Mogadishu / AFP A Shabaab suicide bomber rammed a vehicle loaded with explosives into an African Union military base in central Somalia on Tuesday, a security official said. The explosion was followed by heavy gunfire at the Djiboutian base in the city of Beledweyne. Witness Ismail Mahad described seeing “clouds of smoke caused by the heavy blast” followed by “exchange ...

  Qaraqosh / AFP Iraqi forces were inching to within striking distance of eastern Mosul on Tuesday as defence chiefs from the US-led coalition met in Paris to review the offensive on the extremist bastion. Paramilitary forces were also massing near the battlefield to open a western front they say will aim to retake the town of Tal Afar and ...

  Ankara / AFP Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday Ankara could launch a ground operation in Iraq to remove any threats to Turkey that may arise. “If there is a threat posed to Turkey, we are ready to use all our resources including a ground operation… to eliminate that threat,” Cavusoglu said in an interview with Kanal ...

  Jakarta / AFP Southeast Asia faces a growing risk of extremist violence as IS group supporters increasingly work together, but law enforcement agencies are unprepared for the new threat, a report warned on Tuesday. The main danger lies in the strife-torn southern Philippines, where a handful of extremist groups have sworn allegiance to IS, according to the report from think-tank ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran’s intelligence minister said on Tuesday that a British-Iranian member of its nuclear negotiating team had been cleared of spying allegations, state media reported. Abdolrasoul Dorri Esfahani, part of the team that secured a nuclear accord with world powers last year, was arrested in August and described by a judiciary spokesman as an “infiltrating spy”. But in ...

Economies need competition to work. Almost all basic economic theories, including supply and demand itself, rely on the assumption that companies lower prices to undercut the competition whenever possible. If sellers can set whatever prices they like, that’s a monopoly. And as any good Econ 101 class will teach you, monopolies hold production below its economically efficient level, in order ...

  Change can sneak up on lawmakers and judges, rendering old laws obsolete. Often, that’s harmless. (When was the last time you ran afoul of Reno’s ban on benches in streets or Wyoming’s prohibition on fishing with firearms?) But sometimes, laws that once served a good purpose can get in the way of progress. That’s what’s going on now in ...

  He is the least sentimental of the media moguls, known for being a dispassionate judge of a business’s worth. And now he wants to sell Time Warner. Maybe we should be listening to what Jeff Bewkes is telling us. Sure, there are lots of other things one can discuss regarding the AT&T-Time Warner deal: AT&T’s plan for a 5G-wireless ...

  London / AFP The British government approved a new third runway at London’s Heathrow airport on Tuesday in a long-awaited decision that comes amid deep divisions and follows decades of debate over the issue. “The government today announced its support for a new runway at Heathrow — the first full length runway in the southeast since the Second World ...

  Bloomberg Southend airport, seeking to become London’s sixth hub even though it’s almost an hour away on the North Sea, will operate its own flights in a bid to demonstrate the viability of an expanded timetable to carriers frustrated by capacity curbs at the far bigger Heathrow and Gatwick bases. The services to cities in mainland Europe will employ ...