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But four days ago, Turkey abruptly announced it was no longer abiding by the deal. The decision followed the death of 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria’s Idlib, the last remaining rebel bastion where Turkish-backed rebel groups and Turkish armed forces are fighting a major battle against the Russian-backed Syrian army.

The haunting beauty of Syria's so-called Dead Cities, once seen, is never forgotten. Here on the wild and magical hills of the north-west nestles the world's richest repository of 4th, 5th and 6th Century churches - over 2,000, spread among hundreds of early Byzantine settlements.

Together, they represent the transition from Roman paganism to the zeal of early Christianity, providing unique evidence in stone of the influence of Syrian styles on the subsequent evolution of European Romanesque and Gothic religious architecture.

Ironically, Syria's tourism ministry rebranded the ruins The Forgotten Cities before the war, imagining high-end walking tours for romantically-minded visitors.

The U.S. spy agency was, in effect, supplying rigged communications gear to some of South America’s most brutal regimes and, as a result, in unique position to know the extent of their atrocities.

What the documents don’t show is any substantial effort by U.S. spy agencies, or senior officials privy to the intelligence, to expose or stop human rights violations unfolding in their view.

The countries’ initial target was a multinational rebel group operating in the southern part of the continent. But over time the operation morphed into a sprawling campaign involving mass killings in South America and assassinations of alleged rebel leaders and political exiles in Europe and the United States.

Suburbs Rebel Against Trump, Threatening Republicans in Congress

The American suburbs appear to be in revolt against President Trump after a muscular coalition of college-educated voters and racial and ethnic minorities dealt the Republican Party a thumping rejection on Tuesday and propelled a diverse class of Democrats into office.

voters shunned Republicans up and down the ballot in off-year elections

In July 1793, the revolution was at its lowest ebb. Enemy forces were advancing over French soil, British ships hovered near French ports hoping to link up with rebels, the Vendée had become a region of open rebellion, and Federalist revolts were frequent.

thousands of provincial rebels operating in the capital ready to strike down the leaders of the revolution in droves.

Meanwhile, power struggles between sansculottes and their enemies had begun to erupt in many sections of Paris. The whole country was unfolding into a civil war. 

Like their predecessors did at Columbine in 1999 and Aurora in 2012, some of Colorado’s top elected officials gathered Tuesday to mourn victims of a mass shooting.

Ten people, including one Boulder police officer, were killed at King Soopers in the city Monday. It’s not clear exactly how many witnesses, now survivors, were in the store, though video footage showed at least a dozen being escorted out.They now join the thousands of people that have survived shootings at schools and other public places in the Denver metro since Columbine. More than 1,800 students attended Columbine in 1999, plus staff. Thousands more, collectively, were at other such shootings, like Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Deer Creek Middle School in 2010, a movie theater in Aurora in 2012, a Walmart in Thornton in 2017, and STEM School in Highlands Ranch in 2019. 

A 2019 Denver Post analysis found that the Denver metro has the third-most mass shootings, per capita, of the country’s largest metro areas since 1999. Survivors and experts say there’s a cumulative effect to so many shootings: the circle of survivors, who may face a lifetime of recovery, grows larger with each incident. 

The real starting point, however, is the institutional collapse of the right. Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics.

But over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here, but so too was then-Speaker John Boehner’s inability to sell his members on the budget bargain he’d negotiated with President Barack Obama, followed by his refusal to allow so much as a vote in the House on the 2013 immigration bil

And it’s impossible to overstate the damage that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of Merrick Garland, followed by his swift action to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did to the belief among Senate Democrats that McConnell was in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor. They gave up on him completely.

Fresh evidence shows that military hardware that was supplied to US allies has been distributed in contravention of arms deals to militia groups, including UAE-backed separatists. They are now using it to fight the Saudi-supported forces of the internationally recognized government, who are also armed with US weapons.

These new findings follow an exclusive investigation by CNN in February which traced US-made equipment that was sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The weapons were being passed to non-state fighters on the ground in Yemen, including al Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, the report found, in violation of arms sales law.

Saudi Arabia has led a coalition, in close partnership with the UAE and including various militia groups, to fight Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2015. But, in a clear break with its Saudi partners, the UAE said in July that it was reducing its forces in the country, and fighting escalated between separatists and government forces on the ground in August. The UAE has since thrown its support behind the separatist movement.

We're in the Brexit endgame -- or so Boris Johnson hopes.

By Thursday evening, the British Prime Minister intends to have done the seemingly impossible and passed a Brexit deal.But whether he is able to do that depends on a series of crucial votes by lawmakers on his Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB).

But the government's efforts to force it through in three days are proving controversial, and the bill could be picked apart and reshaped by lawmakers even if it succeeds in its initial vote on Tuesday.

