Middle East, Deaths | featured news

New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose dispatches captured untold stories from Baghdad under "shock and awe" bombing to Libya wracked by civil war, died Thursday of an apparent asthma attack in Syria while reporting on the uprising against its president....

Syrian security forces opened fire Friday on protesters and hunted them down in house-to-house raids, killing about 30 people in the deadliest day in weeks in the country's 7-month-old uprising, activists said.

Turkey struggled to provide shelter on Wednesday to tens of thousands left homeless by an earthquake that killed nearly 500, and rescue teams began taking painful decisions to call off searches for those buried alive.

As night fell over eastern Turkey on Sunday following the most powerful earthquake in at least a decade, citizens were using flashlights and shovels as they clambered over the rubble of collapsed buildings looking for survivors. At least seven aftershocks rattled the region, one of the nation's poorest. The extent of casualties was not immediately known.

More than 30 civilians and as many as a dozen soldiers were killed Monday in an upsurge of violence in Syria, most of them in the central city of Homs that is rapidly emerging as the epicenter of armed resistance to the government led by President Bashar al-Assad.

A leading Kurdish political figure was shot to death in northern Syria, while a political dissident was brazenly beaten in the heart of the capital Damascus, activists said.

A government warplane mistakenly bombed an army position in southern Yemen, killing at least 30 soldiers and wounding many more, military and medical officials said Sunday.

Fighting erupted across much of Sanaa and the death toll for the worst violence in months rose to nearly 50 in two days of clashes.

Syrian troops killed at least 17 people Friday in raids on anti-government protesters, activists said, but failed to stop thousands from pouring into streets nationwide and taking their uprising against President Bashar Assad’s autocratic rule into a seventh month.

The number two leader of al Qaeda, Atiyah abd al-Rahman, was killed on August 22 in Pakistan, a senior U.S. official told Reuters on Saturday.