Middle East, Libya | 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....

President Barack Obama says it is important to resolve the ongoing conflict in Syria without outside military intervention. Obama says not every situation allows for the type of military action the U.S. and allies took in Libya, which led to the removal of Moammar Gadhafi last year. The president says a negotiated solution in Syria is possible. He defended his administration's handling of the violence there, saying the U.S. has been "relentless" in demanding that President Bashar Assad leave power.

After seven months of an aerial bombing campaign that helped depose longtime ruler Moammar Gadhafi, NATO officially ends its mission in Libya on Monday.

The downfall of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is likely to pave the way for increased Western attention to Syria and embolden protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused France of seeing Libya as a source of 'oil, gold mines and underground treasures'.

U.S. crude jumped to a 28-month high of $100 a barrel on Wednesday, as investors weighed the risk of Middle East unrest spreading from Libya to bigger exporters including Saudi Arabia.

Stocks fell sharply and oil prices spiked to their highest level in two years on Tuesday as investors worried about the increasingly violent unrest in Libya.

The State Department issued a travel warning Monday advising all non-emergency U.S. personnel to leave Libya, where anti-government protesters have been gathering for days amid turmoil throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

As protests returned to Libya’s second city, a deadly cycle was emerging: Security forces fire on funeral marches, killing more protesters, creating more funerals.