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  BANGKOK / AP It’s more than eight times bigger than Vatican City and twice the size of Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Wat, making it quite possibly the world’s biggest religious complex. Yet few non-Buddhists have heard of Wat Dhammakaya, a sprawling, extravagant temple compound north of Bangkok that has been at the center of a high-profile power struggle between monks ...

  LONDON / AP A vehicle mowed down pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing at least one woman and leaving others with injuries described as catastrophic. Around the same time on Wednesday, a knife-wielding attacker stabbed a police officer and was shot on the grounds outside Britain’s Parliament, sending the compound into lockdown. Authorities said they were treating the attacks ...

  BEIRUT / AP Syrian activists said on Wednesday that dozens of people were killed or missing after an airstrike the day before leveled a school near the IS-held city of Raqqa where displaced families had sought refuge. The activist-run group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said some 50 families had been sheltering at the school in the northern Syrian ...

  BEIJING / AP China is not building an environmental monitoring station on a disputed South China Sea shoal, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, apparently denying remarks made by a local official last week that prompted a request for clarification from rival claimant the Philippines. Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said reports about the facility on Scarborough Shoal had been checked ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Afghanistan wants the United States to send more forces to help meet shortfalls in the battle against the Taliban and the IS group, the nation’s top diplomat said. Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani welcomed a recent call by US Gen. John Nicholson, the top American commander in Afghanistan, for a few thousand more troops from the US ...

  Mend it, don’t end it’ was Bill Clinton’s rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to ‘repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Obamacare) look increasingly like ‘mend it, don’t end it.’ The problem is not that, as is frequently said, no entitlement can be ended. The most consequential legislation of the 1990s, the 1996 welfare reform, repealed ...

  Among financial geeks, the repurchase market is seen as the lifeblood of a monetary system. Without it, banks can’t really operate. China’s seized up, prompting the People’s Bank to perform an emergency cardiac massage. Other regulators in Beijing may want to look on closely, because they may be called upon to undertake a similar maneuver shortly. To understand what ...

  The Federal Reserve might be doing the right thing for the US economy by moving to bring interest rates back up to normal. But for foreign companies and governments that have borrowed trillions of US dollars, the adjustment could be painful. Thanks in large part to a prolonged period of extremely low US interest rates, borrowers around the world ...

  North Korea launched yet another missile. The missile test, though it turned out to be damp-squib, is nevertheless evidence of Pyongyang’s continued determination to develop intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). It seems there is nothing which can hold it back from pursuing its nuclear ambitions. North Korea is pushing hard to upgrade its weapons systems to cope with the so ...

  Abu Dhabi / WAM Khalifa University was ranked the 76th best university in Asia, according to the latest Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings. This prestigious placement follows the decade-old university’s naming as the top university in the UAE, according to 2016 THE World University Rankings and QS 2016 World University Ranking. In addition, the university was ranked fourth ...