The Israeli prime minister is pushing back on U.S. warnings against his coalition taking steps that critics say will undermine judicial independence and democracy.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says the government's choice to delay a vote on a controversial judicial overhaul amounts to a temporary compromise. He tells NPR what he'd like to see next.

The right-wing government's push to get more control of the judiciary system thrust Israel into a crisis. The pushback led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay his plan for at least a month.

Tens of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets of cities to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu firing his defense minister for challenging the Israeli leader's judicial overhaul plan.

The move by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled he will move ahead with a contentious plan to overhaul Israel's judicial system — a plan that has sparked widespread opposition.

A handful of students return to a school in Gaziantep, Turkey, that seeks to help revive old Syrian and Turkish music and integrate refugees.

A group believed to be linked to Iran fired a drone that killed one U.S. contractor and injured six others, the Pentagon said. The U.S. retaliated, and also faced a second attack on Friday.

When the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, NPR's Mideast editor Larry Kaplow was a reporter in Baghdad. Looking back now, he writes that the signs and warnings of the chaos to come were all too clear then.

NPR's Eric Westervelt was among the first Western reporters to reach Iraq's capital during the 2003 U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

On March 20, 2003, the U.S. carried out its first airstrikes in Iraq.

Two decades ago, then-President George W. Bush announced the start of combat operations in Iraq. The bloody occupation that followed lasted longer and cost more in lives and money than anyone guessed.

Camps in Syria have become overcrowded in the northwest of the country after the February 6 earthquake. NPR talks to Dr. Mego Terzian of Doctors without Borders about his assessment of the situation.

The world's biggest oil company has announced it made $161 billion in profits in 2022, a whopping figure for the corporation and its main shareholder, the Saudi government.

Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinian gunmen who opened fire on troops in the occupied West Bank, the military said, the latest bloodshed in a year-long wave of violence in the region.

Settlement talks began a year ago in the 9/11 terrorism case. But little progress has been made, dragging out the future of the problem-plagued U.S. military court and prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.