Johannesburg
Zuma till 2019: Despite corruption and fraud allegations, Jacob Zuma was overwhelmingly re-elected as head of the African National Congress this week. The victory all but guarantees him another five-year term as president in the 2014 election, since the ANC is by far the most organized and popular party. Still, among the general public, his approval rating is just over 50 percent. His popularity suffered a blow after it was revealed that he’d spent $27 million of taxpayer money to remodel his private home, and after police killed 34 striking miners. Around one quarter of South Africans are unemployed, and two thirds of children and teenagers live in households that earn about $2 a day.
Damascus, Syria
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Assad tottering: Russia, Syria’s closest ally, began preparing for the fall of the Assad regime this week, sending warships to evacuate Russian citizens. With rebels continuing to advance on Damascus, Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa suggested a break with President Bashar al-Assad, telling a Lebanese journalist that the government was open to “new partners’’ and negotiations. “We are not in a battle for the survival of an individual or regime,’’ he said. Meanwhile, NBC News correspondent Richard Engel and four colleagues were kidnapped and held captive for five days by a pro-regime Syrian militia. The team was freed when the captors were stopped at a rebel checkpoint. “We weren’t physically beaten or tortured,” Engel said, but “they made us choose which one of us would be shot first, and when we refused there were mock shootings.”
Karachi, Pakistan
Polio workers killed: The U.N. suspended its polio vaccine program in Pakistan this week after gunmen shot dead eight health-care workers, mostly women, who were giving children polio vaccines. No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the Taliban had issued threats against the polio drive. The workers were part of a U.N.-backed program to eradicate polio. Some Pakistanis are suspicious of immunization because a doctor used a fake vaccination drive as a cover to help the CIA extract DNA from Osama bin Laden’s relatives and determine where he was living.
New Delhi
Protesting gang rape: A brutal gang rape on a New Delhi bus has galvanized Indians to protest a rise in violent sexual attacks. Six men attacked a 23-year-old medical student on her way home from a movie this week, raping her for hours and beating her nearly to death. They also beat her male companion. Tens of thousands of protesters demanded safer streets, while some politicians called for the death penalty for rapists. The passionate response is unusual in India, where crimes against women are rarely prosecuted and police often blame rape victims for being attacked.
Manila
Free contraception: The government of the overwhelmingly Catholic Philippines will now provide free birth control to the poor. Philippine lawmakers passed the bill this week over the strenuous objections of the Catholic Church. “This bill no doubt has inflicted a very wide chasm of division in our society,” said Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile. “Families are even divided, mother and daughter differing in their views, husband and wife differing in their views.” Enrile voted against the bill; his son, a congressman, voted for it. Condoms and birth control pills are expensive and scarce in rural areas. About half of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines each year are unintended.
Tokyo
Abe is back: Frustrated by a weak economy, Japanese voters gave a landslide victory to the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled the country for decades before being turned out three years ago. Back in the post of prime minister is nationalist Shinzo Abe, who held the job for less than a year before stepping down in 2007 amid financial scandals and gaffes related to his hawkish, pro-military stance. This time around, he says, he will focus mainly on the economy. He pledged to replace the central banker and reverse the deflation that has stifled Japan’s exports and led to recession. But Japan’s neighbors fear he will resume his nationalist rhetoric and take a tough line in the dispute with China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
