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Bloomberg SunPower Corp. is following through with a planned restructuring effort that will reduce its workforce by 25 percent to cut costs after solar prices plunged in an oversupplied market. The second-biggest US panel-maker will cut 2,500 employees to reduce operating expenses next year to less than $350 million, San Jose, California-based company said in a statement. It’s closing a ...

  Bloomberg US health insurers signaled that they’re willing to give up a cornerstone provision of Obamacare that requires all Americans to have insurance, replacing it with a different set of incentives less loathed by Republicans who have promised to repeal the law. Known as the “individual mandate,” the rule was a major priority for the insurance industry when the ...

  Bloomberg Growth in UK home prices accelerated in November as the market overcame a stamp-duty surcharge and mortgage-approval rates picked up, though confidence slid to a three-year low. Values rose 6.6 percent in November from a year earlier, according to data published by mortgage lender Halifax. Prices were up 0.2 percent on the month, the third consecutive increase, pushing ...

  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 ...