A Syrian man walks past a poster bearing a portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a street in the capital Damascus on 23 February, 2016, a day after a ceasefire deal was announced.
(photo: Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images)
Syria agrees to truce (CBS News) The Syrian government said Tuesday that it had accepted a proposed truce in the country, adding that operations would nevertheless continue against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. A Foreign Ministry statement on Tuesday said government forces would have the right to respond to any violation carried out by insurgents…
Assyrian hostages released (Vatican Radio) The Islamic State has released 43 Christians who were taken captive during a February 2015 military offensive in northeastern Syria, according to the Assyrian Church of the East Relief Organization (ACERO)…
Mobs in Ukraine attack Russian banks (The New York Times) The branch offices of three Russian banks were firebombed or looted over the weekend, and some of the attacks were the work of Ukrainian nationalists. Petroleum bombs were thrown at three branches of the Russian state banks Sberbank and VTB in the western city of Lviv early on Monday, destroying one in a burst of flames and damaging the other two. Also on Monday, attackers hurled stones at a Sberbank branch in Mariupol, in a government-controlled area of eastern Ukraine…
Canada on track to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees (NPR) Canada is on the verge of hitting its goal of resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees before the end of this month. That’s notable because the country only started accepting these migrants less than four months ago. The government in Canada has relied on private citizens to help carry the load…
Bishop challenges Catholics to combat “ugly tide of anti-Islamic bigotry” (CNS) San Diego Bishop Robert W. McElroy is challenging U.S. Catholics to take an active role in combating “the scourge of anti-Islamic prejudice.” “We are witnessing in the United States a new nativism, which the American Catholic community must reject and label for the religious bigotry which it is,” he said in a keynote address delivered on 17 February in the University of San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice…
In Gaza, bicycles are a battleground for women who dare to ride (The New York Times) Many Palestinians frown at the idea of women bicycling in public because men might inappropriately leer at their legs moving up and down or ogle their bottoms. Female cyclists are a fairly unusual sight throughout the Arab world, though women participate in group rides in Cairo and Amman, and in Beirut, women pedal rented bikes on the Corniche, the pedestrian strip along the Mediterranean…