World briefs

CHINA Officials in Beijing have announced a new environmental police squad to root out illegal burning, the latest government response to the widespread public anger over China’s persistent problems with smog. 

ISRAEL A Palestinian rammed his truck into a group of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem yesterday, killing four people and wounding 15 others, Israeli police and rescue services said, in one of the deadliest attacks of a more than year-long campaign of violence.

NORTH KOREA marked Kim Jong Un’s birthday yesterday in a decidedly low-key manner. Though the young leader’s birthday is well-known throughout the country, it has yet to be celebrated with the kind of adulatory festivities that accompany the birthdays of his late grandfather and father. 

INDIA forecasts its growth will slow to a three-year low even before the effects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cash clampdown start to show. Gross domestic product will grow 7.1 percent in the year through March, the Statistics Ministry said in a statement on Friday.

PAKISTAN Police say 13 people have been killed in a head-on collision between a car and a passenger van in the eastern province of Punjab. Police official Naveed Ahmed said yesterday that the car’s driver moved into the oncoming lane in an attempt to pass another vehicle and collided with a passenger van near the town of Suhawa. Ahmed said nine people were injured, some of them severely.

SAUDI ARABIA said police killed the man who planned a July attack on one of Islam’s holiest sites, identifying him as a former scholarship student who abandoned his studies to join the Islamic State group in Syria.

SOUTH KOREA A Buddhist monk is in critical condition after setting himself on fire to protest the country’s settlement with Japan on compensation for wartime sex slaves.

RUSSIA For hundreds of Muscovites, the fact that the temperature had plunged to minus-27 Celsius was no reason to avoid going for a group bicycle ride. About 500 cyclists, many equipped with fur hats and other nonstandard gear, held a ride of about eight kilometers along the Moscow River yesterday as the capital shivered through a fierce cold snap.

GERMAN federal police say that they found 19 migrants at a highway stop in Bavaria who were suffering from hypothermia after their driver disappeared and left them in the back of an unheated truck for hours. Temperatures were hovering around -20 C (-4 F).