The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad doesn't make threats lightly. And as they confronted the uprising in the town of Jisr al-Shughour, government security forces were blunt, according to the medical staff in area's small hospitals and the local Red Crescent outpost there. Saving a wounded protester's life could cost them their own. As a result, private medical clinics closed and doctors in the northern Syrian town's public hospital fled. Of 200 Red Crescent volunteers, only ...

In the future of Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report, televisions and computers have been replaced by transparent screens on which life-size images appear to be floating in thin air. Watching Tom Cruise operate this fictional technology, David Lauren, Vice President of Ralph Lauren, was inspired to develop similar screens, but with a retail spin — his version would be implanted behind a store's glass window and would be touch sensitive, allowing window shoppers to interactively browse through ...

The echoes of the cries of joy could be heard throughout the Yemeni capital on Sunday morning. As news of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's departure for what was termed as "medical treatment" in Saudi Arabia finally made its way to the stage at Sana'a's Change Square, thousands of protesters roared with complete jubilation. "The people have brought down the regime," they chanted in unison, slaughtering cows to feast on and spraying confetti into the thin mountain air ...

Judging by the front pages of Persian language newspapers neatly laid out at every Tehran newsstand, political scandal is in the air. President Ahmadinejad's closest aides, including right-hand man Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, are being accused of embezzlement, cronyism, collaboration with opposition forces, and even pagan rituals thrown in for shock value. Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, recently re-elected by a wide margin to his position by fellow members, asserted in public, "I wish for a strong Parliament" — ...

On paper, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for United Nations ambassador has much in common with another boundary-breaking, African-American, Stanford-affiliated, female foreign policy expert with the same surname. But the similarities with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice end there. Susan Rice brings to the U.N. job a career devotion to African affairs and eight years of experience in the Clinton administration. Fast Facts: • Age 44, Rice is married to Canadian journalist Ian Cameron, executive producer of ABC's This Week ...

As twilight falls over Mexico City's Buenavista neighborhood, the traditional night shift begins. A woman in suspenders and a pink dress takes up right outside the doors of an American-owned bank. Across the street, two girls in miniskirts entice clients at the entrance of a subway station. A block down, a group of transvestites and transsexuals bare their wares outside a convenience store. Quickly, the streets fill with hundreds of sex workers, while their clients lurk discreetly ...

Retired Major General Joseph McChristian looked straight at the jury in a Manhattan federal courtroom last week, recalling a day in May 1967. He had brought to General William Westmoreland a carefully researched proposal to virtually double the official estimate of enemy troops in Viet Nam. "I stood in front of his desk, and I handed it to him," McChristian said. "I gave him a little bit of background on what it was. He read it. He looked up at ...

Residents of Yemen's capital Sana'a awoke on Tuesday to a dawn chorus of bird song and machine-gun fire. An uneasy truce between rebel tribesmen and loyalist troops had prevailed over the weekend. But now the two sides were back at it, launching shells at each other as windows rattled across the city and plumes of dark smoke rose into the crystal blue sky. Despite four months of mass protests and defections from within his army, party and tribe, ...

Muammar Gaddafi's options for a peaceful exit may have finally run out. For the second time in seven weeks, South African President Jacob Zuma on Monday failed to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his 42-year rule. Gaddafi's refusal to heed the advice of longtime friends in the African Union raises the likelihood that his reign will end either with his indictment by the International Criminal Court in The Hague or with his death in ...

To the untrained ear, Syrian President Bashar Assad's Tuesday offer of amnesty for "all members of political movements" may sound resoundingly generous. But his opponents know that anything sugarcoated offered by the Syrian regime has had a violent and bitter follow-through. Indeed, a look at the fine print makes Assad's beneficence vanish. The new law does not pardon all political prisoners, it only reduces their sentences — replacing death with a life sentence of hard labor, for ...