Kuala Lumpur / AFP A Malaysian opposition politician who worked on native land rights issues was shot dead on Tuesday six weeks after a failed run for a local assembly seat. Bill Kayong, 43, was gunned down in his pickup truck while stopped at a traffic light in the small city of Miri in Sarawak state, police said. Kayong …

  BEIRUT / AP The IS group has launched a counteroffensive in Syria’s northern province of Raqqa, retaking wide areas the militants recently lost to government troops. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday that the government forces have lost all territories they gained in Raqqa province since launching their offensive in early June. The IS-linked Aamaq …

  BAGHDAD / AP A senior Iraqi military commander says about 2,500 IS militants have been killed during a month-long offensive to recapture the city of Fallujah. The counterterrorism forces’ chief in the operation, Lt. General Abdul-Wahab Al Saadi, told the local al-Sumaria TV late on Monday that the number of IS fighters inside Fallujah ranged between 3,500 to 4,000 …

  Dubai / AFP Iran has warned Bahrain that it is fanning armed rebellion and “will pay the price” after an escalating crackdown on the country’s Shiite majority saw a top cleric stripped of citizenship. Washington and the United Nations have also raised concerns about moves by the Sunni-ruled kingdom against Shiites, who account for some 70 percent of the …

  Kandahar / AFP Taliban on Tuesday kidnapped around two dozen people after pulling them off buses in southern Afghanistan, officials said, the latest in series of abductions on the country’s increasingly dangerous highways. The pre-dawn incident in Washer district of Helmand province comes a day after militants killed more than 20 people, including 14 Nepali security guards, in a …

  Brussels / AFP EU ambassadors agreed to roll over damaging economic sanctions against Russia for six months in the absence of any progress on resolving the Ukraine conflict, European sources said on Tuesday. The measures target the oil, financial and defence sectors of the Russian economy and were first imposed after the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 …

Seoul / AFP North Korea appears to be readying another test of a powerful, new medium-range missile, following a series of failures for a ballistic weapons programme that aspires to threaten the US mainland, multiple reports said on Tuesday. Japanese and South Korean media quoted official sources as saying North Korea looked to have deployed a so-called Musudan missile near …

  Here’s something you probably already know about Latin America: In a region ravaged by graft and political payola, regard for elected authorities is dragging bottom. Serial corruption scandals are one of the main reasons why dissatisfaction with democracy is higher in this region than in any other. Here’s something you may not know: The long-flawed justice system is on …

History of aviation is being rewritten in our lifetime, as the Solar Impulse 2 project is getting closer to completing a world tour in an ultralight one-man aircraft intended to demonstrate how best technology may provide solutions to combat global warming and advance aviation industry. The sun-powered Solar Impulse 2 set off from New York’s JFK airport early Monday, embarking …

  Mark Buchanan sometimes say that there’s no need to rush in addressing climate change — that our constantly increasing wealth will eventually make the problem relatively inexpensive to solve. Thanks to some careful mathematical research, that argument is looking increasingly wrong. Placing a value on something that may happen 50 or 100 years from now isn’t easy. Economists typically …