The week at a glance...International

Mogadishu, Somalia

Rapping jihadi killed: Somali Islamists are divided over the killing of an American militant known as the “rapping jihadi.” Omar Hammami, 29, a native of Alabama with a Christian mother and a Syrian-born Muslim father, joined the terrorist group al-Shabab in 2006, fighting alongside them as they took over much of the country and leading online recruitment efforts with his rap videos and propaganda. He split from the group a year ago after criticizing its leaders for enriching themselves and for killing fellow Muslims, and was on the run from them in Somalia until last week, when al-Shabab militants gunned him down. The Somalia-based Islamic World Issues Study Center eulogized Hammami, also known as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, as a brother “killed in cold blood.”

Cairo

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Jailed for blogging: Continuing a mass arrest of top Muslim Brotherhood officials, Egyptian authorities have jailed the group’s head of social media. Gehad el-Haddad, a U.K.-educated public-relations expert, was the foreign-media liaison for ousted President Mohammed Morsi and constantly posted on Twitter about the Brotherhood’s renunciation of violence. Egyptian authorities said that they would nevertheless charge him with inciting violence, presumably because he posted allegations of military atrocities. Some 3,000 Brotherhood supporters—including clerics, bureaucrats, and community organizers—have been jailed in the two months since Morsi was deposed, and the group is effectively hamstrung.

Tehran

Signs of easing: In a rare example of bilateral diplomacy, Iran and the U.S. both confirmed this week that their presidents have been communicating. The two countries haven’t had diplomatic relations since the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy following the Islamic Revolution. But after the June election of moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who has pledged to end the nuclear standoff with the West, President Obama sent a letter of congratulations, and the two have corresponded since. Rouhani has replaced Iran’s top nuclear officials, and a U.N. inspectors report said the country has begun slowing its acquisition of nuclear fuel.

Islamabad

No text flirting: Pakistan has shut down mobile phone chatrooms teens were using for flirting. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered all phone providers to stop offering the service that allowed users to chat anonymously by text—allowing users, for instance, to press 1 to chat with a boy and press 7 for age 18 to 21—because it was “contrary to moral values.” The agency said it was responding to complaints from parents, but the Pakistani press was outraged. “The intermingling of young men and women is not a matter that should concern the state,” the Karachi Dawn said in an editorial.

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Crimes of 1971: Islamists rioted in Bangladesh this week in support of an opposition leader condemned to death for war crimes. Abdul Quader Mollah, 65, had been sentenced in February to life in prison for killing hundreds of civilians as a militia leader in the 1971 revolution, when Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan, split from Pakistan. But after widespread demonstrations calling for his execution, the government changed the law to allow prosecutors to appeal the sentence. Islamists and human rights groups now say that verdict is politically motivated. Mollah is deputy head of Jamaat-e-Islami, which had been an important party in the opposition until the government outlawed it earlier this year after failing to convince it to switch sides.

Imjin River, South Korea

Wrong way: The South Korean military has killed a civilian apparently trying to defect to North Korea. Border guards fired hundreds of shots at Nam Yong-ho, 47, as he attempted to swim across the heavily guarded Imjin River, which marks part of the border. Defections from the democratic South Korea to the dictatorship of the North are extremely rare and usually involve fugitives from justice; it’s unclear what motivated Nam. The two countries are technically still at war but ended open conflict with a 1953 armistice. More than 23,500 North Koreans have escaped to the South since then.