The New York Times

A reporter for Al Jazeera's English-language channel disappeared in Syria on Friday, the network announced Monday, saying it was demanding immediate information from the Syrian government about her whereabouts.

The network said in a brief statement that it had not had contact with the journalist, Dorothy Parvaz, since she arrived in Damascus on a Qatar Airways flight.

As a teenager, he “would lie at her feet and caress her,” a family friend told Steve Coll, for his definitive biography “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.” Like many people who go on to alter history, for good and evil, ...

Syria’s nascent opposition movement, organized by an amorphous group of young activists operating mainly online, now faces its biggest test: whether it can sustain protests in the face of a brutal government crackdown.

A movement that until recently was diffuse and poorly organized, driven underground and into exile by decades of violent repression, is evolving into one led by activists in Syria. They are trying to seize on the fury surrounding the arrest of teenagers in the southern town of Dara’a last month to create their own Arab Spring.

“People seem to think that whoever goes first gets the upper hand,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and a director at the New America Foundation. Using Mr. Netanyahu's nickname, he said: “If Bibi went first and didn't lay out a bold ...

Weeks of clashes in Syria between protesters and the government intensified on Monday and early Tuesday as security forces fired on a crowd of thousands of demonstrators in the central square of the city of Homs, witnesses said.

The crowd had gathered to protest a deadly crackdown by the security forces, who activists say killed 14 demonstrators on Sunday. Tensions mounted throughout the day, and at about 2:10 a.m. on Tuesday the forces began firing again, witnesses said.

"This book has two origins," Francis Fukuyama writes in the preface to "The Origins of Political Order." "The first arose when my mentor, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, asked me to write a foreword to a reprint edition of his 1968 classic, 'Political Order in Changing Societies.' " Its second inspiration was the decade that Fukuyama spent studying "the real-world problems of weak and failed states" and that inspired his 2004 book "State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century."

The largest group of protesters yet thronged the Syrian capital, Damascus, in a widening challenge to the government, defying a nationwide crackdown in which hundreds of demonstrators have been killed by security forces. Marches across the country were met with tear gas, beatings and reports of gunfire.

The security forces' apparent inability to keep protesters in different suburbs from converging in a large demonstration was ominous for the government, activists said.

Protesters gathered again in large numbers in cities across Syria on Friday to demand reforms, defying a nationwide crackdown in which dozens of demonstrators have been killed in regular rounds of gunfire from security forces.

Seeking to tamp down the now weekly and deadly protests, the government of President Bashar al-Assad had announced several measures on Thursday meant to mollify demonstrators.

Ahead of another day of planned antigovernment protests on Friday, President Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria took several steps — including announcing an amnesty for some prisoners — to try to satisfy the growing numbers of demonstrators who have taken to the streets in recent weeks.

The government also withdrew its feared state security forces from the coastal city of Baniyas on Thursday, replacing them with regular army troops who are thought to be better liked.

Syria’s growing protest movement broadened on Wednesday as Aleppo, one of Syria’s largest cities, had its first demonstrations against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and a group of women from the coastal village of Bayda, where hundreds were detained this week, marched to demand the release of their husbands and sons.

At least 200 students protested at the University of Aleppo, witnesses and human rights advocates said, until security forces broke up the demonstration, hauling away dozens of students.