The week at a glance...International

last updated 8 January 2015

Changchun, China

Horror over baby murder: The senseless killing of an infant has plunged China’s social media sites into another round of soul-searching. The baby was in a car stolen outside a grocery in northeastern China, and the carjacker admitted to strangling and burying the child. Chinese Internet users contrasted the story with a similar incident in New York City last month, in which a car with a baby in it was stolen outside a Bronx grocery store. In that case the carjacker called police to report the location of the infant, who was found unharmed. “The fractured Chinese reality has made people lose their basic morality,” Sun Yuchen said on Weibo. “We are becoming a nation with no bottom line, no humanity.” In 2011, China was similarly appalled by a viral video of a toddler being run over twice in front of dozens of apathetic onlookers; the video sparked a national conversation.

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New Kim in town: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is apparently a father. South Korean media analyzed photos of Ri Sol Ju, Kim’s wife, and concluded that she had a child late last year. In December she was still wearing baggy, shapeless dresses, while last week, in photos taken during the visit by U.S. basketball star Dennis Rodman, she was wearing tailored suits. Analysts speculate that the baby is probably a girl, because if it were a boy there would have been a big official announcement.

West Bank

Segregated buses: Israel has introduced a Palestinian-only bus line for workers entering Israel from the West Bank, after Jewish settlers there complained that Palestinian men on their buses were a security risk. Palestinians with permits to work in Israel must now gather at a single crossing point where the bus embarks, far from where many of them live, and wait in long lines for one of the segregated buses. Palestinian and Israeli human-rights groups and politicians promptly denounced the practice as racist. “Separate bus lines for Palestinians prove that occupation and democracy cannot coexist,” said Zahava Gal-On of the leftist Meretz party.

Nairobi, Kenya

Tense election: Voting in Kenya’s first presidential election since the bloody vote of 2007 went generally smoothly this week, but delays in counting the votes sparked fears that violence could still break out. Uhuru Kenyatta—a member of the same tribe as current President Mwai Kibaki—got 53 percent of valid votes counted so far, while Prime Minister Raila Odinga got 42 percent. But the constitution requires that the winner take 50 percent of all votes cast, not all votes counted, and when 300,000 spoiled votes are considered, Kenyatta will probably get less than 50 percent, forcing a runoff. Odinga’s 2007 loss to Kibaki set off weeks of violent clashes that left more than 1,000 dead.

Gao, Mali

Rebel leaders slain: Chadian forces trained by the U.S. have reportedly killed the top two militants in Mali. Mokhtar Belmokhtar was the mastermind of January’s hostage raid on an Algerian natural gas plant that killed 38 employees, including three Americans. Abdelhamid Abou Zeid was the commander of the Malian wing of al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. French and Chadian officials said their attack on the Islamic militants had been greatly aided by intelligence from U.S. spy drones. American officials debated for weeks about whether giving the French direct intelligence would make the U.S. a co-belligerent in the war; they decided it would not.