London / AFP Britain will ban junk food ads aimed at children from both print and social media from next year, the advertising rules watchdog said on Thursday, a move welcomed by campaigners against child obesity. The new rules, which come into effect in July 2017, extend an existing ban on television ads for “high fat, salt or sugar ...

  Aleppo / AFP President Bashar al-Assad said victory for his forces in Aleppo would be a “huge step” in ending Syria’s war, as government troops battled on Thursday to retake more rebel ground. Despite pleas from increasingly cornered opposition fighters, Western countries and the United Nations, Assad also rejected talk of a ceasefire in Aleppo. Repeated diplomatic efforts this week ...

  Hamburg / AFP US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov failed to make progress on a Syria truce in talks in Germany early Thursday, an American official said. Kerry and Lavrov met twice Thursday on the margins of a foreign ministers’ meeting of the 57-member Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said a US ...

  Beirut / AFP Nearly 150 civilians, many disabled or sick, were evacuated overnight from a health facility in Aleppo’s Old City after the army retook the area, the Red Cross said on Thursday. The bodies of 11 people who died at the facility after being caught in crossfire or failing to receive medication were also retrieved, the humanitarian organisation said. ...

  Seoul/ AFP South Korea’s parliament on Thursday introduced an impeachment motion against President Park Geun-Hye, ahead of a vote seeking her ouster over a corruption scandal that has riveted the country and paralysed her administration. The motion, which accuses Park of constitutional and criminal violations ranging from a failure to protect people’s lives to bribery and abuse of power, will ...

  Beirut / AFP IS group extremists killed at least 26 members of Syrian government forces on Thursday in an assault on regime positions in the central province of Homs, a monitor said. IS launched simultaneous attacks near the Mahr and Shaar oil and gas fields and elsewhere in the desert in eastern Homs where clashes were continuing, the Syrian Observatory ...

  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 ...

  Simply holding still shows backbone when other Polish institutions are under siege. By sticking with its longest policy pause in almost two decades, the National Bank of Poland is winning over the biggest doubters of the country’s course after the Law & Justice party’s sweep into power last year. S&P Global Ratings, which in January handed the sovereign its ...