Baghdad / AFP The IS group “executed” five Iraqis, including members of the security forces, during ongoing fighting in the western town of Rutba, army officers said on Monday. Extremist fighters launched an attack on Rutba, a remote but strategic town near the Jordanian border in Anbar province, early on Sunday. They briefly seized the mayor’s office before being ...

  Baghdad / AFP Iraq’s joint operations command on Monday denied Turkey was participating in military operations to retake the northern city of Mosul from the IS group. “The spokesman of the Joint Operations Command denies Turkish participation of any kind in operations for the liberation of Nineveh,” a statement said, referring to the Iraqi province of which Mosul is ...

  Jérémie / AFP Rickety structures made of sheet metal and scrap wood are clustered along the road to the Haitian city of Jeremie, which still hasn’t seen any aid nearly three weeks after Hurricane Matthew. In a scene that is eerily similar to the devastation in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, when hundreds of thousands of survivors had to ...

  Moscow / AFP Russia, blaming failures by the US-led coalition and meagre hopes for diplomacy, on Monday ruled out early moves to renew its ceasefire in Aleppo after a brief truce ended at the weekend. “The question of renewing the humanitarian pause is not relevant now,” deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax news agency, in Moscow’s first official ...

  Donald Trump and his populist, nationalist counterparts in Europe are often portrayed as a threat to democracy. Their supporters argue that establishment politicians and technocrats are an even bigger threat because they listen only to the special interests that feed them. Could it be, then, that democracy in its current American and European forms is a threat to itself? ...

  Given the parlous state of Europe’s economy, it’s hard to imagine that the investments of the region’s banks are among the safest in the world. Yet that is precisely what they would have regulators and investors believe. The banks’ safety has come into the spotlight as European officials — including German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and European Commission financial-services ...

  When smoking costs more, more people quit. That’s why higher cigarette taxes are almost always good policy, for smokers and the public health, too. There’s a catch, though — and it’s one that voters in four states should keep in mind as they consider ballot initiatives next month to raise cigarette taxes: Sin taxes work only if they’re high ...

  Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s repeated tirades have raised a wave of worry for the United States. The firebrand leader recently remarked that his country would “separate” from the US. Later, however, he clarified his comment and said he did not plan to sever the nation’s seven-decade alliance with America. For some time now, Duterte has been cozying up to ...

  In the June referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union, 61 percent of the voters in the city of Sunderland voted to quit. As a result, 6,700 jobs at Nissan’s factory there are now in peril as the Japanese carmaker weighs whether to build the next version of its Qashqai model in the northeast of soon-to-be-independent England. ...

  India’s celebrated position as the world’s fastest-growing large economy conceals a dangerous weakness: Too few people seem to want to invest in the country. Even going by the government’s growth figures, private investment is shrinking at an increasing pace — by 1.9 percent between January and March, and by 3.1 percent between April and June. India’s Aspirations The government ...