Latin America

Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports on his recent trip to Zabadani, a besieged Syrian town near the Lebanon border. “[Zabadani] is basically waiting for some kind of solution to happen and is yet really on the receiving end of the majority of the violence,” says Kouddous, whose latest article, “On the Ground in Zabadani, a Syrian Town in Revolt,” was published in The Nation on Monday.

We look at Mitt Romney’s newly announced vice-presidential running mate Paul Ryan’s record on women’s reproductive rights. Ryan opposes abortion in all situations, including cases of rape and incest, and opposes abortion in cases that endanger an expectant mother’s health.

One of the many records broken during the 2012 Olympic Summer Games was the number of female athletes participating from the conservative Islamic nations of Qatar, Brunei and Saudi Arabia.

A new Obama administration policy could stop the deportation of as many as 1.3 million undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Starting on Aug. 15, students under the age of 30 may be eligible for a two-year reprieve from deportation if they meet certain conditions.

Texas is preparing to kill death row prisoner Marvin Wilson tonight despite a 2002 Supreme Court ruling against the execution of the mentally retarded. Wilson was convicted of murdering Jerry Williams during a 1992 fight.

Police in Wisconsin have identified the suspected gunman in the Sikh temple shooting as Army veteran Wade Michael Page. According to the Associated Press, Page enlisted in April 1992 and was given a less-than-honorable discharge in October 1998.

If Julian Assange is granted asylum in Ecuador, he will become a resident of Latin America, where the trove of classified U.S. State Department cables he strategically disseminated through WikiLeaks has generated hundreds of headlines, from Mexico to Chile.

After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says “global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause.”