World briefs

CHINA recorded its first drop in coal production since 2000 last year, as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter pulls back on its use of the fossil fuel and switches to cleaner energy sources. According to the country’s national coal association, China produced 3.5 billion tons of coal in the first 11 months of 2014, 2.1 percent less than the same period in 2013. The association estimates the drop for the entire year will reach 2.5 percent.

HONG KONG’s Civil Human Rights Front, organizer of a rally planned for Feb. 1 calling for universal suffrage, has rejected conditions set by police to stage the event. Police gave approval for the rally, while asking the organizers to disperse people who occupied public spaces and provide information about groups that might get involved in illegal activities during the event, spokesman Johnson Yeung told reporters yesterday. Civil Human Rights Front will appeal the police conditions, he said.
India President Barack Obama opens a three-day visit to India aimed at turning his personal chemistry with Prime Minister Narendra Modi into progress on climate change, defense and economics.

PHILIPPINES A town mayor says more than 30 police commandos have been killed in a clash with Muslim rebels while hunting a top terror suspect in the south. It was the biggest single-day combat loss for Philippine forces in many years. Mayor Tahirudin Benzar Ampatuan said that dozens of police special action force members entered the village of Tukanalipao in Mamasapano town at dawn yesterday to capture a notorious bombing suspect but had a “misencounter” with members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which signed a peace deal with the government last year.

NIGERIA In fierce fighting yesterday, Nigerian troops clashed with Islamic extremists who attacked Maiduguri, the biggest city in northeast Nigeria. Dozens of combatants have been killed and wounded, soldiers and hospital workers said. The attacks come the day U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, more than 1,500km southwest of Maiduguri.

UKRAINE Indiscriminate rocket fire slams into a market, schools, homes and shops in Ukraine’s southeastern city of Mariupol, killing at least 30 people, authorities say. The Ukrainian president calls the blitz a terrorist attack and NATO and the U.S. demand that Russia stop supporting the rebels. Ukrainian officials rush to defend the strategically important port on the Sea of Azov.

YEMEN Tens of thousands of Yemenis marched in protest against Shiite rebels who hold the capital, amid a power vacuum in a country that is home to what Washington describes as al-Qaida’s most dangerous offshoot.