The Senate's Syria hearing: Live updates  —  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is hearing testimony Tuesday about the potential use of military force in Syria.  Testifying are Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.

No good options for President Obama, Congress on conflict engulfing Syria  —  President Obama and Congress face no good options when it comes to taking action in Syria.  —  The case for launching a strike is that the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons should be punished …

Rubio: We Wouldn't Be At This Stage With Syria ‘If I Had Been In Charge’ (VIDEO)  —  Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said Tuesday that he's “very skeptical” that the proposed airstrike on Syria will deter the Assad regime from using chemical weapons in the future, while arguing that he'd have handled …

Cheney knocks Obama, papers  —  150 in Tea Party crowd hear candidate call for a ‘rebirth of freedom.’  —  Liz Cheney would not vote to attack Syria if she were in the U.S. Senate.  —  Speaking to an enthralled crowd of 150 Jackson Hole Tea Party members Tuesday night in her first public appearance …

Ariel Castro a suicide  —  (CNN) — Ariel Castro, who was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years for kidnapping and raping three women, as well as murder, was found hanging in his prison cell Tuesday night, the state's Department of Corrections said.  —  The cause of death was hanging with a bed sheet …

Obama's inept foreign policy: Column  —  The president's Syria coalition (France) is dwarfed by the international coalition involved in the Iraq War.  —  CONNECT  —  One of the things we were promised back in the 2008 election campaign was that under a Democratic administration America …

AP Interview: Putin Warns West On Syria Action  —  NOVO-OGARYOVO, Russia (AP) — President Vladimir Putin warned the West against taking one-sided action in Syria but also said Russia “doesn't exclude” supporting a U.N. resolution on punitive military strikes if it is proved that Damascus used poison gas on its own people.

Al Gore's Incredible Shrinking Climate Change Footprint  —  Illustration by John Gara / BuzzFeed; Joe Raedle / Getty Images; Saul Loeb / Getty Images  —  WASHINGTON — Last January, Al Gore took a boatload of scientists, donors, and celebrities to Antarctica to talk about climate change.

How Fragile Is the New Democratic Coalition?  —  Last December, Jennifer Duffy, an election analyst at the Cook Political Report, came up with a particularly tantalizing set of data points, the kind that demand further exploration.  —  In 1988, the Democratic presidential nominee …

Special report: We all thought Libya had moved on - it has, but into lawlessness and ruin  —  Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi  —  A little under two years ago, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, urged British businessmen to begin …

Arm and Shame  —  The Obama team has clearly struggled with its Syria policy, but, in fairness, this is a wickedly complex problem.  We need a policy response that simultaneously deters another Syrian poison gas attack, doesn't embroil America in the Syrian civil war and also doesn't lead …

NAACP and Ku Klux Klan sit down for unprecedented meeting  —  Jimmy Simmons of the Casper, Wyo., NAACP requested the meeting after reports of violence against black men and KKK literature distributed in Gillette.  The Southern Poverty Law Center and United Klans of America say its the first meeting between the groups.

Howard Dean backs Obama on Syria strike  —  Former DNC chairman Howard Dean supports President Obama's call for a punitive military strike against Syria.  —  “Thus far I fully support the president, including his going to Congress,” Dean said in an e-mail to The Hill.

65 Years Later, a Memorial Gives Names to Crash Victims  —  FRESNO, Calif. — A fiery plane crash here decades ago that killed 32 people, most of them unidentified Mexican farmworkers, inspired a protest song by Woody Guthrie that has been performed by Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, among others.

Ohio Man Can Be Listed As Spouse On Husband's Death Certificate, Judge Rules  —  CINCINNATI (AP) — A recently deceased gay Ohio man must be listed on his death certificate as married and his husband must be listed as his spouse despite Ohio's gay marriage ban, a federal judge has ordered.

Business Losing Clout in a G.O.P. Moving Right  —  How did corporate America lose control of the Republican Party?  —  From overhauling immigration laws to increasing spending on the nation's aging infrastructure, big business leaders have seemed relatively powerless lately …

Another Set of Questions About Syria  —  A few minutes ago I posted the six-step pattern of pro-escalation rhetoric that Eric Martin laid out two years ago.  That followed William Polk's lengthy and important 13-question examination of a strike on Syria.  —  Now on the Foreign Policy site …

Introducing “Kindle MatchBook”: Soon Customers Will Be Able to Purchase Kindle Editions of Print Books Purchased from Amazon—Past, Present and Future—for $2.99 or Less  —  Over 10,000 books already enrolled from authors such as Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, Blake Crouch, James Rollins …

ECONOMISTS: Summers As Fed Chair Would Shave 0.5% Off GDP And Cost Us 350,000 Jobs  —  Economists at BNP Paribas have issued a research note saying if President Obama picks Larry Summers as the next Federal Reserve Chairman, he will do serious harm to the U.S. economy.

U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda's efforts to fight back against drones  —  Al-Qaeda's leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses upon …