Only a few hours later, airstrikes and artillery fire could be felt in northern Syria as the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces accused Ankara and its proxies of severe ceasefire violations.

The mood both in Washington and in the Middle East is that the ceasefire is not the real deal. It expires on Tuesday, October 22, the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recip Tayyip Erdogan will meet in Sochi to discuss the future of Syria. It seems pretty clear: that's when the world will find out that the real deal will be for the future of this volatile region.

Russia immediately started negotiations with the Kurds and Moscow's main ally, the Assad government, quickly reaching a deal to allow the Syrian military into Kurdish-held areas where Damascus has not had a presence for years in order to stave off the Turkish-led offensive. Moscow also quickly deployed its own military as a buffer to keep the Turks and their forces apart from the Kurds and Syrian government troops.

Ukraine has warned that Russia has "almost completed" its build-up of forces that could be used for an offensive against the country, compounding fears that Moscow could launch an invasion at any time.

According to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's latest intelligence assessment -- shared exclusively Tuesday with CNN -- Russia has now deployed more than 127,000 troops in the region.

"The full strength of RF AF (Russian Federation's Armed Forces) land group at the Ukrainian direction -- (is) over 106,000 personnel. Together with the sea and air component, the total number of personnel is over 127,000 servicemen," the assessment said.

The former officer, Anwar Raslan, was accused of overseeing a detention center where prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 were killed.

He fled Syria in 2012 after the government committed a massacre in his hometown, killing more than 100 people. He joined Syria’s exiled opposition and traveled with them to peace talks in Geneva in 2014.

Through nearly 11 years of civil war, the Syrian government bombed residential neighborhoods, used poison gas and tortured countless detainees in state lockups

Wulf says that Romanticism is difficult to define because it emphasized not an absolute truth but “the process of understanding” — a fuzziness that pleased the Romantics themselves, who refused to be hemmed in by any rules

there was still a core to their movement, which emphasized the limits of rationality and extolled the imagination. Science wasn’t something to be resisted; it was to be integrated, because everything was connected.Romanticizing the world meant grasping it as a resonant whole.

Fichte’s “new focus on the self and on the self being aware of itself”, Wulf writes, “fundamentally re-centred the way we understand the world”. You may decide this puts things too forcefully but Fichte’s thought is at least one trailing root of our self-orientated modern culture with its fetish for the individual, its belief in a “personal truth” that trumps objective facts (if such things exist). Approving nods on modern campuses for the Fichtean notion that “there were no absolute truths or laws created by God that shaped our understanding of the world. There was only the self.”

“Give the people what they want” is a core element of democratic politics, and if enough people “want” Trump, then who are American politicians or judges to deprive them? Yet the American founders (and the drafters of the 14th Amendment) also knew the necessity of occasionally checking the popular will, and the Constitution thus contains a host of safeguards designed to protect American democracy from majorities run amok

Why are Republicans in Congress punting to voters and the legal system? For many of them, the answer lies in raw fear. First, there is the simple political fear of losing a House or Senate seat

there’s another fear as well, that imposing accountability will only escalate American political division, leading to a tit-for-tat of prosecuted or disqualified politicians.

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.

When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq, he said: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” It “would spread a lively terror.” (Strangely, Toye doesn’t quote this.)

it’s easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn’t everybody in Britain think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye’s research is that they really didn’t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum.

While the protest began over plans to destroy a park, for many demonstrators it had moved beyond that to become a broad rebuke to the 10-year leadership of Mr. Erdogan and his government, which they say has adopted authoritarian tactics.

“It’s the first time in Turkey’s democratic history that an unplanned, peaceful protest movement succeeded in changing the government’s approach and policy,” said Sinan Ulgen, the chairman of the Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, a research group in Istanbul. “It gave for the first time a strong sense of empowerment to ordinary citizens to demonstrate

The Interior Ministry said it had arrested 939 people at demonstrations across the country, and that 79 people were wounded, a number that was probably low. After Friday’s protests, which were smaller and less violent than those on Saturday, a Turkish doctors’ group reported nearly 1,000 injuries.

And while Mr. Biden implicitly criticized Russia for supporting the Assad government, he gave the Syrian opposition little hope that Washington would change its mind about allowing more sophisticated arms to flow to the rebels.

“As the Syrian people have their chance to forge their own future, they will continue to find a partner in the United States of America,”

A group of Ukrainian hackers has released what it says are the emails of a senior Kremlin official that show a direct Russian role in creating and directing the rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The Obama administration has accused the Kremlin of hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and various Democratic officials and institutions in an effort to discredit the American political system. In recent weeks, there have been reports of high-level meetings at the White House to discuss ways to punish Moscow, including sanctions and covert action against Russian targets.