The political and economic problems facing Yemen: 　　Yemen is probably the hardest [state in the region] in terms of economic challenges and development challenges. The people of Yemen are the poorest in the region. The state in Yemen is by far the weakest, compared to Libya in the sense of... More

　　Israel's expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and eviction of Palestinians from their homes there is a form of ethnic cleansing, a United Nations investigator said on Monday. 　　United States academic Richard Falk was speaking to the UN Human Rights Council as it prepared to pass resolutions condemning settlement building... More

　　German Magazine Der Spiegel has released hideous photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenseless Afghan civilians they killed. 　　Senior officials at Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul have compared the pictures published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers... More

　　A distraught Libyan woman has told journalists in Tripoli how she was raped by government troops, before being bundled away by officials. 　　Iman al-Obeidi sought out foreign reporters in the capital's Rixos hotel on Saturday morning, weeping and claiming that troops had detained her at a checkpoint, tied her up,... More

　　NATO's political mission "should swiftly identify and nurture a national opposition and plot the path for a post-conflict transition to democracy, probably under UN auspices", or so advises the Financial Times in its lead editorial, "Plotting the Way Forward". 　　Both the title and the advice are borrowed from a past... More

　　Israeli troops arrested 100 Palestinian women in an overnight raid Thursday, the latest in a series of round-ups around the West Bank city of Nablus. 　　Israeli troops stormed a village near Nablus early Thursday, arresting more than 100 women, local officials said. 　　Hundreds of troops entered Awarta shortly after midnight... More

　　According to a report in the Washington Post, US defense officials have claimed that there is no plan to suspend or restrict the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan, and that the agency has not been asked to pull any of its employees out of Pakistan. 　　US and Pakistan’s relationship was... More

　　Benghazi internal security headquarters, November 3, 1990. A fax arrives at 10:30 in the morning, addressed to the director from the head office in Tripoli. 　　"We received information about some of the suspicious people," it begins. A list of names and paragraphs of information follow. 　　One man is singled out... More

　　The only outside visitors the people of Daraa are allowed to receive these days are friends and family attending funerals. 　　To access the city where Syria's uprising began, a local reporter simply had to tell the guards at the first checkpoint the truth: The husband of his wife's cousin had... More

　　As darkness fell across it, Deraa was a city under siege. 　　Tanks and troops control all roads in and out. Inside the city, shops are shuttered and nobody dare walk the once bustling market streets, today transformed into the kill zone of rooftop snipers. 　　Trapped and terrified inside their homes,... More

　　The UN has said that almost 40,000 people have fled fighting in Libya's Western Mountains region in the past month. 　　Thousands of ethnic Berbers from Libya fled into Tunisia after a brief hiatus in their exodus last week because of fighting between Gaddafi troops and opposition forces for control of... More

　　President Assad reaffirms his father's legacy by quelling dissent with brute force. 　　As the fists and boots and sticks pummeled his body and bloodied his face, the college student screamed out what he thought his interrogators wanted to hear: The name of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. 　　It worked. The secret... More

　　Fawaz al-Haraki had only minutes to live. 　　As the shots rang out, Abu Haidar and the other protesters ran for cover, grimly familiar with what to do when the mukhabberat (secret police) attacked. 　　But Fawaz fell, the blood soaking his trousers where the bullet from a Syrian secret policeman had... More