Excessive ideological zeal, immoderate sincerity and determination to fight to the finish are fuelling Syria's crisis. After several days of dilly-dallying and international pressure, the Syrian government has agreed to permita team of United Nations experts to visit rebel-held suburbs of Damascus - scene of an apparent chemical attack last week. One immediate consequence has been to overshadow all previous ...

Britain and the US are finalising plans to launch limited punitive militarystrikes at the end of the week against the regime of Bashar al-Assad over the "abhorrent" use of chemical weapons near the Syrian capital, Damascus, last week. ...

US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning arrives alongside military officials at a US military court facility to hear his sentence in his trial at Fort Meade, Maryland on August 21, 2013. (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)   A US military judge has sentenced Army Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison. Manning faced up to 90 years behind bars, while prosecutors sought to put the whistleblower away for a mi ...

This week’s deployment of Black-hawk helicopters in Chicago is only the latest in a series of “urban warfare training” exercises that have become a familiar feature of American life. As elsewhere, this exercise was sprung unannounced on a startled civilian population. Conducted in secrecy, apparently with the collusion of local police agencies and elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, the oste ...

Detroit hit the Trifecta yesterday—the third in a series of body blows that politicians have landed on the city’s working people. The Michigan legislature passed “right-to-work” in December and gave the governor the right to impose “emergency managers” on cities two days later. When Detroit’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr announced Chapter 9 bankruptcy Thursday, he was following a predicted trajectory that wi ...

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian. ...

US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electro ...

Verizon court order: telephone call metadata and what it can show The US insists call data is not private information, but critics say it allows government to build detailed picture of individuals' lives The US government has long argued that 'metadata' isn't private or personal: it's the equivalent of looking at the envelope of a letter. When does mass data collection get personal? When it comes to the con ...

Wage theft is fast becoming a top trend of the 21st-century labor market. April 25, 2013  | Editor's note: This article is part of an ongoing AlterNet series, "The Age of Fraud." Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your c ...

The horrific bombings of the Boston Marathon produced inspiring images of a spirited, brave Boston refusing to be cowed. Some spectators surged forward toward the danger to apply tourniquets, offer first aid, share blankets, and later to give blood, for the victims. President Obama followed the crisis from its first moments and came out promptly to caution against fruitless speculation as to the perpetrator ...