World briefs

CHINA Consumer inflation eased in August amid signs of cooling economic growth. Prices rose 2 percent from a year earlier, down from July’s 2.3 percent increase, government data show. Producer prices fell 0.2 percent, extending a months-long decline.

SOUTH KOREA will increase tobacco taxes for the first time in a decade as Park Geun Hye’s administration seeks to reduce smoking and boost revenue. The price of a pack of 20 cigarettes will rise by about 2,000 won (USD1.93) from January, almost double the current average price of 2,500 won. That will help lower the smoking rate for adult males to 29 percent by 2020 from 44 percent now, Health and Welfare Minister Moon Hyung Pyo said in Seoul yesterday.

INDIA-PAKISTAN Pakistani troops use helicopters and boats to evacuate thousands of marooned people from the country’s plains where raging monsoon floods inundate more villages. In neighboring India, the military dropped food for hundreds of thousands of people marooned in flood-hit areas of Indian-held Kashmir. Pakistani and Indian officials said the death toll had reached 461 in the two countries.

AUSTRALIA The suspected brother of a suicide bomber killed in Syria and another alleged jihadist appear in an Australian court charged with funding and recruiting al-Qaida offshoot terrorists in the Middle East.

AUSTRALIA An Australian hospital was treating a patient who returned last month from the Democratic Republic of Congo as a suspected Ebola case on Thursday, although a doctor said the man was unlikely to have the deadly disease.

PHILIPPINES Two Philippine soldiers and 10 members of a Muslim rebel group opposed to a government peace accord die in a clash a day after the president submitted legislation to Congress to create a new Muslim autonomous region, the military says.

SYRIA-FIJI The 45 Fijian peacekeepers held captive by an al-Qaida-linked Syrian rebel group are alive and well and will be released soon, one of the hostages said in a video released by the militants. Fighters from the Nusra Front captured the Fijian troops late last month in the Golan Heights, where a 1,200-strong U.N. force monitors the buffer zone between Syria and Israel. The frontier zone has been engulfed in heavy clashes since then between the rebels and Syrian government forces.

UKRAINE Diplomats say the European Union has decided on new sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine. Three diplomats in Brussels say the ambassadors of the 28-nation bloc agreed yesterday that the sanctions will take effect today following their publication in the EU’s official journal.