sometimes in politics, is everything. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad lives in a very different geopolitical neighborhood from his erstwhile, but now-ousted counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the teetering leaders of Libya and Yemen. It's a tumultuous patch of the Middle East, populated by an uneasy mix of religious and ethnic groups, frequently in turmoil. Fear of the chaos and instability his ouster might unleash is Assad's greatest advantage as ...

When the main office of Lebanon's Intra Bank reopened last month to pay off holders of small savings accounts, hopes rose that the country's biggest bank might soon be out of the crisis that had shuttered it and slowed much of the country's business since October. Last week Intra received a new setback, this time from the courts. Hoping to stave off liquidation and gain time to arrange new financing, Intra had asked Lebanon's Commercial Court for a three-year grace ...

A Pennsylvania soccer mom was chatting with a friend via webcam when she was shot to death by her husband, who then went upstairs and shot himself, police said Friday. Meleanie Hain, 31, made national headlines last year as the mother who carried a loaded, holstered handgun to her 5-year-old daughter's soccer game. She was found dead in her Lebanon, Pennsylvania, home along with her husband, Scott Hain, 33, on Wednesday evening, Lebanon police said. Hain was ...

Israel's military fired at least a dozen artillery shells into southern Lebanon on Friday shortly after a rocket attack on northern Israel, according to the Israeli military and a Lebanese army official.

The man charged with forming a government in Lebanon said Thursday he would not do so after the opposition rejected his proposed Cabinet. Saad Hariri, the head of the pro-Western "March 14 coalition," declared Thursday he was stepping down as prime minister-designate, a role he got after his party won the largest share of the vote in elections in June. He presented a slate of proposed ministers earlier in the week, but Hezbollah and the group led by Maronite Christian ...

Jewish groups and the Argentine government condemned Friday the nomination of a man accused in the 1994 terrorist bombing of a Jewish center to serve as Iran's defense minister. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nominated Ahmad Vahidi to fill the cabinet position on Wednesday, which drew a rebuke from Jewish leaders in Buenos Aires, including one from the Delegation of Israeli-Argentine Associations, or DAIA. "The decision adopted by the Iranian president, who systematically denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction ...

On paper, perhaps, Congressman Joe Sestak seems to be on a quixotic mission — to unseat Arlen Specter, a 30-year incumbent Senator who is arguably the most successful politician in Pennsylvania history. And he's got to do it all in nine months with less money than Specter, little name recognition outside his district in the Philadelphia suburbs and the near unanimous disapproval of the state's powerful Democratic establishment. Is he crazy Surprisingly, many of the state's veteran political observers and ...