Ensconced in a corner of Damascus, Bashar Assad is growing stronger, while Homs, the capital of the Syrian revolution, lies in ruins

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In Syria, victory is written in ruin.

An antigovernment uprising, followed by three years of war and the threat of U.S. air strikes, nearly destroyed this Middle Eastern nation. But President Bashar Assad’s government has fought its way back with a relentless military campaign of air strikes, shelling and the strategic use of siege warfare on insurgent-held areas.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the former rebel stronghold of Homs, once dubbed the capital of the revolution. For two years, rebel groups in a few key districts collectively known as the Old City held out against a debilitating air and artillery barrage that turned a once thriving middle-class neighborhood full of dress shops and ice cream parlors into a rubble-strewn wasteland of bombed-out hospitals and commercial centers.

Anti-E.U. populists may have scored big at the ballot box, but they’re wrong on foreign policy

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In late May, citizens from across the European Union’s 28 member states went to the polls to elect 751 lawmakers to the European Parliament, which debates and passes E.U.-wide legislation. The results shocked the continent. Parties on the far right—from Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn to more-mainstream groups that advocate leaving or dismantling the E.U.—scored spectacular gains, tapping into anger and mistrust fueled by the euro-zone crisis and the years of austerity, recession and unemployment.

Though the focus was on domestic issues, one of the more curious aspects of their campaign was an outpouring of praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who seized Crimea after a pro-European movement in Ukraine ousted the country’s pro-Russian President in February.

Why the island’s citizens are worried about China’s growing influence over their home

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On a past visit to Taiwan’s rugged, windswept east coast, I stayed at a B&B in the seaside town of Hualien. It was run by a middle-aged Taiwanese descended from islanders predating the 1949 flight to Taiwan of the Kuomintang (KMT) army and elite after the communists won the civil war in China. The innkeeper was apoplectic about a new influx of mainlanders: Chinese tourists, whom he found arrogant and politically incorrect. He refused to host any, even though that cost him business. The Chinese, he said, were trouble.

It’s a sentiment shared by ever more of Taiwan’s 23 million people.

Amid a new wave of repression, china needs the spirit of 1989 as much as ever before

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Tiananmen. Is there any word freighted with such divergent meaning?

To much of the world, Tiananmen denotes tragedy—democracy denied, students slaughtered, an authoritarian regime that unleashed tanks in the early hours of June 4, 1989, yet still rules today. For most Chinese, however, Tiananmen—or the Gate of Heavenly Peace located in the physical center of Beijing—symbolizes the heart of a resurgent civilization. On China’s official national emblem, Tiananmen is topped by stars and burnished in gold, a fitting hue for a country that has, in the quarter-century since the June 4 carnage, enjoyed the greatest economic expansion in history. So thoroughly has the memory of bloodstained protest been scrubbed from the nation’s consciousness that Chinese online search results first point users to the time of the daily flag-raising ceremony at Tian­anmen Square.

Space is full of potential killer asteroids. Meet the astronomer who stands between you and them

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You don’t want Don Yeomans’ job, no matter how appealing it seems. He’s an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., which is awfully cool. And he’s one of the lab’s top guys, which is even better. The problem with Yeomans’ job is the pressure. He is never really off duty, and his work is very straightforward: he guards the planet. Really. If morning dawns in your part of the world and all is still well, it’s on Yeomans’ watch. If your city or entire country is wiped out tomorrow, well, there’s a case to be made that it’s on Yeomans’ head.

Yeomans leads JPL’s prosaically named Near Earth Object Program Office, charged with the mission of…

The author of The Fault in Our Stars watches his book become a movie

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Question: What is the job of a novelist on the set of the movie adaptation of his book? When John Green arrived to watch The Fault in Our Stars being shot in Pittsburgh on a cold morning last September, it was a bit like Aslan making an appearance in Narnia: here comes the benevolent deity, padding amiably through his creation. Everybody wanted to say hi. Shailene Woodley–who plays the hero, Hazel–said hi. The director, Josh Boone, said hi. The guy holding the boom mike said hi. “I don’t know what authors are supposed to do on movie sets,” Green admitted, and it wasn’t clear that anybody else knew either.

All I ever wanted was to start a humor website. But the patent trolls won't let me

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When you start a business you have to do due diligence, like finding out what due diligence is. From what I’ve gathered, it’s exactly like diligence except it requires people to say “do due,” which I’m guessing amuses the business community.

I also found out that if I’m going to start a humor website–which I’m considering, since there are not enough websites–I’m going to have to deal with patent trolls. These are entities that don’t actually make products but own patents for vague ideas and send out mass letters threatening to sue unless you pay them. There are a lot of them, mostly because while the federal government issued fewer than 78,000 patents a year from 1966 to 1986, it has handed out more than 250,000 in each of the past two years.

On her 100th birthday, the high jumper got hundreds of postcards from Germans. Here’s why

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In 1934, you were Gretel Bergmann, a German Jew living safely in the U.K. Why did you go back to Germany?

I went back to Germany because my father came to [see me in] England–he could not use the telephone or write because the Nazis checked everything. He told me that I had to come back because the Nazis needed me for the 1936 Olympic team. They needed to show that Jews were not excluded, and I was the only Jewish person that had a chance. My family still lived in Germany. Had I not gone back, the Nazis would have killed them immediately.