Bashar al-Assad: Aleppo must be 'cleaned' Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, has spoken of "cleaning" the besieged city of Aleppo, where a quarter of a million people are caught under heavy bombardment by his government's forces, and using it as a "springboard" for winning the country's war. Speaking to Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda, Assad said Aleppo was effectively no longer Syria's industrial capital but taking back the city would provide important political and strategic gains. Victory in the city would allow the Syrian army to liberate other areas of the country from who Assad calls "terrorists". Aleppo must be 'cleaned', declares Assad, amid outcry over bloody siege 'Hard Brexit' to come After months of wishful thinking over the consequences of the UK's vote to leave the European Union, the British have received a sharp reality check from European political leaders. Donald Tusk – who chairs the EU leaders' summits – said it was useless to speculate about a soft Brexit, in which the UK remained a member of the single market. "The only real alternative to a hard Brexit is no Brexit, even if today hardly anyone believes in such a possibility." Meanwhile, France says US banks plan to leave the UK. EU council president: it's hard Brexit or no Brexit at all Who won the marijuana war? Candi CdeBaca voted to legalize the free sale of marijuana in Colorado four years ago because she thought it would be good for her Denver neighborhood. Now she's not so sure. "We have just swapped one kind of drug dealer for another," said CdeBaca. "I believed it would positively impact communities of colour by decriminalizing it. So watching it unfold has been surprising." As CdeBaca sees it, all legalization has done is open the door to a takeover by corporate interests. "It's your typical capitalist who is in our neighborhood now and benefiting from an industry that at one time was our only option," she said. 'Commercialization won out': will legal marijuana be the next big tobacco? Why Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel prize "Some will argue against the award, as they argued against him in the long and infinitely tiresome Dylan v Keats controversy, and as others have contested the meaning and value of every phase and nuance of his output," writes Richard Williams. Still, the singer has "explored ways of playing games with time, voice and perspective, continuing to expand the possibilities of song in ways that disarm all possible criticism of this new and perhaps greatest honour." Meanwhile, the contrarian singer predictably made no mention of the accolade during a show in Las Vegas last night, ending his set with a cover of Frank Sinatra's Why Try To Change Me Now. Why Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel literature win Music in the dark Events like London's Pitch Black Playback are returning music to darkness. "The atmosphere shifts in the shadows," writes Arwa Haider, "basslines go deeper in the dark; voices make you tingle; the silences hit you harder." Music in the dark sounds more appealing, says Pitch Black Playback creator Ben Gomori. "The darkness is a way to underline that desire to cut yourself off from other distractions, but also to create a shared experience." Dancing in the dark: the growing trend of gigs with the lights off In case you missed it ... There are conceivably – or inconceivably – 2tn galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday. The surprising finding, based on 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, was published in the Astronomical Journal. The new calculation comes with a caveat: even within the "observable universe", current technology only allows us to glimpse 10% of what is out there. Universe has two trillion more galaxies than previously thought | 
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Hillary Clinton implored supporters on Thursday to sweep her to victory in November as a 'rebuke' to Donald Trump. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP 
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