Syrian tanks pushed toward more towns and villages near the Turkish and Iraqi borders on Tuesday, expanding the crackdown against a 12-week uprising to the north and east as more Syrians flee their homes.
A 40-year-old American man living in Scotland said Monday he's sorry for posing as a Syrian lesbian blogger who offered vivid accounts of life amid revolt and repression in Damascus, a hoax that has exposed the difficulty of sifting truth from fiction online.
Is NATO a paper tiger? With a "dim, if not dismal future," as outgoing Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates put it in a valedictory address before his NATO opposite numbers, it is "facing the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance."
Syrians poured across the border Monday to refugee camps in Turkey, fleeing a military crackdown that sent elite forces backed by helicopters and tanks into a northern town that was spinning out of government control.
Under the rattle of heavy gunfire and loud explosions, Syrian troops on Sunday regained control of a restive northwestern town, clashing with mutinous soldiers whose decision to side with armed protesters posed a potent threat to the authoritarian regime.
Syrian forces shelled a town in the country's restive north and opened fire on scattered protests nationwide, killing at least 32 people on Friday, activists said. Hundreds of Syrians streamed across the border into Turkey, trying to escape the violence.
After four years of turbulent rule in the Gaza Strip, the Islamic militant group Hamas is weighing a new strategy of not directly participating in future governments even if it wins elections.
The existence of a blogger who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian came into question on Wednesday after a woman in Britain said photographs circulating on the Internet were of her, not the blogger supposedly in Damascus.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that his country will continue to accept the hundreds of Syrian refugees who are fleeing their nation's violence, but he urged Syria's government to adopt reforms aimed at ending the unrest.
