Yusuf Sayman

After Istanbul had the feel of a conflict zone on Tuesday, tensions were rising again on Wednesday night with police and protesters locked in a tense standoff in Taksim Square. Mike Giglio reports.

The streets of central Istanbul, normally home to shoppers and tourists, with hotels and restaurants buzzing until the late hours, had turned into an eerie scene of conflict Tuesday night. The crowds were gone, and many shops had pulled down their iron gates. Along residential side streets, any locals who ventured out moved hurriedly—a man in a surgical mask walking briskly with a bag of groceries; a young woman holding a cloth to her mouth as she sprinted to her door and fumbled with her keys.

Bulent Kilic/Getty

In a big reversal, the United Nations says it wants to open 12 refugee camps in Lebanon for Syrian refugees. Jamie Dettmer reports on the repercussions—and why Hezbollah is opposed.

For months the United Nations insisted it was in full accord with the Lebanese government’s opposition to opening refugee camps in Lebanon for the influx of an estimated 1 million refugees from war-torn Syria, but in a dramatic and unadvertised reversal of policy, U.N. authorities are now proposing establishing a dozen major camps—a move reflecting a grimly deteriorating humanitarian crisis.The decision, which some veteran aid workers criticize as coming far too late, will place the U.

Gregorio Borgia/AP

Priests caught with their pants down have fueled rumors for years that there’s a ‘gay lobby’ in the upper echelons of the Vatican. Now that Pope Francis is said to have confirmed it, what’s he going to do about it?

So, it seems there really are gay priests in the upper echelons of the Vatican hierarchy. At least that’s what Pope Francis reportedly told a group of Latin American prelates in a private audience June 6.The remarks, which were made off-the-cuff and were not meant for the general public, were first published Tuesday in Spanish on the Chilean website Reflexión y Liberación, sourced to the participants in the audience who allegedly spilled the beans on the pope’s address.

Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty

After the Russian president and his wife announced their divorce last week, signs point to a growing role for Putin’s rumored mistress.

Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum

Is Afghanistan destined to be run by a drug mafia?

Ayman Oghanna

Turkey’s protests took a violent turn on Tuesday, as riot police stormed Taksim Square. See photos of the youth powering the ‘Occupy Gezi’ movement.

JM Lopez/AFP/Getty; Maartje Blijdenstein/AFP/Getty

Men from The Netherlands and other European countries are taking up arms in Syria. But are they even more dangerous than the local fighters? Nadette De Visser reports.

The gruesome video of a beheading in Syria that surfaced on the Internet recently was shocking by any measure. But when people in Belgium and The Netherlands listened to the voices in the background, the terror hit home. The men brutally sawing through their victim’s throat were speaking Dutch, or perhaps the Belgian variant, Flemish, and sometimes switching to French. Suddenly, both Brussels and The Hague, while trying to gauge the authenticity of the footage, are starting to rethink the impact of the Syrian war on Europe.

Lam Yik Fei/Getty

Riot police surged past barricades, filling the air with tear gas and ending the relative calm of Turkey’s Occupy movement. What happened to peace? Mike Giglio reports from Istanbul.

Editor's note: This piece has been updated as news is breaking. For more than a week, protesters had free rein of central Istanbul’s Taksim Square, massing daily in defiance of the government as authorities kept away. Flags and political banners hung from the square’s main monument—a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic—and makeshift barricades blocked the surrounding streets. But the tentative peace that had settled over the area came to an abrupt end on Tuesday morning as riot police surged past the barricades and back into the square.

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

Even as protesters were under attack and tear gas floated through the streets, novelist Elif Shafak found humor, bonhomie, and pride among Turkey’s demonstrators. She writes about the slogans and stories that keep hope alive in Gezi Park.

Now that the protests have subsided and the police have retreated from the streets, there is the familiar smell of salt and seaweed in the wind, instead of pepper spray and tear gas. After days of tension, citizens have started to exchange anecdotes. Suddenly everyone has a story to tell.One of these stories is about a muezzin who, in the middle of the night, found outside his mosque a number of protesters who had been running away from tear gas.

Patrick Semansky/AP; inset: Getty

The top-secret ‘Q Group’ has been chasing Edward Snowden since he disappeared in May. Eli Lake on the intel community’s internal police—and why the agency is in ‘complete freakout mode.’

Even before last week’s revelations by The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting call records from telecommunications companies and had the ability to mine user data from major U.S. Internet companies, the NSA was already on the trail of the leaker, according to two former U.S. intelligence officers with close ties to the agency.On Sunday, The Guardian revealed its source—a 29-year-old former U.S. Army soldier and CIA employee named Edward Snowden.