Beirut / AFP Fighting raging between rival extremist rebel factions to control a key opposition stronghold near Damascus since late last month has killed more than 300 fighters, a monitor said on Sunday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the clashes in Eastern Ghouta pitted Jaish Al-Islam faction, which has been taking part in peace talks in Geneva, against ...

  Baghdad / AFP Suicide attackers broke into a gas plant north of Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least seven people and setting fire to gas tanks, officials said. The attack on the Taji plant, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the capital, took place at around 6 am (0300 GMT). Eight suicide bombers broke into the gas plant ...

  Ankara/ AFP Members of Turkey’s right-wing MHP party were prevented from holding a congress on Sunday aimed at unseating longtime leader Devlet Bahceli and recovering ground lost to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party. Dissidents from the Nationalist Movement Party launched a campaign to oust Bahceli, 68, after a general election in November in which the party shed half its support—taking ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he told the French foreign minister that Paris’s support of a UNESCO resolution on Jerusalem cast doubt on the impartiality of a peace initiative it is promoting. “I told him that the scandalous resolution accepted at UNESCO with France’s support, that does not recognise the bond of thousands of ...

  Washington / AFP US authorities and Internet giants are boosting attempts to counter the IS group’s online propaganda, though it is unclear how effective these efforts are in hampering the extremists’ public-relations machine. With calls to holy war and highly produced videos of IS fighters in battle or killing captives, the IS group has long used the Internet and ...

It’s time to cut the GDP some slack. Overhauling the GDP — as some critics would — threatens to politicize one of our most useful economic indicators. It could be twisted to advance or retard political agendas. This is a bad idea. First, some background. GDP stands for “gross domestic product,” and it’s our standard measure of economic growth. When ...

  The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement will face its first acid test when signatories gather in Bonn, Germany, on Monday to iron out details and set new mechanisms to fund climate adaptation projects amid reports the global warming has caused the water-rise that vanished five Islands of Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. Against the backdrop of such a grim ...

  Andrew Collier SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Vietnam later this month, taken together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, signals a closer economic alliance between the two countries. The TPP will be a boon to Vietnam – but could be a problem for China. The TPP – which has been signed but not ratified ...

  Christopher Flavelle The proposal boiled down to just three paragraphs in the Federal Register: Would it be a good idea, the Federal Emergency Management Agency wondered, if Washington gave states a financial incentive to pass building codes, better protecting their residents against the effects of climate change? That was in January. By March, the response from states was clear: ...

  While showing off some new UAZ Patriot pickup trucks armed with machine guns and grenade launchers to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, a general couldn’t open the door of one of the trucks and, in his desperate desire to please the commander-in-chief, ripped off the door handle. “Well done,” Putin said, laughing. Meanwhile, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ...