Moscow / AFP Russia, Iran and Turkey agreed on Tuesday to guarantee Syria peace talks and backed expanding a ceasefire in the war-torn country, laying down their claim as the main powerbrokers in the conflict. “Iran, Russia and Turkey are ready to assist in preparing the agreement in the making between the Syrian government and the opposition and to become …

  Moscow / AFP Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday there should be no “concessions to terrorists” at talks with his Turkish counterpart on Syria, a day after Moscow’s ambassador was murdered in Ankara. “This tragedy forces all of us to fight more decisively against terrorism,” Lavrov told Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu as they sat down together in Moscow. “For …

  Ankara / AFP A team of Russian investigators arrived in Ankara on Tuesday to uncover how an off-duty policeman assassinated Moscow’s ambassador in an art gallery, as Turkey made its first arrests over the murder. Veteran diplomat Andrei Karlov was shot four times in the back by Turkish policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas, 22, in a brazen attack as he opened …

  Hamam al-Alil / AFP Three men set up a fence and a ribbon of yellow and black crime scene tape around a site south of Iraq’s Mosul, marking a mass grave of extremists’ victims. It is one of dozens of such sites discovered in areas around Iraq that have been recaptured from the IS group, whose rule has been defined …

  Kabul / AFP An American-Canadian couple held hostage by the Taliban have appeared in a video for the first time with their two children born in captivity, pleading with President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump to secure their release. Canadian Joshua Boyle and his American wife Caitlan Coleman had two sons after being kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012 during …

  Investors have been anxious for some time about what rising interest rates will mean for US stocks and bonds. The Federal Reserve kicked that anxiety into a higher gear recently. It wasn’t that the Fed raised the fed funds rate a quarter point — everyone knew that was coming. The real news, as my Gadfly colleague Lisa Abramowicz pointed …

  In times of trouble for gold — and the yellow metal has slid 11 percent over the past six weeks — India has traditionally provided a safety net. The country’s consumers typically account for between a fifth and a quarter of total global gold demand in the second half of the year, with bargain-hunting buyers putting a floor under …

  The European Central Bank reckons that financial market uncertainty, as measured by how far stocks, bonds and the euro are from historical norms, is currently close to zero, in contrast with elevated uncertainty during the recessions of 2009 and 2013. The sheer range of known unknowns for 2017 — the outlook for China’s economy, the effect of populism on …

  Bloomberg Air travellers globally are bracing for higher fares after Opec decided last month to cut output. Not in India, the world’s fastest-growing major aviation market. Carriers cut fares in November, selling tickets about 12% cheaper on average for Mumbai-New Delhi flights from a year ago, according to Yatra.com, India’s No. 2 online travel agency. The steepest discounts were …

  Bloomberg Boeing Co. is making deeper job cuts in its commercial airplane business and planning further reductions for 2017, citing “fewer sales opportunities and tough competition.” The US planemaker will trim the workforce in its largest division by 8 percent by the end of this year compared with the January level, Boeing Vice Chairman Ray Conner and Kevin McAllister, …