BAGHDAD / AP Iraqi troops consolidated gains in their advance on the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, regrouping as they clear neighbourhoods and houses once occupied by the IS group. In Mosul proper, where troops have a foothold in a sliver of territory in the city’s east, the special forces control the Zahra neighborhood, once named after former dictator …

  Hebron / AFP Israeli forces have sealed off the West Bank home of a Palestinian accused of helping plan an attack in Tel Aviv that left four Israelis dead, the Israeli army and residents said on Thursday. The army said the home of Younes Zein, 22, in Yatta, south of the flashpoint city of Hebron, was sealed off overnight. …

  Moscow / AFP Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency is reporting that the armed forces chief of staff has criticized Donald Trump for his past harsh words about confronting Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf. The Thursday report quotes Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri as saying, “The person who has recently achieved power, has talked off the top of his head! …

  Moscow / AFP Russia’s defence ministry on Thursday dismissed as “counterproductive” a request from the United Nations to extend future pauses in fighting to allow aid into rebel-held eastern Aleppo as winter comes. The ministry said it received a request from the head of a UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, to make future breaks in fighting longer to …

  Istanbul / AFP President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday hailed the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the 78th anniversary of his death but added the country’s influence should go well beyond the borders of the state he created. Ataturk, who died on November 10, 1938, founded Turkey as a secular republic in 1923 out of the …

  BEIJING /AFP A top Chinese police official was elected president of Interpol on Thursday, setting off alarm bells among rights advocates over abuses and a lack of transparency within China’s legal system, as well as the potential misuse of the police organization to attack Beijing’s political opponents. Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei was named as the first Chinese …

  Moscow/ AFP Russia’s security service said on Thursday it had detained several people in Crimea, accusing them of being saboteurs sent by Kiev to the Moscow-annexed peninsula to attack infrastructure targets. Russia’s FSB security service on Wednesday “detained members of a sabotage-terrorist group from the main intelligence directorate of the Ukrainian defence ministry,” it said in a statement. The …

  At dawn on Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, America’s easternmost point, it was certain that by midnight in Cape Wrangell, Alaska, America’s westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did not deserve to win. The surprise is that Barack Obama must have immediately seen his legacy, a compound of stylistic …

  Welcome, American liberals. Welcome to the special torment of discovering that you do not know your country. You thought, no doubt, you were exempt — immune from the shocks that liberals throughout the world have felt in recent years. And I can understand why: Because while you have suffered defeats at the hands of Reagan and the Bushes, and …

  Donald Trump has made history as the first man with no government experience to reach the highest office in the land — and as the least popular and most divisive candidate ever to do so. The burden is now on him to leave a mean-spirited campaign behind and demonstrate that he can bring people together to move the country …