Syrians, Iraqis and Algerians often choose Lebanon as a refuge when they are persecuted at home. But many find it isn't what they imagined.

Muammar Qaddafi used the schools to promote his ideology and now the new government is purging his influence from curriculums and textbooks.

As Tunisians prepare for the Arab Spring's first free election, they are discovering that democracy, too, can be messy.

The Tunisian revolution that toppled Ben Ali now has an aftermath: street protests against the government put in place to assure the revolution’s goals.

Afghanistan has an estimated one million drug users, a 140% increase since 2005. An increasing number of heroin users are choosing to inject it instead of smoking it, with the result that an HIV epidemic is being born.

For months Tunisians have suspected that loyalists to the former dictator they toppled remain influential in politics. Now, they believe they have proof of it, and are taking to the streets once again.

Police fire on a crowd in a suburb of Damascus, killing four people, as activists organize a 'Day of Martyrs' to honor the more than 70 people killed in recent unrest.

Jordan recent protests reflect a factor peculiar to Jordan – its delicate demographic balance between indigenous tribes, known as "East Bankers," and Palestinians, who have emigrated or fled to Jordan in the past six decades and received Jordanian citizenship.

A vibrant, modern city immersed in a difficult yet
illustrious history, Beirut is more than ready to look to the future — with a nod to the past.

Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Cyprus vie for new natural gas reserves that are already causing political realignments in the region, as the Israelis get closer to Greece.

The ministers walked out in protest as UN investigators are expected to indict Shiite militants for the assassination of former premier Rafiq Hariri.

Fears grow that dispute over investigation into responsibility for prime minister's assassination may prove a flash point for regional strife.

Every evening, thousands of colourful kites soar above the streets of Kabul, a pastime in which Afghans have indulged for centuries. That the endless battles are a metaphor for the nation below does not diminish the pleasure.

Planners are thinking up creative remedies for Lebanon’s transport woes: go offshore or renovate the coastal railway line which served the country well in Ottoman days

Hizbollah's leader accused of "attempting to boycott justice" after calling for the boycott of the UN tribunal on the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

As Muslims prepare to celebrate Eid, many restaurants across the Arab world boost their meat orders by a few crates. But Damascus Gate restaurant—officially the world's biggest —boosts its orders by the ton.

Residents Take to an Underground Network of Tunnels and Caves to Explore City's Past, Paint Murals or Throw a Party

Emerging in the West Bank is a generation of young Palestinian filmmakers, at ease with the camera and fluent in editing and the language of visual storytelling.

Hezbollah Boasts New War Museum to Commemorate Struggle Against Israel

Amid the abandoned real-estate projects, bailout plans and downsized dreams of Dubai, an art market is flourishing.

Young Palestinians have been using cameras to document abuses and misconduct by Israeli forces near the West Bank village of Ni'lin. What has emerged is a generation of talented filmmakers fluent in editing and visual storytelling.

In Ireland, deep recession has left behind hundreds of empty, unsold houses.

Boutique hotels in Damascus and Aleppo offer intimate service in the center of town.

After Lebanon’s long civil war and political turbulence, involvement in politics still means playing by sectarian rules. 
Women’s rights come only after community, religion and cultural identity.

Yasmine Hamdan, 33-year-old front singer for the electropop duo Y.A.S., says vocalizing in Arabic is like working with "a precious metal, a raw metal." With their debut album "Arabology," the duo hopes to strike gold.

In Beirut, you don't hail a cab, it hails you, with a raucous honk. The city's ubiquitous, banged-up Mercedes-Benz taxis -- with their hissing engines, torn upholstery and smoking drivers -- are icons in Lebanon.

Don Duncan travels to Bhutan, the world’s newest democracy, to meet the political leaders and militants shaping the country

The impressive necklace of cliff-perched fortresses that dot this Himalayan nation's mountainous perimeter are a testimony to Bhutan's long-standing effort to keep out foreigners.

The key: a system of trap-doors and tunnels.

On a somber St. Patrick's Day, Belfast carries on as extremists try to end a decade of calm.

The cliff-perched fortresses that dot this Himalayan nation’s mountainous perimeter are a testimony to a long-standing effort to keep out foreigners. But in the 1980s, Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist nation of just 600,000 inhabitants sandwiched between China and India, found itself with what it considered a foreign problem.

From the outside, Afghanistan may seem one of the least safe places to visit, especially now with recent successful or barely contained Taliban attacks in the provinces along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borders and in and around Kabul. Yet a visit there makes it clear that today there are two Afghanistans.

As the destinations begin to flip across the departures board, it becomes a little clearer why this place has earned a reputation as the terminal to hell: Baghdad, Basra, Tehran, Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar and, finally, my destination: Kabul, in Afghanistan.

In the thick of a global financial crisis, many economists have come to this Himalayan kingdom to study a unique economic policy called Gross National Happiness, based on Buddhist principles.

A visit there today makes it clear that there are two Afghanistans. There's the Afghanistan at war, to the south, particularly in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. But there's an Afghanistan at peace, with varying levels of stability from jittery, paranoid Kabul to the carefree Mazar-i-Sharif in the north

Palestinian Youth Bring Their Politics Online

Ireland is seeing an unprecedented boom in Irish language education, but how does the nation's embrace of this old tradition square with its newfound multiculturalism?

The lines between the Afghanistan at war and the Afghanistan at peace alter daily. Cities accessible by road today may only be reached by plane — or not at all — tomorrow. And so follow the boundaries of the nation's tiny tourism industry.

Lebanon proposes to rebuild Nahr al-Bared, the Palestinian city-camp near Tripoli pulverised in a long siege last
year in an attempt to kill Sunni militants holed up there. The new, as yet only imagined, town is intended to preserve the memories of the old, yet return the area to the control of Lebanon.

Loss of Palestinian infrastructure in destroyed camp is costly

A U.N. peacekeeping convoy targeted by a Sunni fundamentalist group south of Beirut.

Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has become almost completely dependent on the foreign assistance the U.S. intervention has brought, Afghans perhaps have good reason for their anxiety over who will be America's next President

business begins to stir again amid the rubble of Nahr al Bared

Profile of novelist Paulo Coelho at his home in the French Pyrenees for City Magazine

Coverage of the Annapolis Conference, Maryland in November 2008

Profile of an American dancer at the Moulin Rouge for The Paris Times

Interview with Bjork for City Magazine on the release of her soundtrack album to Matthew Barney's "Drawing Restraint 9"