As the push to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi has stalled, journalists have increasingly borne the brunt of the frustrations of Libya's rebels. Although the foreign press was eagerly welcomed just months ago, reporters in rebel-controlled areas have recently been harassed and intimidated. Officials of the rebel-led National Transitional Council have steadily begun to treat correspondents as hostile elements: some have been prohibited from filming bomb scenes; others have been accused of being spies. In several incidents in the ...

Muammar Gaddafi faces a potential war crimes trial at The Hague after the International Criminal Court on Monday issued arrest warrants for the Libyan leader, along with his son Saif al-Islam and his military intelligence chief General Abdullah al-Sanoussi. The warrants allege that all three men were involved in ordering security forces to open fire on unarmed protesters last February, turning a peaceful protest movement into a four-month civil war. The arrest warrants turn the regime's top ...

When the U.S. and France asked Russia last month to help mediate the war in Libya, they were probably not expecting a self-proclaimed emissary of alien life to show up in Tripoli for a meeting with Muammar Gaddafi. But on Sunday evening, as NATO air strikes continued on the Libyan capital, the besieged Colonel took the time to entertain a Russian politician named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, best known for his claims that extraterrestrials took him on a mystical ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in La Stampa . The Tunisian island of Djerba has for all intents and purposes become a Libyan colony. Since the beginning of the civil war, almost 50,000 Libyans have escaped to Tunisia, and 5,000 of them have flocked to Djerba, a popular tourist destination before the wave of revolts ...

"I have to close my restaurant when it gets dark," complains Ahmad al-Dursi, 43, the owner of a small hamburger joint in Benghazi, the capital of what is called Free Libya. But it is not completely free yet. "It is not safe here with the revolutionary committees still active," says al-Dursi, referring to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's loyalists who have terrorized the population for most of Gaddafi's 42 years in power. Though Gaddafi's troops withdrew from eastern Libya ...

Muammar Gaddafi's options for a peaceful exit may have finally run out. For the second time in seven weeks, South African President Jacob Zuma on Monday failed to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his 42-year rule. Gaddafi's refusal to heed the advice of longtime friends in the African Union raises the likelihood that his reign will end either with his indictment by the International Criminal Court in The Hague or with his death in ...

On Thursday, as NATO war planes prepared fresh strikes against the compound of Muammar Gaddafi, his prime minister, Baghdadi al-Mahmudi, put in an urgent call to Moscow. After months of civil war, he said, Gaddafi was ready to negotiate a ceasefire and he needed Russia to mediate the talks. That same day in the French resort town of Deauville, the French and U.S. presidents, who have been leading the bombing raids against Gaddafi, reportedly came to their ...

The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat used to be called "the great survivor." Syria's President Bashar al-Assad may be succeeding to the title. Many observers had expected Barack Obama to use a much-anticipated speech on the Middle East to call for Assad to step down, much as Washington has demanded that Muammar Gaddafi relinquish power in Libya. The signs were not good: the day before, the U.S. had slapped sanctions on Assad himself as well as ...

Muammar Gaddafi and his family could be hit with war-crimes indictments within the coming weeks for his brutal crackdown against unarmed protesters in eastern Libya last February, turning him and his top officials into international fugitives — and probably burying any hope of a ceasefire deal or an arrangement for quiet exile for Gaddafi and his family as a way of ending the war. As if to emphasize the regime's defiance on Wednesday, Gaddafi loyalists shelled the ...

Ever since the end of the cold War, the U.S. has been the dominant and unrivaled power in the Middle East. That situation is changing, not because another great power is entering the region but because the Arabs are becoming more independent, unlikely to ally themselves submissively to any outside patron. Egypt's decision to establish relations with Iran and Hamas is one part of this trend. Washington cannot change it, nor should it try. This is the ...