Boston Scientific to buy Bedford company for $500m

Ted Bloom, the former president of International Data Group, died on Wednesday. He was 68. He worked at the Framingham-based technology media company for essentially his entire career, starting in 1967, and working his way up to CFO before being elevated to president in 2014. China Oceanwide Holdings acquired IDG last year. The Wellesley resident was also known for his philanthropy, including his service on Newton-Wellesley Hospital’s board of trustees. — JON CHESTO

The Food and Drug Administration says new guidance about added sugars that exempts pure maple syrup and honey products will be released early next year. The agency announced months ago that it was considering requiring pure maple syrup and honey to be labeled as containing ‘‘added sugars.’’ Members of the industries that produce those products protested the labels, saying they would be misleading and unfair. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Thursday that the new rules will provide ‘‘a path forward for pure, single-ingredient’’ maple syrup and honey products that does not involve an ‘‘added sugars’’ declaration along with the nutritional facts. He says the solution addresses ‘‘producer concerns that their products could be perceived as being economically adulterated.’’ — ASSOCIATED PRESS

Clorox Co. says it will add detailed ingredient labels to more US household disinfecting products than required by a new California law as it looks to appeal to a more conscious consumer. The maker of Pine-Sol and its namesake wipes and bleach plans to list ingredients for 350 more household disinfecting products sold in the United States — beyond the 300 that are already getting labels under California’s Cleaning Product Right to Know Act signed into law last year. — BLOOMBERG NEWS

Starbucks is opening its first store in Italy on Friday, betting that premium brews and novelties like a heated marble-topped coffee bar will win customers in a country fond of its daily espresso rituals. Decades ago, Milan’s coffee bars inspired the chain’s vision. Now Starbucks is hoping clients will visit its new store, the Reserve Roastery, to watch beans being roasted, sip coffee, or enjoy cocktails at a mezzanine-level bar in a cavernous former post office near the city’s cathedral. Starbucks chief design officer Liz Muller said this week that the company is ‘‘not coming to Italy to teach people about coffee. This is where coffee was born.’’ — ASSOCIATED PRESS

Three Baltic countries have lashed out at retail giant Walmart for selling online T-shirts and other products with Soviet Union emblems on them, and demanded that the goods be removed. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were forcibly annexed by Moscow in 1940 and remained part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, except for a brief occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941-1944. Lithuania has been taking a particularly hard line against its communist-era legacy, banning all Soviet symbols as well as Nazi ones.
— ASSOCIATED PRESS

US businesses added 163,000 jobs in August, a private survey found, a decent gain that suggests that employers are confident enough to keep hiring. Payroll processor ADP said Thursday that the job gains were the fewest since October. But last month’s pace of hiring is still enough to lower the unemployment rate over time. Solid economic growth is underpinning an optimistic outlook among businesses. Growth reached 4.2 percent at an annual rate in the April-June quarter, the fastest pace in four years, spurred by tax cuts and robust consumer spending. ADP’s hiring figures come a day before the government will release its official jobs data for August. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

British luxury fashion brand Burberry said Thursday it will stop using real fur in its products and also stop destroying products that it cannot sell. The company said there will be no real fur in its London Fashion Week catwalk show later this month. It will also phase out existing real fur products. Burberry said it has made only limited use of real fur in recent years with clothing incorporating fur from rabbit, fox, mink, and Asiatic raccoon. Those will now be eliminated, along with use of angora. The fashion house, which produces clothing, leather goods, and beauty products, also said it will no longer dispose of unwanted and unsold stock by destroying it after the practice was criticized by environmental activists this summer. The company said in an earlier report that it destroyed more than $36 million worth of luxury goods including beauty products in the last year to protect the brand’s image and keep its goods from being sold cheaply. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

Under pressure from US safety regulators, Ford is recalling about 2 million F-150 pickup trucks in North America because the seat belts can spark and cause fires. The recall, which covers trucks from the 2015 through 2018 model years, comes about one month after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating fires in the pickups, which are the top-selling vehicles in the United States. Ford said Thursday that it has 23 reports of smoke or fire in US and Canadian trucks, but it’s not aware of any injuries.
— ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filings for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest in almost five decades, indicating a tight job market, Labor Department figures showed Thursday. Thursday’s figures, coming before the main jobs report is released Friday, show employment continued to improve in late August. Jobless-claims figures can be more volatile around holidays, such as Labor Day, observed on Monday. Even so, the figures add to signs businesses are keeping existing staff and adding new workers to help meet demand being boosted by tax cuts in the 10th year of the economic expansion. — BLOOMBERG NEWS