Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi held on Sunday officials responsible for the deadly bombings that have recently rocked Beirut’s southern suburbs and the northern city of Tripoli. “Political parties don’t value the heavy price payed by innocent citizens in the three bombings,” al-Rahi said in his sermon at his summer residence in Diman. Politicians “haven’t yet […]

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – The International Committee of the Red Cross also warned of Syria’s rich cultural heritage being destroyed and archaeological sites looted. An independent humanitarian agency, the ICRC said it was horrified over the news of poison gas attack on August 21 that left hundreds dead. The U.S. says that attack was carried out by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The ICRC has urged warring parties in Syria’s two-year civil war to respect the absolute ban on chemical weapons use under international law.

The head of the ICRC’s delegation in Syria, Magne Barth says military action would "likely trigger more displacement and add to humanitarian needs, which are already immense."  Some two million people have already fled Syria. One million of these are children, many younger than five years of age. Human rights groups estimate that 100,000 people have been killed since the war began.

The countryside around Damascus, eastern Aleppo and Deir Ezzor province are the areas that have been the hardest hit in the ongoing civil war. These areas are also suffering from breakdowns of basic services such as water, electricity and garbage collection, the ICRC said in a statement.  "In large parts of rural Damascus for example, people are dying because they lack medical supplies and because there are not enough medical personnel to attend to them," Barth says. "They also go hungry because aid can’t get through to them on a regular basis."

The 11-year-old son of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is suspected of posting a diatribe on Facebook that calls American soldiers "cowards with new technology" and dared the U.S. to attack, Liam Stack of The New York Times reports.

Stack writes that if the post is a hoax, "it is either a highly elaborate one involving dozens of fake accounts purporting to belong to the children of other regime insiders, or a forgery so impressive that some of those children themselves — including the boy’s cousins — have been fooled."

March 14 sources told NOW on Wednesday that President Michel Suleiman has proposed for the upcoming cabinet to include Hezbollah representatives without providing them with veto-power. According to the sources, Suleiman’s proposal would offer eight ministries to the March 14 alliance, eight to the March 8, including Hezbollah representatives, and eight to representatives of the […]

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s failure to win parliamentary approval for military strikes against Syria complicates a decision by U.S. President Barack Obama on how to hold the Syrian government accountable for an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians. With the House of Commons rejection of a plan from Cameron for use of military force, […]

With all eyes on Syria, ABC News has announced plans to reopen a bureau in Beirut, Lebanon. The network’s first bureau there was opened in 1968 by Peter Jennings and closed in the 1990s. “Beirut was a city Peter Jennings made his own. So it’s fitting – and timely – that ABC News is returning […]

    by Michael Kelly – Business Insider – There are three primary reasons, as illustrated by this report by Krishnadev Calamur of NPR.  1) Strategic: Syria’s port of Tartus hosts the only remaining international military base outside of the former Soviet Union. 2) Financial: As of June 2012, Russia’s economic interests in Syria total approximately $20 billion, about […]

ALEPPO, Syria — Aleppo is basically “Little Syria,” a melting pot, representative of the diverse ethnic and religious groups that make up the nation. Christians in Aleppo have tended to live together in close-knit communities in neighborhoods usually clustered around churches.  It would be very accurate to describe some areas of Aleppo as “Christian,” although […]

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Monday reiterated his call for political parties to close ranks in the wake of the deadly bombings that rocked Tripoli and Dahieh. After offering condolences at the headquarters of the Higher Islamic Shiite Council on Dahieh’s outskirts over the victims of the Rweiss blast, al-Rahi said "what happened on August […]

The Obama administration was inching closer to a decision on how and whether to strike Syria, after Secretary of State John Kerry and the White House both declared that the evidence showing chemical weapons were used in a deadly attack last week is "undeniable." "What is before us today is real, and it is compelling," […]