This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Valerie Sanderson at 1,300 hours GMT on Friday the 6th of December.

These are our main stories.

In Syria, Islamist-led rebels continue their rapid advance.

The UN says hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced

with the rebels on the outskirts of

the city of Homs. Romania's top court has annulled the results of the first round of the presidential

election, saying the whole process must be rerun. Also in this podcast, we're in Ghana, where the

cost of living dominates voters' concerns ahead of the general election on Saturday.

Everything has increased in price. Their increase is too much. It's really affecting us, but we have to live to survive, so we have to manage it.

And how to react to a polar bear on the attack.

Almost 15. And how to react to a polar bear on the attack. Almost 14 years after civil war broke out in Syria, it's taken just nine days for Islamist rebels to turn the country upside down.

They've already captured the country's second city Aleppo and further south, Hama,

where a statue of the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, the father of President Bashar al-Assad,

has been torn down.

As we record this podcast, the rebels have reported have advanced a further 70 kilometres

closer to the capital of Damascus than are on the outskirts of another big city, Homs.

Thousands of people have fled the city.

Images posted on social media show people celebrating as a convoy of rebel vehicles drives through a town 10 kilometres from Homs.

The leader of the rebel group, HTSM or Hyatt Taryl al-Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Jalani, told CNN that its goal is the end of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the government elites.

The seeds of the regime's defeat have always been within it.

It has been effectively dead since that time.

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