Members of Congress remain divided on whether to rein in the National Security Agency’s broad collection of phone records, with one Democrat saying the Founding Fathers would be “astounded” by the snooping program, while an outspoken New Yorker insisted that the program is fine and could have prevented the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Read MoreBEIRUT—Syrian aircraft pummeled an opposition neighborhood in Aleppo on Sunday, killing at least 32 people in the eighth straight day of intense government bombardment of the rebel-held half of the city.
Read MoreThe U.S. government this week said the head of a human-rights organization working on behalf of Islamist political prisoners was also a financier for al Qaeda. Most of the world knows Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi as a Qatari history professor and human-rights activist. The Swiss-based organization he founded, known as al-Karama from the Arab word…
Read MoreGENEVA — The Syrian government has waged “a campaign of terror” against civilians through a policy of forced disappearances that amounts to a crime against humanity, United Nations investigators said in a report released Thursday.
Read Moreby Anna Borshchevskaya Another recent report –by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) —highlights the rise in foreign fighters in Syria. The study is based on analysis of over 1,500 open sources and concludes that up to 11,000 individuals from 74 countries joined the opposition struggle in Syria. From Western Europe in…
Read MoreWASHINGTON, D.C., December 19— The American Islamic Congress D.C. Center is proud to host an event with Matthew Levitt, who will discuss his latest book, “Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God.” Hezbollah, Lebanon’s “Party of God,” is a multifaceted organization: it is a powerful political party in Lebanon, a Shia Islam religious and…
Read MoreWASHINGTON — A panel of outside advisers urged President Obama on Wednesday to impose major oversight and some restrictions on the National Security Agency, arguing that in the past dozen years its powers had been enhanced at the expense of personal privacy.
Read MoreMonths of bitter sectarian fighting in Syria is deepening the divide between the branches of Islam in Persian Gulf states far from the battlefield, as Sunnis and Shiites wage dueling campaigns to drum up cash and supplies for Syria’s partisans, Western officials and independent experts say.
Read MoreSIDI BOUZID, Tunisia — It was a humble man’s desperate act, but one with far-reaching consequences. Relatively small and subdued crowds of Tunisians rallied Tuesday to mark the third anniversary of the self-immolation of vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi, which set in motion the series of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East that came…
Read MoreOn Monday, a Federal District Court judge ruled that the National Security Agency’s collection and storage of all Americans’ phone records probably violates the Constitution and is an “almost Orwellian” system that “surely…infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.” It’s the first successful legal challenge to NSA surveillance…
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