Iran, Syria | featured news

Syria and Iran on Saturday condemned a move by the United States to give non-lethal aid to rebels fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accusing Washington of double standards.

Shouting condemnation and promises of retaliation, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah condemned Israel's decision to send warplanes into Syria, calling its airstrike a day before "inhuman" and "barbaric."

It wasn't exactly a break-up moment between Iran and ally Bashar Assad. But Tehran's whiplash diplomacy over the weekend suggested its embrace of the Syrian president could be cooling....

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy -- couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.

Syria’s civil war is straining sectarian tensions in Iraq nine months after American forces left, and it is causing Iraq’s Shiite-led government to move closer to Iran.

The U.S. Navy is cutting short home leave for the crew of one of its aircraft carriers and sending them back to the Middle East next week to counter any threat from Iran, according to the official Navy News Service.

A "pervasively polluted" culture at HSBC Holdings Plc allowed the bank to act as financier to clients seeking to route shadowy funds from the world's most dangerous and secretive corners, including Mexico, Iran,the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia and Syria, according to a scathing U.S. Senate report issued on Monday.

Against the backdrop of a new massacre in Syria, international envoy Kofi Annan on Thursday will propose tasking a group of world powers and key regional players including Iran to come up with a strategy to end the 15-month conflict, U.N. diplomats said....

Kofi Annan appealed on Wednesday to President Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian backers to support a peace effort.