The five Syrians pulled from their homes by secret police on the same night last year were not insurgents, spies or suspected of being disloyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Instead, they were targets in a desperate new phase of Assad’s battle to survive: the hunt for...

 The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented at least 228 cases of arbitrary arrests/ detentions in November, including 18 children and two women, noting that Syrian regime forces carried out widespread arrest campaigns, while the US-backed Kurdish forces continue to kidnap children...

 Lebanon’s information minister resigned Friday, a move many hope could open the way for easing an unprecedented diplomatic row with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab nations that has compounded the small country’s multiple crises. George Kordahi, the minister and a prominent former...

NEW YORK (AP) — Jonas Poher Rasmussen was 15 when a boy his same age arrived alone in his small Danish town. “He arrived all by himself and stayed with a family just around the corner from where I lived,” says Rasmussen. “We met at the bus stop every morning going to high school and...