Bloomberg Nestle SA says it found a way to reduce the amount of sugar in chocolate by as much as 40 percent, a discovery that may give the KitKat maker an edge as food producers face increasing pressure from governments, health advocates and shoppers to make products healthier. The world’s largest food company has developed a process to alter ...

  Aleppo / AFP Hundreds of elite Syrian troops moved into east Aleppo on Thursday ahead of a push into the most densely populated areas, after the UN warned the city risked becoming a “giant graveyard”. Despite fierce global criticism, forces loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad have pressed an assault to retake control of all of Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial ...

  Moscow / AFP President Vladimir Putin adopted a conciliatory tone to international rivals in a key speech on Thursday, saying Russia needed has “never looked for enemies” in the international community. “We do not want confrontation with anyone. It is not needed—not by us, our partners, the international community,” Putin said during an address on the state of the nation. ...

  Istanbul / AFP Moscow and Damascus were not behind an air strike in northern Syria that killed four Turkish soldiers, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday. “Neither Russia nor Syria, its air force, had anything to do with this,” Lavrov told a news conference in the southern Turkish resort of Alanya, alongside his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu. ...

  Genevat / AFP Russia has proposed setting up four humanitarian corridors to battered eastern Aleppo to allow in aid as well as hundreds of desperately needed medical evacuations, the United Nation said on Thursday. “The Russian Federation announced that… they want to sit down in Aleppo with our people there to discuss how we can use the four corridors to ...

  Jerusalem / AFP A leading minister called Mahmud Abbas Israel’s top ideological enemy on Thursday after the Palestinian president suggested he could withdraw recognition if progress was not made towards peace. Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, seen as close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called the Palestinian leader’s remarks at a Fatah party congress in Ramallah on Wednesday “a sad joke.” ...

  Beijing / AFP Beijing will “seriously” implement new United Nations sanctions imposed on North Korea over its nuclear and missile programmes, it said on Thursday, with the measures set to hit Pyongyang’s lucrative Chinese coal exports hard. UN Security Council resolution 2321, passed on Wednesday, caps the North’s annual coal exports at little more than four months of current ...

  Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps, highlighting its push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings. Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services unit, unveiled the new products at the company’s fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries ...

  DUBLIN / AP As Gov. John Kasich announced a $15 million investment in advanced self-driving highway technology, he urged Ohioans to push back against old ideas about the state. “Who would ever want to be called the Rust Belt?” he said. “The Rust Belt’s some deteriorating, eroding, old, tired and worn out place. You ever hear that term, do ...

  Bloomberg Users of the WeChat instant-messaging platform can have their content censored even if they leave China or switch to an overseas phone number, according to a research group. WeChat accounts registered with a mainland China-based phone number have keywords filtered out or messages blocked anywhere in the world as long they keep the same user name, according to ...