The week at a glance...International

Kiev, Ukraine

Former leader beaten: Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, jailed last year on corruption charges, said this week she’d been beaten by prison guards. “They came to my bed, threw a sheet over me, and started dragging me off the bed,” she said in a statement published on her website. “I received a punch to the stomach, and they twisted my arms and legs and dragged me in the sheet out into the street.” Tymoshenko was arrested and charged in 2010, after barely losing the presidential election to Viktor Yanukovych, and Western governments say her conviction was politically motivated. This week, lawmakers from her party started a sit-in at parliament. “We will not leave this place until the head of the fascist service that oversees prisoners arrives here,” one of them said.

Yerevan, Armenia

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Call it genocide: Thousands of Armenians gathered in Yerevan and other cities around the world this week for the annual remembrance of the World War I–era massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks. Armenian leaders want world governments to officially label the killings of some 1.5 million people “genocide,” but Turkey denies that there was any systematic campaign against Armenians. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly vowed to explicitly recognize the Armenian genocide once in office, but he has yet to do so. In a speech this week, he called the killings “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.”

Cairo

No gas for Israel: Egypt has abruptly canceled its 2005 deal to supply gas to Israel, citing a payment dispute. Gas shipments have been interrupted frequently since the Egyptian revolution because of militant attacks on Egypt’s pipelines in the Sinai Peninsula, and the two sides were at odds over how to compensate Israel for those interruptions. The two countries insisted that the disagreement was a business issue, not a diplomatic spat, but it comes at a time of tensions on their mutual border. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained this week that Palestinian militants were smuggling weapons from Sinai to Gaza for use against Israel. That prompted a testy reply from Egypt’s military ruler, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi: “We will break the legs of anyone who tries to attack us or comes near the borders.”

Kabul

Pact with U.S.: The U.S. and Afghanistan have finalized an agreement that commits the U.S. to defending Afghanistan for at least 10 years after the 2014 withdrawal of forces. The pact, reached after 18 months of tense negotiations, is meant to reassure the Afghan people that the U.S. won’t abandon them and to convince the Taliban and Pakistan that the country will not be up for grabs after foreign forces leave. The thorniest issues were resolved over the past month, when the U.S. agreed to transfer the main military prison at Bagram to Afghan control and to end night raids on suspected Taliban houses. “Our goal is an enduring partnership with Afghanistan that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability, and prosperity, and that contributes to the shared goal of defeating al Qaida and its extremist allies,” said Gavin Sundwall of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Pyongyang, North Korea

Threat against South: In an unusually specific threat, North Korea’s military said this week that it would take “special actions” to assassinate South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and destroy his government. “Once the above-said special actions kick off, they will reduce all the rat-like groups and the bases for provocations to ashes in three or four minutes, by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style,” the military said in a statement carried by state media. North Korea’s attempt at a long-range rocket test failed recently, and based on its history it is expected to cover its humiliation by lashing out against South Korea. Many analysts believe it will conduct another nuclear bomb test; the last one was in 2009.