INDIA: Authorities in India’s capital shut schools, halted construction and banned non-essential trucks from entering the city today after air pollution shot up to its worst level this season.

Residents of New Delhi woke up to thick, toxic smog enveloping the city of some 33 million as the air quality became increasingly hazardous. 

In several areas of the city, pollution levels were more than 50 times higher than the World Health Organisation’s recommended safe limit. 

PAKISTAN: A top body of clerics has declared the use of virtual private networks against Islamic laws, officials said today.

Raghib Naeemi, the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises the government on religious issues, said that Shariah allows the government to prevent actions that lead to the “spread of evil.”

He said that any platform used for posting content that is controversial, blasphemous, or against national integrity “should be stopped immediately.”

PHILIPPINES: Typhoon Man-yi left at least seven people dead in a landslide, destroyed scores of houses and displaced large numbers of villagers before blowing away from the northern Philippines, worsening the crisis wreaked by multiple back-to-back storms, officials said today.

Man-yi was one of the strongest of the six major storms to hit the northern Philippines in less than a month and had sustained winds of up to 125 miles per hour.

TANZANIA: Rescue efforts continued for a third day today after a building collapsed and killed at least 13 people in Tanzania’s commercial capital.

More than 80 people have been rescued from the four-story building that housed dozens of shops and collapsed on Saturday morning in Dar Es Salaam.