Syria | featured news

Lebanon's prime minister linked the massive car bomb that tore through Beirut to the civil war in neighboring Syria on Saturday, the latest signal that the crisis is enflaming an already tense region.

The U.N. refugee agency said Thursday the number of Syrian refugees who have fled their country's civil war and found shelter in Egypt has now topped 150,000 — a significant jump from last month's figure of 95,000. The director of UNHCR in Egypt, Mohamed Dayri, said that despite the growing number of refugees in Egypt, only 4,800 Syrians have registered with the agency in Cairo. He called on Egyptian authorities to help UNHCR deal with the "rising emergency" of Syrian refugees here.

The turrets of Turkish armored vehicles rise from the cotton fields outside this border village, guns trained toward Syria. Infantry units flank the banks of the Orontes River as Syrians escaping the fighting in their homeland maneuver across its muddy waters in rowboats. Overhead, Turkish fighter jets periodically buzz the skies.

A journey through the borderlands found that the slow-boiling resentment over the troubles wrought by Syria’s war may be a mere prologue to the danger that lies ahead.

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...