Cairo
U.S. cutting aid: The Obama administration is reducing aid to the Egyptian military because of its continued brutal crackdown on Islamist protesters, officials said this week. One shipment of jets has already been canceled, and delivery of other hardware, including tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets, will be put on hold. Thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been arrested since the July ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, who faces trial next month on charges of inciting murder. This week, pro-army and pro-Brotherhood factions held rival celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel, resulting in bitter clashes that killed at least 51 people.
Damascus, Syria
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.
Destroying the gas: The Syrian government is cooperating in the destruction of its chemical weapons, inspectors said this week. Syrian personnel have destroyed or disabled “a range of items,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement, including “missile warheads, aerial bombs, and mixing and filling equipment.” Under the U.N. resolution reached as a compromise between the U.S. and Russia last month, facilities that produce poison gas are to be destroyed by Nov. 1, and chemical stockpiles by the middle of next year. Some of the facilities, though, are in rebel-held areas, and inspectors said they may not be able to reach those without a cease-fire.
Jerusalem
Sephardic leader dies: More than 700,000 Israelis, many rending their clothes, packed the streets of Jerusalem this week to mourn Ovadia Yosef, the ultra-Orthodox rabbi who once led Israel’s Sephardic Jews. Yosef, 93, founded the influential Shas party to speak for working-class Jews from the Middle East, who had less clout in Israel than Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. A polarizing figure, he paved the way for peace with Egypt by ruling that territorial concessions were permissible, yet he also denounced Muslims as “ugly” and “stupid,” and said Jews who died in the Holocaust were being punished for ancestral sins. Non-Jews, he said in a 2010 sermon, “were born only to serve us.”
Kabul
Karzai won’t bend: Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he won’t allow American troops to stay in Afghanistan after next year unless the U.S. agrees to stop raids on Taliban militants in his country. The U.S. would leave some troops in the country beyond 2014 if it could reach an agreement with Afghanistan on their function. But Karzai insists on two conditions the Americans will not accept: that the U.S. stop all pursuit of al Qaida operatives on Afghan soil and that it send troops into Pakistan to retaliate when militants based there attack Afghanistan. If the Americans won’t agree, Karzai said, let them leave. He said 12 years of U.S. occupation have brought only “a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure.”
Peshawar, Pakistan
New threat to Malala: The Pakistani Taliban have renewed their death threat against girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai. “If there is any opportunity we can target, she would be on our hit list again,” said spokesman Shahidullah Shahid. Taliban militants shot the girl, now 16, in the head a year ago, and she now lives in the U.K. This week, on the anniversary of her shooting, she unveiled her memoir, I Am Malala, which tells of her defiance of Taliban restrictions on education for girls in rural Pakistan. The Taliban have destroyed more than 200 girls’ schools in the past several years.
Bali, Indonesia
Obama misses APEC: The government shutdown forced President Obama to skip the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit this week, allowing Chinese President Xi Jinping to seize the spotlight. Obama had intended to use his trip to shore up support for his planned Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free-trade zone that will encompass 12 nations, conspicuously excluding China. In Obama’s absence, Xi pushed his rival pact, which will include China and 15 other nations but not the U.S. Xi said that APEC should play “a leading and coordinating role” in free-trade integration. Xi has now “become the brightest political star on the Asian diplomatic platform,” said China’s Ta Kung Pao newspaper. “In contrast, America has lost an important chance to perform.”
The news at a glance...International