NEWS OF THE DAY

Knife attack: A knife-wielding Palestinian attacker sneaked into a Jerusalem police station and lightly wounded four police officers before he was shot and captured, Israeli police said Thursday. The assault came on the heels of a fragile truce that was reached between Israel and Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip that ended two days of heavy fighting, the area’s most severe violence since the 50-day Gaza war in 2014. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the knife-wielding attacker climbed over the station’s fence late on Wednesday night and began stabbing officers inside. Other officers then shot the assailant, who was taken to a hospital.

Sri Lanka politics: Rival lawmakers exchanged blows in Sri Lanka’s Parliament on Thursday as disputed Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa claimed the speaker had no authority to remove him from office by voice vote. The fighting in the chamber came a day after it passed a no-confidence vote against Rajapaksa’s government. When Parliament re-convened, Speaker Karu Jayasuriya said the country had no government and there was no prime minister — either Rajapaksa or his rival whose ousting in late October by the president started a political crisis. More than 50 lawmakers in the 225-member house fought, and some who fell on the floor were kicked by rivals. Some of the lawmakers supporting Rajapaksa threw water bottles, books and trash cans at the speaker. Korean diplomacy: South Korea exploded a front-line guard post Thursday, sending plumes of thick, black smoke into the sky above the border with North Korea, in the most dramatic scene to date in the rivals’ efforts to reduce animosities that last year sparked fears of war. Last week, the two Koreas finished withdrawing troops and firearms from some of the guard posts along their border before dismantling them. Meanwhile, the North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un observed the successful test of “a newly developed ultramodern tactical weapon,” state media reported Friday, though it didn’t describe what sort of weapon it was. It didn’t appear to be a nuclear or missile-related test. Still, any mention of weapons testing could influence the direction of currently stalled diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang to rid the North of its nuclear weapons. No repatriation:

The head of Bangladesh’s refugee commission said plans to begin the repatriation of 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar on Thursday were scrapped after officials were unable to find anyone who wanted to return. Some people on the government’s repatriation list disappeared into the sprawling refugee camps to avoid being sent home, while others joined a large demonstration against the plan. More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, from western Myanmar’s Rakhine state to escape killings and destruction of their villages by the military and Buddhist vigilantes that have drawn widespread condemnation of Myanmar. 1st in Africa:

French President Emmanuel Macron and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI inaugurated Morocco’s first high-speed rail line on Thursday, the first ever such line in Africa. The $2 billion project was launched in 2011 by the king and Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France, which jointly funded the line with several Arab states. It will connect the economic hubs of Tangier and Casablanca in 2 hours 10 minutes instead of almost 5 hours on a regular train. Chronicle News Services