The week at a glance...International

Moscow

Putin’s man wins: The Kremlin-backed incumbent has declared victory in a Moscow mayoral election carefully managed to prevent an upset. Officials said Sergei Sobyanin took 51.3 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff, while opposition leader Alexei Navalny took 27 percent. That showing was impressive for the opposition, given that Navalny was barred from the airwaves while Sobyanin was on TV daily and had state resources for his campaign. Navalny was recently convicted of fraud in a case that Western analysts said was bogus and politically motivated, but authorities allowed him to run anyway, presumably to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the race. President Vladimir Putin described the vote as “legitimate, transparent, and regulated,” adding, “Such a thing has never happened in our country before, perhaps maybe not even in other countries.”

Beijing

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Internet crackdown: China’s most influential microbloggers are being threatened with jail terms. In a new push to rein in criticism and mockery of government officials online, China announced that it would arrest people who post defamatory statements or rumors that get widely reposted on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. A blogger can be jailed for three years if a post deemed illegitimate attracts more than 5,000 views or 500 reposts. State media have run numerous articles warning widely followed Weibo users, known as “Big V’s,” to watch what they say, and dozens have been arrested. American Charles Xue, who blogs as Xue Manzi, was arrested last month on allegations of visiting a prostitute, not rumor-mongering, but state media are citing him as an example of a Big V brought to justice.

Delhi

Rapists convicted: All four defendants in the brutal gang-rape case that shocked India and the world in December have been found guilty. The victim, 23, was assaulted on a bus for hours and died of horrific injuries two weeks later. Prosecutors called for the death penalty for the four, saying, “There is no element of sympathy in the way in which the hapless woman was tortured.” A fifth suspect was found hanged in his cell in March, while a sixth, age 17, was convicted last month in a separate trial and given three years, the maximum for a minor.

Islamabad

Democratic handoff: Pakistan this week celebrated its first peaceful transition from one elected head of state to another. Asif Ali Zardari, the first democratically elected Pakistani president to complete his term, stepped down, and President Mamnoon Hussain was inaugurated. The post of president is largely ceremonial. Hussain, a businessman, is a close ally of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has announced a new policy of negotiating with Taliban and other militants in the lawless areas near the border with Afghanistan.

Paktika Province, Afghanistan

Taliban kill writer: Afghan police have arrested six Taliban militants in the murder of an Indian writer whose book about her escape from the Taliban was made into a Bollywood film. Masked gunmen dragged Sushmita Banerjee, 49, from her home last week and shot her 25 times. Banerjee moved to Afghanistan in 1989 to be with her Afghan husband and converted to Islam. She became an activist for Afghan women’s rights during the Taliban’s rise to power, but Taliban militants destroyed her women’s health clinic, beat her severely, and sentenced her to death. She escaped to India in 1995 but returned to Afghanistan to research a novel this year. “We begged her not to go back,” her cousin said.

Rafah, Egypt

Troubling new tactic: Militants battling Egyptian troops in the Sinai Peninsula have begun deploying suicide bombers. Two struck this week in the town of Rafah, on the border with the Gaza Strip, killing at least nine people. One drove a car bomb into the building housing military intelligence, destroying it, while another hit an armored personnel carrier. The attacks appear to be revenge for the Egyptian military’s recent offensive in Sinai, which became a hotbed of Islamic militancy under ousted President Mohammed Morsi. “The use of car bombs and suicide attacks is a new turn,” said army spokesman Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali. A Sinai-based group inspired by al Qaida claimed responsibility for last week’s attack on the interior minister’s convoy in Cairo.

Benghazi, Libya

Car bomb on 9/11: A bomb blast this week destroyed a Benghazi building that housed the U.S. Consulate decades ago. The powerful bomb, set off exactly a year after the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, blew out a wall of the building that housed the consulate in the 1960s, before late dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi overthrew King Idris. The building is near Libya’s Foreign Ministry. It’s unclear whether the attack, which killed no one, was meant to target the government or send a message to the U.S. Libya is overrun with heavily armed militias that have been killing lawmakers and activists and other militants since the civil war. “Even with so many officials assassinated, no one has been held accountable,” said lawmaker Tawfiq Breik. “No one arrested. The state is disabled.”