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It is clear Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people. And Obama must now take action. By Bruce Riedel.

The news that Washington and London finally believe Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own people is both an opportunity and a series of traps. Both the opportunity and the traps are huge, and President Obama needs to tread carefully to quickly exploit the first and avoid the second.Credible observers of Syria like my colleague at the Brookings Doha Center, Salman Shaikh, have been reporting since December on the evidence that Assad’s forces have used small quantities of chemical weapons in the civil war that has been raging in Syria for more than two years.

J K Weston

As presidents gathered to salute George W. Bush’s presidency, a leading Iraqi offers up his perspective on what happened to his country in the last decade—and what will happen next. He spoke to John Kael Weston.

Here is an Iraqi perspective, unfiltered, unlike the rest of my series. The following exchanges occurred over two long lunches, sharing Lebanese food, in Pentagon City in late March. Ameer was raised in Baghdad and is an expert on Iraqi politics. He worked for the U.S. Embassy, becoming a go-to analyst for American diplomats, and is now living in the Washington, D.C. area. Saddam Hussein’s regime persecuted his family members and neighbors.The opening ceremony for President George W.

Shaam News Network via AP video

The Obama administration says Syria’s government may have attacked its citizens with sarin last month. Rebel groups allege those attacks are continuing.

As the White House waits for more evidence to determine whether or not Syrian president Bashar al-Assad crossed what President Obama has called his “red line” and last month used chemical weapons in his campaign against his country’s rebels, Syrian fighters from the ground are reporting a new chemical weapons attack in south Damascus.On Thursday, the Syrian Support Group (SSG), a U.S.-based advocacy organization that has pressed Obama to provide the Syrian opposition with advanced weapons, issued a report that said two chemical weapons attacks were conducted on April 25 in the southern part of Daraya, a suburb of Damascus.

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Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a ‘game changer.’ So what will he do in the face of new evidence that they were deployed? Mike Giglio reports.

The U.S. government drew closer to confirming today what many of its allies have long suspected—that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, “on a small scale,” according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.“This is serious business,” Hagel added, speaking at a press conference in Abu Dhabi.Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fight against rebel forces has seen him dig deep into his military arsenal, pounding rebel-held neighborhoods with artillery and airstrikes—even in the capital of Damascus—and launching Scud missiles.

Abdul Majeed Forjani/AP

In what’s being called a ‘terrorist act,’ an explosion has ripped through France’s mission in Tripoli, Libya. Jamie Dettmer reports on the group that has claimed responsibility.

A jihadist group calling itself the Mujahedeen Brigade was likely behind a car bomb blast outside the French Embassy in the Libyan capital of Tripoli that injured two French security guards, one severely, and wounded several residents in neighboring houses.Security sources say a statement from the Mujahedeen Brigade, which was uploaded several days ago to YouTube by the Islamic television channel in the eastern Libyan city of Derna, announced it was behind the attack on the French Embassy.

John Stanmeyer/Vll

No one has more domestic servants than the Brazilians. But a new law is designed to move those downstairs upward.

Complaining about the hired help in Brazil is as old as the New World. And yet like the nightly telenovela, where the storyline often turns on maids and masters, the comfortable classes can’t seem to do without their household staff. No country has more domestic servants than Brazil: some 7.2 million, according to a recent report by the World Labor Organization (or 6.6 million, according to Brazilian government figures). By contrast, India, with five times the population, has 4.

Photodisc, Alamy, Getty, Alamy, Getty (2)

Before There Were Scientists The word “scientist” was not coined until 1833. Before that, scientific disciplines were the domain of mostly wealthy men and women who called themselves “natural philosophers.” They might have had curiosity cabinets full of fossils, concoctions, and pickled bits of anatomy, but laboratories were few and far between. Then, oddly, the eccentric, opium-imbibing poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge challenged this use of the metaphysical-sounding word “philosopher.

Uriel Sinai/Getty

The relationship is about money and weapons, but it’s also about something deeper—something, Fania Oz-Salzberger says, it takes a good long-term memory to understand.

The best nutshell definition of Israeli-U.S. relations is still the one attributed to Moshe Dayan. “Our American friends,” he allegedly quipped, “offer us money, weapons, and advice. We take the money, we take the weapons, and we decline the advice.”Dayan would have made a fabulous tweeter. But beware. The American-Israeli bond is so unique that it defies nutshelling. It’s more of a nut grove. It never rested on reason of state alone. Between them, Americans and Israelis subvert the core curriculum of political-science departments and the truisms of international relations.

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Russia’s president now gets to tell the West ‘I told you so’ about Chechens after the Tsarnaev brothers were revealed as the bombing suspects, Chechnya’s opposition prime minister, Akhmed Zakayev, tells Michael Moynihan.

In another life, Akhmed Zakayev was a renowned actor, a severe-looking young Shakespearean who often played Caius Marcius Coriolanus and Hamlet in Grozny’s tiny theater scene. After the fall of the Soviet Union, in the violent tumult that followed Chechnya’s declaration of independence, he abandoned the stage for the battlefield, becoming a highly regarded rebel commander and navigating various political appointments (culture minister, foreign minister, deputy prime minister).

Tribeca Film Festival

The new documentary, which screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, captures the perils of enlisting local fighters to take on more sophisticated menaces.

The documentary The Project, shown this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, gives a glimpse into one future for the war on terrorism.The film documents the creation of the Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF) to hunt the pirates that have menaced the coastal waters of Somalia in recent years. But the mission is very similar to the large-scale counterinsurgencies America fought in Iraq and is still fighting in Afghanistan. Train the locals to fight the bad guys, so the Westerners don’t have to fight them.