Dhaka / AFP Bangladesh’s elite security force on Thursday arrested five suspected members of a banned extremist outfit who it said were planning to break their leaders out of jail. The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said the men were members of the banned Harkatul Jihad al Islami (HuJI), whose leader Mufti Abdul Hannan this week had his death sentence upheld …

  Meureudu / AFP Aftershocks rattled the survivors of a devastating Indonesian earthquake that killed more than 100 people, as officials urgently appealed on Thursday for medicine and doctors to treat the hundreds injured. The shallow 6.5-magnitude quake levelled hundreds of homes, mosques and businesses across Aceh province, one of the areas worst affected by the devastating 2004 tsunami. Search and …

  Our thinking about productivity is cockeyed, according to a new economic report. We’re ignoring the real productivity problem: surging costs for health care, housing and education. We need to understand this argument, because it just might be correct. Unless you’ve been vacationing on Mars, you know that productivity is the catchword for economic efficiency — and also that we’re …