Saudi Arabian officials have sentenced two men to flogging and prison for helping a women convert to Christianity and escape the country.

The uproar started last summer when a video clip surfaced showing a young woman in a hijab relating to an Arabic Christian TV host how she converted to Christianity after Jesus came to her in a dream. She is the first Saudi Arabian woman to publicly convert to Christianity.

The second-highest serving officer at the U.S. mission in Libya is set to testify today in Congress against the White House version of events surrounding the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. If you don’t read anything else, scroll through the article linked above to see Gregory Hicks’ scheduled testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: “I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate.” 

April is the Month of Microfinance and today is the day every gift to Five Talents, one of many groups majoring in microfinance projects, gets doubled. Microfinance projects put financial services in the hands of small groups of business owners and crafts people who otherwise would not have access to the infusions of cash needed to launch business expansion and enterprise.

The U.S. decision to provide “non-lethal” aid to rebels in Syria is by most accounts a faint gesture, an offer coming—two years into Syria’s raging civil war—too little, too late. After U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry promised food, medical supplies, and about $60 million for “security” and “education” last month, Syrian rebel commander Abdul Jabbar Akaidi was blunt: “We have no need for medical supplies or for food stuffs,” he told NPR from his base camp. “We need more than this.”

A Japanese tunnel collapse on Sunday killed nine and trapped many motorists.

Hopes that we’d earned a little breathing space after the election were quickly dashed with what might be called, for convenience, the Petraeus Affair. With revelations falling like dominoes, I can’t venture to comment on how it will end. But we can be reminded of the simmering kettle that is the Middle East, increasingly dominated by radical Muslim groups and fueled by combustible propaganda.