Middle East, Syria | featured news

There are growing fears that the regime could shut down the Internet across the country, similar to what was done in Egypt during its January 2011 uprising, which brought communication in Cairo to a near standstill.

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy -- couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.

Turkish forces fired across the frontier into Syria on Sunday after a shell launched from Syria landed in Turkey's border town of Akcakale, underlining Ankara's warning that it will respond with force to any violence spilling over into its territory.

Another mortar shell from Syria struck Turkish territory on Saturday, prompting a fourth day of retaliatory artillery fire from Turkey, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported... The latest shelling came a day after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Syria not to test Turkey's "limits and determination."

Hours after world leaders painted a grim picture of the Syrian war, a new wave of attacks erupted Sunday. The bloody conflict rages -- and a solution continues to be elusive. Here is the latest in the Syrian uprising...

Syrian authorities on Thursday sent text messages over cell phones nationwide with a message for rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's regime: "Game over." The messages signed by the Syrian Arab Army also urged the rebels to surrender their weapons and warned the countdown to evict foreign fighters has begun. The texts appear to be part of the regime's psychological battle against the rebels, but are highly unlikely to have any effect on fighters intent on toppling Assad.

The UN refugee agency warned Thursday there could be as many as 700,000 Syrian refugees fleeing the war-torn nation by the end of the year as it stepped up its call for emergency funding.

Syria’s civil war is straining sectarian tensions in Iraq nine months after American forces left, and it is causing Iraq’s Shiite-led government to move closer to Iran.

The United States accused Syria on Friday of using the "brutal repression" of its people waging an uprising as an excuse not to address U.N. nuclear watchdog concerns about suspected past illicit nuclear activity in the Arab state.