Hamam al-Alil / AFP Three men set up a fence and a ribbon of yellow and black crime scene tape around a site south of Iraq’s Mosul, marking a mass grave of extremists’ victims. It is one of dozens of such sites discovered in areas around Iraq that have been recaptured from the IS group, whose rule has been defined …

  Kabul / AFP An American-Canadian couple held hostage by the Taliban have appeared in a video for the first time with their two children born in captivity, pleading with President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump to secure their release. Canadian Joshua Boyle and his American wife Caitlan Coleman had two sons after being kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012 during …

  Investors have been anxious for some time about what rising interest rates will mean for US stocks and bonds. The Federal Reserve kicked that anxiety into a higher gear recently. It wasn’t that the Fed raised the fed funds rate a quarter point — everyone knew that was coming. The real news, as my Gadfly colleague Lisa Abramowicz pointed …