Everyone – politico, activist – seems to think they can play host. Luke Blackall points out that good conversation is an art

Last weekend Ali Shabaan was looking forward to his engagement party. Yesterday his fiancée stood at his graveside. By Robert Fisk

Mourners demand answers over fate of cameraman killed on the Lebanese border

Security has been stepped up across Israel following bomb attacks on its diplomats in India and Georgia.

Here is the brutal truth about Syria: no one knows what to do. Six months after Barack Obama said bluntly that Bashar al-Assad should go, and with the Arab League calling for him to resign, there is no sign that the country's President is willing to listen. Two days ago, on the 30th anniversary of the massacre carried out by his father Hafez al-Assad in the city of Hama, the younger Assad ordered the Syrian army to bombard residential areas of the country's third largest city, Homs. Shocking TV pictures showed buildings ablaze against the night sky, the wounded rushed to makeshift casualty stations inside mosques.

The militant group Hezbollah has revealed the identities of CIA officers working undercover in Lebanon, a blow to agency operations in the region and the latest salvo in an escalating spy war.

A rocket fired from Lebanon toward Israel fell short, wounding a Lebanese woman, the Lebanese army said today.

The UN-backed special court investigating the former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri's murder yesterday published the 47-page indictment against four members of the Iranian-backed Shia militia Hezbollah for alleged involvement in the truck bombing that killed him in 2005.

The UN-backed Lebanon tribunal yesterday released the names, photographs and details of four men wanted for killing statesman Rafik al-Hariri, saying it acted in an effort to bring about their arrest.

Syrian security forces killed at least 17 protesters as hundreds of thousands flooded the streets nationwide in the largest anti-government demonstrations since the uprising began more than four months ago, witnesses and activists said.

More than six years after ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri was blown up by a truck bomb on the Beirut Corniche along with 21 other Lebanese, a UN Special Tribunal has blamed four Hezbollah officials for the assassination and issued arrest warrants for the quartet.

Five months after Hezbollah and its allies brought down the Lebanese government, the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, formed a new cabinet yesterday that gives the Iranian-backed militant group far more power.

Israel fired two tank shells and several rounds from machine guns as Gazans approached the heavily fortified border with Israel on Sunday, wounding at least 15 youths, a Palestinian health official said. One of the wounded was in critical condition.

Syria's Cabinet resigned today to help quell a wave of popular fury that erupted more than a week ago, threatening President Bashar Assad's 11-year rule in one of the most authoritarian nations in the Middle East.