Greg Myre

With oil around $85 a barrel and tumbling to its lowest levels in several years, here's the upside: Gasoline prices are down, the U.S. is feeling less dependent on foreign crude, and serious economic pressure is growing on oil producers such as Iran and Russia.

Here's the downside: The low ...

Six more clandestine graves have been found in Mexico near the town where 43 students allegedly were abducted by local police working for a drug gang. Relatives and supporters of the students have vowed to hold a week of protests to pressure authorities into finding the disappeared.

According to the ...

The U.S. has been bombing the Islamic State for two months now, and several developments stand out: The extremists are still on the offensive, the U.S. is struggling to find partners on the ground, and for the first time in a quarter-century, a major U.S. military intervention lacks a formal ...

President Obama says the goal is to roundly defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria because the threat is too serious to ignore. But he'd prefer you not call it a war.

In a letter to Congress on Tuesday, the president said, "I have ordered implementation of a new ...

In Iraq, Kurdish militiamen fighting the group that calls itself the Islamic State are key American allies.

In Syria, some Kurdish fighters battling the very same Islamic State are considered part of a terrorist group, according to the U.S. government.

What gives?

In both Iraq and Syria, the ...

As the U.S. steps up arms and training, Syria's "moderate" rebels are joining a long line of resistance movements the Americans have backed over the decades, from Angola to Afghanistan.

The high-water mark was President Reagan's administration in the 1980s, when the U.S. supplied weapons to three rebel groups on ...

Host Jessica Harris speaks with Jeremy Stoppelman, the co-founder and CEO of Yelp. Harris also speaks with Marc Decosta, co-founder of Enigma, a company that makes public data understandable.

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President Obama's plan for an expansive air campaign in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State appears to have broad support, but it will be a major undertaking that could still be playing out on the day he leaves office.

Here are the key points in Obama's plan, with a ...

President Obama previewed his plan for dealing with the Islamic State by comparing it to counterterrorism operations in recent years and said it would not be an invasion akin to the ground war in Iraq.

As he prepares to lay out the details in a speech to the ...

Ever since the Cold War ended, the armies of NATO and Russia have been moving warily toward each other while their political positions keep moving further apart.

Twelve Eastern European countries have joined NATO since the Soviet breakup, and NATO is now on the verge of creating a rapid-reaction force ...

As the U.S. juggles multiple crises in the Middle East, it's a good time to look at the map.

Find Libya. Head east across North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to Pakistan in South Asia. The journey covers eight troubled lands, side by side. In seven, ...

When it comes to humanitarian rescues for persecuted minorities in northern Iraq, the U.S. military has valuable experience that may offer some lessons for the latest mission.

President Obama's call to help some 40,000 members of the Yazidi community, who are trapped on barren mountains and surrounded by ...

Ever since its sweeping victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has been regarded as the dominant military power in the Middle East. No Arab state has risked a full-fledged war in decades, and few question the conventional wisdom that Israel would swiftly defeat any national army in a ...

Israel has unleashed repeated military offensives in the Gaza Strip since 2000 and has never been able to permanently suppress Palestinian rocket fire or seal off the territory's smuggling tunnels.

So why is Israel launching another major ground incursion now, and is there any reason to think the

Ukrainian officials say pro-Russian separatists may have shot down the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed Thursday in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard.

It's rare, but not unprecedented, for civilian airliners to be shot down. In fact, it's happened before in Ukraine, just 13 years ago.

Back in ...

The Islamic caliphates had a long and glorious run, but in the 21st century, they seemed consigned to history. Simply put, a caliphate is an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader, and it has existed in one form or another for most of the 1,400-year history ...

This post was updated at 9:40 p.m. ET to reflect the Obama administration's pressure on the Iraqi government.

A week ago, it would have been difficult to find anyone in the U.S. arguing for renewed U.S. military action in Iraq. Now there's a furious debate about what the U.S. should, ...

As this animated map shows, the extremist Islamist group ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has made major gains since it was created early last year with the goal of establishing an Islamic empire, or caliphate, across the Middle East with little or no regard for existing ...

Joe Cicippio was held hostage by the Islamic group Hezbollah in Lebanon for five years, often chained to a radiator in a room with blacked-out windows, cut off entirely from the outside world. Within weeks of his release in 1991, he asked if he could go back to his ...