World briefs

EGYPT A senior Egyptian prison official and the country’s official news agency say Al-Jazeera’s Australian reporter Peter Greste has been freed from prison after more than a year behind bars and is on his way to Cairo airport to leave the country.  Greste, Egyptian-Canadian Mohammed Fahmy, and Egyptian Mohammed Baher were sentenced to at least seven years in prison on terrorism-related charges last year in a trial that was described as a sham by rights groups.

CHINA A gauge of China’s manufacturing activity fell to a 28-month low in January amid economic slowdown, according to official data, although January typically is a month of slower activities as China’s factories prepare for the upcoming Lunar New Year celebrations.

USA-HK A Hong Kong businessman is charged with breaking into a northwestern Montana home after getting drunk at a wedding and causing extensive damage in a case a judge says “reads like a ‘Hangover’ movie.” Sheriff’s deputies responding to a report of a naked intruder at a residence found food strewn across the kitchen, a frying pan heating “some sort of wretched, mysterious substance” on the stove, urine-soaked formalwear in the living room and flooding from a damaged water line. Guneet Banga was found naked and asleep in the bedroom early on Sept. Investigators learned that Banga had attended a wedding a few houses away and apparently, while intoxicated, mistakenly broke into someone else’s house to get some sleep.

SYRIA The Islamic State group acknowledges for the first time that its fighters have been defeated in the Syrian town of Kobani and vows to attack the town again. An Associated Press video from inside the town shows widespread destruction, streets littered with debris and abandoned neighborhoods.

IRAQ When Islamic State militants invaded the Central Library of Mosul this month, they loaded about 2,000 books — children’s stories, poetry, philosophy and volumes on sports, health, culture and science — into pickup trucks. Only Islamic texts were left behind. The rest? “They will be burned,” a militant told residents.

VATICAN CITY A new Vatican outreach initiative to women hit a sour note before it even got off the ground: The sexy blonde on its Internet promo video came under such ridicule that it was quickly taken down. But the program is going ahead, and an inaugural meeting this week will study women’s issues in ways that are utterly new for the Holy See.

USA-TIBET President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama will be at the National Prayer Breakfast this week in Washington, the first time the two men have been together in nearly a year. While the president and the Tibetan spiritual leader could have a chance encounter at the event Thursday, the White House played down any official engagement between the two. Obama has met three times with the Dalai Lama. In each case, the meetings prompted objections from the Chinese government, which has branded the Dalai Lama an anti-Chinese separatist.