London / AP British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wrote an article urging that Britain stay in the EU just days before becoming the chief campaigner for Brexit, the Sunday Times newspaper reported. In the previously unseen column, Johnson asserted that remaining in the European Union would be “a boon for the world and for Europe”. He warned that Brexit ...

  Lausanne / AFP US Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to build momentum behind a new drive to end the Syrian civil war on Sunday after high-level talks with Russia and the country’s neighbours. Kerry was due to fly to London to brief Washington’s European allies after “brainstorming” talks in Lausanne with the main players in Syria’s bloody five-year-old ...

  Jerusalem/ AFP Israel closed off the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on Sunday for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the army said, as concerns rose over whether visits to a sensitive holy site could lead to violence. The restrictions barring Palestinians from entering would remain in place through Monday, but humanitarian cases would be allowed passage, said an army ...

  Dhaka / AFP Security was tightened in a Bangladesh southern city on Sunday ahead of the expected execution of a senior extremist whose group has been linked to the murder of foreign hostages, police said. Asadul Islam, a leader of the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) who is also known as Arif, is due to hang in Khulna after the Supreme ...

  Beirut / AFP Turkish-backed rebels captured the emblematic northern Syrian town of Dabiq from the IS group on Sunday, dealing a major symbolic blow to the extremists. The defeat for IS came as US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to meet European allies in London as part of a new diplomatic push to end Syria’s conflict, which ...

  Baghdad / AFP Iraqi aircraft dropped “tens of thousands” of leaflets, some bearing safety instructions for Mosul residents, ahead of an operation to retake the city from extremists, the military said. Iraq has dropped leaflets over Mosul before, and has also done so as part of operations to retake other cities seized by the IS group in 2014 and ...

  Podgorica / AFP Montenegro said it had arrested 20 Serbs for planning to carry out attacks after voting wraps up in the Balkan nation’s tense parliamentary elections on Sunday. The attacks would have targeted the state and possibly “senior state officials”, Montenegro police chief Slavko Stojanovic said in a statement. The 20 were arrested on Saturday night and a 21st ...

  While everyone fixates on the U.S. election, developments in the world economy threaten to create problems for the next president and, possibly, trigger a major financial crisis. A little-noticed study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivers the bad news. It finds that global debt — including the debts of governments, households and non-financial businesses — reached a record ...

The past few weeks of revelations about Donald Trump should convince you of the utility of Twitter’s platform. It is the new news ticker, the way information gets spread at the speed of light by the fastest typists. But that’s merely the networked and mobile technology. If you want to know how valuable the company is, you must ignore the ...

  Cheers rose from prominent voices around the world this month when almost all countries agreed to reduce the climate costs of international air travel. The United Nations and the White House applauded the deal, as did the airline industry and even some environmentalists. Yet the agreement hardly qualifies for the praise. It stands to do little to reduce carbon ...