Greg Myre

The flood of Syrian refugees has been straining Lebanon for several years, and the Lebanese have now responded by imposing visa restrictions on Syria for the first time ever.

Residents from the neighboring Arab states have traditionally been able to travel back and forth easily despite relations that have often ...

Wars raged in the Middle East and beyond. Economic woes stretched across continents. Crashing oil prices boosted some countries and slammed others. World leaders had a lot on their plate this past year. They were responsible for some of their trouble, and some of it just happened to them.

Whether ...

Just months after he seized power in Cuba, Fidel Castro visited Washington in April 1959. He placed a wreath at the base of both the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and was photographed looking up in seeming admiration of both U.S. presidents.

For U.S.-Cuba relations, it was all downhill ...

Since his return to the Russian presidency in 2012, Vladimir Putin has been on a tear: He has annexed Crimea, crushed opposition at home and challenged the West at most every turn.

With oil seemingly stable at more than $100 a barrel, the government coffers were ...

Nazila Fathi covered Iran for The New York Times until she feared her arrest was imminent. She then fled her homeland. Her new book, The Lonely War, tells of the challenges of reporting on Iran.

With his coalition government splintering, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sacked two senior Cabinet ministers, said Parliament should be dissolved and called for early elections.

The Israeli media reported that new elections could be held as early as March.

Netanyahu has been prime minister for the past five years ...

On Sunday, five St. Louis Rams players jogged onto the field with their arms raised by their heads, a stream of fog behind them: hands up, don't shoot.

The players — Tavon Austin, Kenny Britt, Jared Cook, Chris Givens and Stedman Bailey — were invoking the gesture that's been widely ...

The Islamic State isn't the first Middle East extremist group to make a gruesome spectacle of kidnapping and killing Westerners. The first wave came in the 1980s, when Hezbollah in Lebanon seized dozens of Westerners amid an anarchic civil war.

But that spree was largely confined to Lebanon and wound ...

Gen. John Campbell leads the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. On Veterans Day, he offers his assessment of the war as the U.S. winds down its presence and hands over responsibility to the Afghans.

With oil around $85 a barrel and tumbling to its lowest levels in several years, here's the upside: Gasoline prices are down, the U.S. is feeling less dependent on foreign crude, and serious economic pressure is growing on oil producers such as Iran and Russia.

Here's the downside: The low ...

Six more clandestine graves have been found in Mexico near the town where 43 students allegedly were abducted by local police working for a drug gang. Relatives and supporters of the students have vowed to hold a week of protests to pressure authorities into finding the disappeared.

According to the ...

The U.S. has been bombing the Islamic State for two months now, and several developments stand out: The extremists are still on the offensive, the U.S. is struggling to find partners on the ground, and for the first time in a quarter-century, a major U.S. military intervention lacks a formal ...

President Obama says the goal is to roundly defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria because the threat is too serious to ignore. But he'd prefer you not call it a war.

In a letter to Congress on Tuesday, the president said, "I have ordered implementation of a new ...

In Iraq, Kurdish militiamen fighting the group that calls itself the Islamic State are key American allies.

In Syria, some Kurdish fighters battling the very same Islamic State are considered part of a terrorist group, according to the U.S. government.

What gives?

In both Iraq and Syria, the ...

As the U.S. steps up arms and training, Syria's "moderate" rebels are joining a long line of resistance movements the Americans have backed over the decades, from Angola to Afghanistan.

The high-water mark was President Reagan's administration in the 1980s, when the U.S. supplied weapons to three rebel groups on ...

Host Jessica Harris speaks with Jeremy Stoppelman, the co-founder and CEO of Yelp. Harris also speaks with Marc Decosta, co-founder of Enigma, a company that makes public data understandable.

President Obama's plan for an expansive air campaign in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State appears to have broad support, but it will be a major undertaking that could still be playing out on the day he leaves office.

Here are the key points in Obama's plan, with a ...

President Obama previewed his plan for dealing with the Islamic State by comparing it to counterterrorism operations in recent years and said it would not be an invasion akin to the ground war in Iraq.

As he prepares to lay out the details in a speech to the ...

Ever since the Cold War ended, the armies of NATO and Russia have been moving warily toward each other while their political positions keep moving further apart.

Twelve Eastern European countries have joined NATO since the Soviet breakup, and NATO is now on the verge of creating a rapid-reaction force ...

As the U.S. juggles multiple crises in the Middle East, it's a good time to look at the map.

Find Libya. Head east across North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to Pakistan in South Asia. The journey covers eight troubled lands, side by side. In seven, ...