Beirut / AFP Turkish-backed rebels captured the emblematic northern Syrian town of Dabiq from the IS group on Sunday, dealing a major symbolic blow to the extremists. The defeat for IS came as US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to meet European allies in London as part of a new diplomatic push to end Syria’s conflict, which ...

  Baghdad / AFP Iraqi aircraft dropped “tens of thousands” of leaflets, some bearing safety instructions for Mosul residents, ahead of an operation to retake the city from extremists, the military said. Iraq has dropped leaflets over Mosul before, and has also done so as part of operations to retake other cities seized by the IS group in 2014 and ...

  Podgorica / AFP Montenegro said it had arrested 20 Serbs for planning to carry out attacks after voting wraps up in the Balkan nation’s tense parliamentary elections on Sunday. The attacks would have targeted the state and possibly “senior state officials”, Montenegro police chief Slavko Stojanovic said in a statement. The 20 were arrested on Saturday night and a 21st ...

  While everyone fixates on the U.S. election, developments in the world economy threaten to create problems for the next president and, possibly, trigger a major financial crisis. A little-noticed study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivers the bad news. It finds that global debt — including the debts of governments, households and non-financial businesses — reached a record ...

The past few weeks of revelations about Donald Trump should convince you of the utility of Twitter’s platform. It is the new news ticker, the way information gets spread at the speed of light by the fastest typists. But that’s merely the networked and mobile technology. If you want to know how valuable the company is, you must ignore the ...

  Cheers rose from prominent voices around the world this month when almost all countries agreed to reduce the climate costs of international air travel. The United Nations and the White House applauded the deal, as did the airline industry and even some environmentalists. Yet the agreement hardly qualifies for the praise. It stands to do little to reduce carbon ...

  There were demonstrations and rallies on Sunday in France, Spain and Poland against the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). While TTIP is in limbo, CETA is to be signed on October 27. But it can only be struck when all 28 EU member states back it. Tuesday (October 18) ...

  Pontianak / AFP A striking bird with monochrome plumage and a formidable “beak”, the helmeted hornbill is being hunted to extinction, one of the latest victims of a thriving global trade in exotic wildlife. For decades poachers in Borneo’s western forests focused on capturing orangutans and sun bears, but in the past few years a surge in demand for ...

  Harare / AFP They sleep outside banks, skimp on meals and sell flowers in hospitals. After long years of work, Zimbabwe’s pensioners are struggling to survive old age as the country’s economy collapses. With banks short of cash to pay out pensions, 80-year-old Gift Kaondera-Shava, a former truck driver, bus conductor and factory supervisor, now scrambles to feed himself ...

CAIRO / AP For two weeks now, the shelf once piled with bags of sugar — for better or worse Egypt’s most loved commodity — has stood empty at this grocery store in bustling downtown Cairo. “This is nothing — they’re missing even more things in my village,” said Mahmoud Sulayman, a former army conscript from the Nile Delta now ...