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 …

  Relaxnews Soft-launched as a June 2015 computer game, the very well-received “Lego Worlds” is now heading to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for February 2017, as Warner Bros challenges the era-defining success of Microsoft-owned “Minecraft.” When you’re making a game that takes on “Minecraft,” recognizable branding isn’t enough. Fortunately, the studio charged with developing “Lego Worlds” has a long …

  Washington / AFP Malicious software designed to attack Android smartphones has breached the accounts of more than a million Google users, security researchers said. The report by Check Point Software Technologies said the malware dubbed Gooligan targets devices running Android 4.0 and 5.0, which represent nearly 74 percent of mobile devices using the Google-powered operating system. The attacks can …

  ABU DHABI / WAM His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, and Their Highnesses the Supreme Council Members, on Wednesday, attended the UAE Commemoration Day …