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The Iraqi army says it is preparing military operations to retake western Mosul, the last urban stronghold in Iraq of so-called Islamic State.

The preparations follow a recent offensive which officials said on Wednesday had recaptured nearly all of the city’s east.

Counter-terror chief Talib Shaghati said special forces had retaken all eastern districts assigned to them. Some IS fighters remain holed up in north-eastern districts, he added.

Earlier reports suggested the army had retaken all of the city’s east. The jihadists remain in control of all of Mosul west of the Tigris river, including the warren-like streets of the old city, which present a challenge to government forces.

The army has made swift advances through eastern Mosul since re-launching its operation to retake the city last month.

The operation began in October, more than two years after the jihadists overran the city, but stalled amid heavy IS resistance. It is the Iraqi military’s largest operation in years, involving domestic security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen and Shia militiamen, and assisted by US-led coalition warplanes and military advisers.

Last Friday the army launched an operation to capture the Mosul University complex, used by IS militants as a base and, Iraqi officials said, a chemical weapons production site.

More than 100,000 people have fled their homes in and around Mosul and UN officials have warned that the figure is likely to rise as pro-government forces press further into the city.

An attack on the government offices in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun has left four people dead, officials say. Police intervened after gunmen opened fire at the Quintana Roo state attorneys’ office. TV showed footage in which intense gunfire could be heard.

One policeman and three suspected attackers died, governor Carlos Joaquin said. Five suspects were arrested. Mr Joaquin described the attack as a reaction by gangsters to his crackdown on organised crime.

It happened one day after a gunman killed five people in a club in the nearby resort city of Playa del Carmen. In that incident, Mr Joaquim said the attacker and one of the victims, a man from Veracruz, had a “personal conflict”. A Canadian, an Italian and a US citizen were among the dead. It was not clear if the two attacks were related, officials said.

Clubbers Were Told Shooting Was Fireworks

Gunfire erupted during the attack in Cancun on Tuesday, causing panic on the streets, witnesses said.

A shopping centre was evacuated by security forces after people described hearing gunfire inside. But officials later said it was a false alarm. Security checkpoints were set up near Cancun’s hotel area, some 7km (4 miles) from where the attack happened, local media reported.

The US consulate in Merida urged Americans to follow local authorities’ warnings and consult with their hotels before leaving the premises. Federal forces would be sent to help the local authorities, the governor said, without giving details of how many gunmen were involved in the attack.

Speaking on television in the evening, Mr Joaquin added: “The state is under control and in order…People from Cancun and our visitors can go about their lives as normal.”

Quintana Roo, an area popular with foreign tourists, has long been spared from the drug-related violence that afflicts other parts of Mexico.

About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online for the first time.

The files were uploaded following lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA. The records include intelligence briefings, research papers, UFO sightings and psychic experiments.

The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files. It includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

Among the more unusual records are documents from the so-called Stargate programme, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying – but sometimes precise – accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner”.

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The man suspected of carrying out the New Year’s Eve attack on a nightclub in Istanbul was trained in Afghanistan, the city’s governor says.

Vasip Sahin said the man, named earlier as Uzbek national Abdulkadir Masharipov, was believed to have entered Turkey in January 2016.

Mr Sahin said the suspect had confessed to the attack and that his fingerprints matched those found at the scene. Thirty-nine people died in the attack on the Reina club with dozens wounded.

Citizens of Israel, France, Tunisia, Lebanon, India, Belgium, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were among the victims.

So-called Islamic State (IS) said it was behind the attack, saying it was revenge for Turkish military involvement in Syria.

Police detained the man on Monday evening in a raid on an address in the Istanbul suburb of Esenyurt. Initial reports said a Kyrgyz man was also held but Mr Sahin said on Tuesday that a man of Iraqi origin and three women of Egyptian and African origin were detained.

A picture of Abdulkadir Masharipov taken shortly after his arrest showed him being held by the neck by an officer with his face bruised and bloodied.

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The security of a Tunisian resort where 30 Britons were killed in a gun attack in June 2015 had been questioned six months before, an inquest has heard.

A report from January 2015 for the UK government had raised concerns about the beach entrance of the Riu Imperial Marhaba, near Sousse.

Islamist gunman Seifeddine Rezgui killed 10 people on the beach before entering the five-star hotel from the sand – 38 people died in total. He was killed by police an hour later.

The attack was the deadliest on Britons since the 7 July 2005 London bombings.

On the second day of the hearings into the Britons’ deaths – held at London’s Royal Courts of Justice – Andrew Ritchie QC, who represents 20 of the victims’ families, read extracts from the heavily redacted report. It had looked at the security of around 30 hotels in three Mediterranean resorts. The resort had previously been targeted by a suicide bomber in 2013, who had killed only himself, the inquest heard.

Mr Ritchie said: “Given that the attack on the Riadh Palms Hotel in October 2013 was launched from the beach, particular attention was paid to the beach access points. “[The report] said ‘Despite some good security infrastructure around the hotels and resorts, there seems to be little in the way of effective security to prevent or respond to an attack [from the beach]’.”

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