As unrest continues in Syria, Bruce Riedel explains the complex religious differences within the country and its army. At stake is the future of Syria -- and the region...

The former speaker's top aides bolted en masse Thursday, leaving his campaign in tatters. Peter J. Boyer on staffers complaints about gingrich's rogue inclinations, the Greek cruise with wife Callista that was the final straw -- and whether the candidate has any chance of recovering....

In its eighth year, the Iraq war tends to fade in and out of the headlines. But for artist Megan Rye, whose solo-show opened at the Forum Gallery in New York this week, it's always at the forefront of her mind.

"I could paint this subject forever,” Rye said while seated in the gallery, surrounded by 28 oil paintings that depict scenes from military life taken during the war. "I'll never get to the bottom of it."..

German vegetable sprouts caused the E. coli outbreak that has killed 31 people and sickened more than 3,000, investigators announced Friday after tracking the bacteria from patients in hospital beds to restaurants and then farm fields...

In 1957 a 30 year-old engineer named Max Mathews got an IBM 704 mainframe computer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N. J., to generate 17 seconds of music, then recorded the result for posterity.  While not the first person to make sound with a computer, Max was the first one to do so with a replicable combination of hardware and software that allowed the user to specify what tones he wanted to hear. This piece of music, called “The Silver Scale”  and composed by a colleague at Bell Labs named Newman Guttman, was never intended to be a masterpiece. It was a proof-of-concept, and it laid the groundwork for a revolutionary advancement in music, the reverberations of which are felt everywhere today...

The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials...

LAST NOVEMBER, at the annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council, which took place in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Billings, Montana, I watched a cowboy cry.

As someone born east of the Mississippi, I’m aware that I may have my vocabulary words mixed up here. The crying man called himself a rancher, not a cowboy. But he had the hat. The legs in the blue jeans were bowed. And he said things like, Sometimes you have to ride with the brand, and sometimes you have to speak yer mind.

Which sounded like cowboy talk to me...

Ready for some real summer reading? Mother Jones, msnbc.com, and ProPublica will be unveiling a searchable database containing 24,000-plus pages of correspondence. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I filed a request under Alaska's open records law, for all—yes, all—of Palin's gubernatorial emails. Other journalists and citizen activists later did the same. And after many delays—see here and here—the state is finally preparing to release those emails, probably within the next week or so. But not all of the emails from Palin's half-term as governor will be made public...

From a mountaintop in northern Chile, the largest visible-light telescope in the world has captured stunning images of the cosmos in never-before-seen detail. The Paranal Observatory released initial images Wednesday from the powerful VLT Survey Telescope...