Ruth Sherlock
Ruth Sherlock is an International Correspondent with National Public Radio. She's based in Beirut and reports on Syria and other countries around the Middle East. She was previously the United States Editor for the Daily Telegraph, covering the 2016 US election. Before moving to the US in the spring of 2015, she was the Telegraph's Middle East correspondent.
Sherlock reported from almost every revolution and war of the Arab Spring. She lived in Libya for the duration of the conflict, reporting from opposition front lines. In late 2011 she travelled to Syria, going undercover in regime held areas to document the arrest and torture of antigovernment demonstrators. As the war began in earnest, she hired smugglers to cross into rebel held parts of Syria from Turkey and Lebanon. She also developed contacts on the regime side of the conflict, and was given rare access in government held areas.
Her Libya coverage won her the Young Journalist of the Year prize at British Press Awards. In 2014, she was shortlisted at the British Journalism Awards for her investigation into the Syrian regime's continued use of chemical weapons. She has twice been a finalist for the Gaby Rado Award with Amnesty International for reporting with a focus on human rights. With NPR, in 2020, her reporting for the Embedded podcast was shortlisted for the prestigious Livingston Award.
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For a week and a half, Gazans have taken cover in their stairwells and other parts of the house, eating canned foods and hoping they can run out in time — if an airstrike warning comes.
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"This is an embarrassing time for Gulf countries," says political scientist Bessma Momani. "Ultimately, they gave Israel a normalization deal, but didn't really extract anything for the Palestinians."
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Until recently, Marib was under Saudi control. The U.S. has ended support for the Saudi Arabian military intervention in Yemen — which contributed to civilian casualties, famine and displacement.
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Some of the country's last beaches spared from development are now carpeted in globs of tar from an oil spill in the Mediterranean, damaging beaches that are nesting grounds for endangered turtles.
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The conflict has not only pitted the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad against a band of rebels, but drawn the U.S., Iran, Russia and Turkey, among others, into a complex proxy war.
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The dismissal of the lead judge investigating last year's massive blast in Beirut is raising fears of political interference to protect the country's leaders. The blast killed dozens of people.
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A coronavirus surge is overwhelming hospitals, leading doctors to tell families to care for sick loved ones at home instead. Health workers fear New Year's parties could have led to further spikes.
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People were still disembarking from the plane carrying the officials when the explosion hit, causing a large crowd to scatter. More than 20 were killed. There has been no claim of responsibility.
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Hopes from the Arab Spring have mostly been dashed. But the era led to "a radical change in the way people think about the authorities, the state, and about their rights," says an Egyptian journalist.
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That's the situation in Syria, where bread shortages are now widespread — and the queues for daily rations stretch on and on. The same goes for gasoline.