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Baghdad / AP Backed by paramilitary forces and aerial support, Iraqi troops on Tuesday launched a new push to retake a key area north of the capital, Baghdad, and dislodge IS militants from there, officials said. According to a statement by the Joint Operations Command, the “new offensive” began at dawn in a swath agricultural area northeast of the city ...

Narobi / AFP Vietnam is suffering its worst drought in nearly a century with salinisation hitting farmers especially hard in the crucial southern Mekong delta, experts said Monday. “The water level of the Mekong River has gone down to its lowest level since 1926, leading to the worst drought and salinisation there,” Nguyen Van Tinh, deputy head of the hydraulics ...

Calais / AFP French authorities razed parts of the “Jungle” migrant camp for a second day on Tuesday while thousands of refugees were blocked in Greece as Europe strained to contain the flood of desperate people at its borders. Tensions were high in the northern French port city of Calais as workers continued dismantling the southern half of the notorious ...

Cape Town / AFP Beleaguered South African President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday faced a no-confidence vote in parliament for a second time in less than a year and a legal bid to reinstate corruption charges against him. The mounting pressure on the president comes against a background of economic crisis sparked by his firing of two finance ministers within days ...

Donald Trump’s distinctive rhetorical style — think of a drunk with a bullhorn reading aloud James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” under water — poses an almost insuperable challenge to people whose painful duty is to try to extract clarity from his effusions. For example, last week, during a long stream of semi-consciousness in Fort Worth, this man who as president would ...

With the manufacturing sector declining and showing poor figures worldwide partly due to prospects of global economic slowdown, the service sector is widening and may likely fill in the gap to help shore up the world economic growth. The dwindling manufacturing sector isn’t new, as the manufacturing employment has been falling everywhere, including China. By contrast, the service sector has ...

Russia remains the largest supplier of military equipment to India, according to information supplied by India’s Ministry of Defense and quoted by TASS. Over the past three years, Russian defense deals with India exceeded 340 billion rupees (over $5 billion), with the United States coming in at a close second with 300 billion rupees (around $4.4 billion) in deals. Over ...

In an astonishing fashion, and going against everything political scientists have long thought about U.S. politics, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is shooting to the top of the field of candidates. Moreover, Trump is quietly gaining unexpected support in a far-away country: China. Increasingly, Chinese netizens follow Trump’s primary and caucus wins, which have been coming one after the other. ...

Vietnam has been among Asia’s top performers in recent times, bucking a region-wide trade recession despite tensions with China, its biggest trading partner. For the nation’s reformers though, Vietnam’s economic and political rise could be just about to start. In a joint report released February 23 by the Vietnamese government and the World Bank, the authors suggested the Southeast Asian ...

China’s growth is slowing, probably for good. But the form that the slowdown is taking isn’t yet known. The question is whether China’s troubles will be more like a typical emerging-market crisis, or more like the typical bust in a large developed country. Every nation undergoes a growth slump at some point. For good background on the phenomenon, check out ...