Greg Myre

In a wide-ranging interview with NPR, the president says U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century should focus on diplomacy and counter-terrorism rather than large-scale military operations.

Pop quiz: How many popes have visited Jerusalem over the past 2,000 years?

What papal destination could be more natural than the Holy Land, where the pontiff can walk Jerusalem's stone streets and follow the footsteps of Jesus. Popes have dispatched envoys, emissaries and even Crusader armies to claim the ...

Thailand has a beloved king. The country has had one of the more prosperous economies in Asia. It's a magnet for Western tourists. Its history is largely peaceful. By most measures, Thailand has been very successful.

So why has the country now had a dozen coups, plus many ...

Happiness, it seems, is still a controversial topic in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme leader after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, offered this pronouncement years ago: "There is no fun in Islam."

In keeping with the ayatollah, police arrested six young Iranians and held them for a day after they playfully ...

Until a few months ago, the U.S. government was effectively boycotting Narendra Modi, the man who is virtually certain to be India's next prime minister following the landslide victory by his party in the country's parliamentary elections.

So will the U.S. now warm to Modi as the elected ...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s seminal ruling Brown v. Board of Education that stated separate but equal public education was unconstitutional, turns 60 on May 17.

Desegregation did not come easily to most parts of the U.S., especially in the South.

Here & Now’s Robin Young speaks to two Southern ...

Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul spent several years and all his money to make a moving documentary about an American singer, Sixto Rodriguez, who was unknown in the U.S. yet somehow became a legend in South Africa.

The strange twist was that for decades Rodriguez worked as an impoverished laborer in ...

When South Africa buried apartheid with its first all-race election in 1994, the Rev. Desmond Tutu danced with joy as he cast his ballot. He called it "a religious experience, a transfiguration experience, a mountaintop experience."

As the country votes Wednesday, here's what he recently told ...

Children are abducted with depressing regularity in African conflicts, but the seizure of more than 250 schoolgirls in Nigeria is a particularly strange and baffling case.

The radical Islamist group Boko Haram has now released a video saying it seized the girls from their boarding school on April ...

Seven years after a violent split, the two main Palestinian factions said Wednesday that they are attempting to reconcile and form a national unity government within five weeks.

The Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas have tried several times to resolve their feud, but those efforts quickly unraveled.

So ...

Anja Niedringhaus was a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. Kathy Gannon has covered Afghanistan for more than 25 years, longer than any other Western reporter.

The two AP journalists knew their way around dangerous places and shared a special gift for finding the humanity in the most war-ravaged places, something ...

Should the United States free Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life for spying for Israel?

Pollard's case bubbles to the surface periodically, and suddenly his fate has become central to Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts to keep alive the shaky ...

Crimea appears to be on the fast track for joining up with Russia after Sunday's referendum vote in favor of union with Moscow.

Ukraine and the West are adamantly opposed to the Russian annexation of Crimea, but what are they prepared to do about it? Here's a look at the ...

Redrawing national borders may feel like a historical relic that belongs to an earlier century, yet Crimea's crisis shows there are still places that don't fit neatly on the map — and may not for years to come.

Just last month, Crimea was part of Ukraine. On Sunday, Crimeans vote ...

Ukraine appears rather helpless in the face of the Russian intervention in Crimea. But what if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons? The confrontation might look rather different, and perhaps much scarier.

When Ukraine gained independence in the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, it inherited a nuclear arsenal that included ...

Russia has effectively taken control of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula without a shot fired in anger. Now a larger question looms: What is Russian President Vladimir Putin's ultimate goal in Ukraine?

Russia and pro-Russian groups in Ukraine are moving swiftly to consolidate their hold on Crimea. Ukraine's interim government ...

Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union for its fertile fields of wheat. Now it's just a basket case. The outgoing finance minister said the country needed $35 billion to stave off bankruptcy over the next couple years.

Some analysts say that figure may be on the ...

The worldview of Russian President Vladimir Putin could be summed up along these lines:

Moscow's precipitous decline in global influence since the Soviet breakup must be reversed. Russia must be respected as the dominant power in former Soviet republics like Ukraine. Russia is entitled to a strong voice in the ...

The Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago, yet genuine democracy is still a stranger in most of the 15 former republics. Ukraine, where at least 25 people were killed on Tuesday, is just the latest bloody example.

From President Vladimir Putin's hard-line rule in Russia to the 20-year ...

As the Syrian government and opposition forces try to make peace in Geneva, the group Human Rights Watch has issued a new report that accuses the regime of demolishing entire neighborhoods that were considered opposition strongholds.

The report, "Razed to the Ground," was issued Thursday and ...