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  California / AFP Weary firefighters on Thursday battled a raging inferno that was threatening the homes of more than 82,000 people in southern California and sent flaming “firenadoes” tearing across the brush. Nearly 1,600 firefighters were fighting the giant blaze, but had only contained four percent of it, according to a fire service official. Dramatic local TV news footage ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israel’s hardline defence minister Avigdor Lieberman has a new “carrot and stick” policy for the West Bank that will penalise the hometowns of Palestinian attackers while rewarding others, his ministry said on Thursday. Under the policy, Palestinian families, villages and towns that are linked to attackers will face extra punitive measures, while those that are not will ...

  Hanoi / AFP Two senior communist officials were shot dead by a colleague at their offices in northern Vietnam, state media reported on Thursday, a rare high profile gun homicide in the country. Northern Yen Bai province’s most senior official, party chief Pham Duy Cuong and head of the provincial people’s council Ngo Ngoc Tuan, were gunned down by a ...

  Ankara/ AFP Eastern Turkey was rocked by two deadly bombings against police as Kurdish guerrillas launched a new campaign of attacks targeting areas that are not predominantly Kurdish. The car bombings—less than 12 hours apart—killed at least 10 people in total and injured over 200, officials said Thursday, blaming the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The rebels, who have been ...

  Khartoum / AFP UN chief Ban Ki-moon has expressed disappointment over the failure of talks between the Sudanese government and rebels on a ceasefire in Darfur and two other conflict zones. The talks on a cessation of hostilities in Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan were held in Addis Ababa last week after three prominent rebel groups signed a roadmap ...

Tokyo / AFP Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi met Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday as her country’s new civilian authorities seeks to cement ties with Beijing—long the former military junta’s protector. The five-day visit—with the suspension of a giant Beijing-backed dam project set to dominate talks—is Suu Kyi’s first major foreign trip since her government took ...

  We are such an anxiety-ridden society that we worry about problems that haven’t happened, and, almost certainly, won’t. Robots are an apt example. Even McKinsey and Co., the high-powered management consulting firm, professes to be concerned. We imagine hordes of robots destroying jobs, leaving millions of middle-class families without work and income. Relax. Unless we adopt self-destructive policies, this ...

  The world is braced for the discovery of a fifth fundamental force of nature — the four known ones being electromagnetism, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear forces — that subverts the so-called standard model of particle physics. Given the lackluster outlook for global growth, maybe economics needs a similar revolution. Quantitative easing’s failure to quash the threat of ...

  Economists regularly point out that the U.S. has recovered from the recession of 2007 to 2009 much more strongly than other countries. If only it were so. True, the U.S. stands out if one looks only at gross domestic product. For example, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development pointed out recently that U.S. GDP has expanded by more ...

  The Federal Reserve is playing it safe amid the looming uncertainty. That’s what the minutes of its last meeting on July 26-27 reflect. The Fed officials are still divided over interest-rate hike, even though New York Fed chief William Dudley flagged the prospect of an increase as soon as September. However, the minutes clearly show that the policy makers ...