The week at a glance ... International

last updated 8 January 2015

Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

‘Noah’s Ark’ for North Korea: Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is assembling a “Noah’s Ark” of Zimbabwean wildlife, as a gift to his fellow dictator and ally, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Park officials have captured pairs of baby elephants, rhinos, giraffes, warthogs, and other species, which are to be shipped to Pyongyang. Environmental activists are appalled. “We are losing out many animals and now the president has ordered two of every species to be taken to North Korea,” said Johnny Rodrigues of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force. “Those animals, especially the elephants, are not going to live.” Mugabe gave North Korea two rhinos in the 1980s; they died after just a few months.

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Chomsky blocked at border: Israeli border guards refused to allow famed linguist and Jewish leftist activist Noam Chomsky to enter the West Bank from Jordan this week. The MIT professor, a champion of Palestinian rights, was to give a speech at Birzeit University in Ramallah, but ended up delivering it by videoconference instead. A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision to turn Chomsky away was a mistake. “A guy at the border overstepped his authority,” he said. But Chomsky said the guards who questioned him for hours were in close contact with their superiors at the Interior Ministry. “The government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say,” Chomsky said, “which puts them into the category of, I suppose, every other government in the world.”

Election results, finally: The results of Iraq’s March parliamentary election have finally been officially confirmed, which means the maneuvering to form a government can begin. The Independent High Electoral Commission said this week that a hand recount of Baghdad votes, requested by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, upheld the two-seat lead of the secular Iraqiya bloc of Iyad Allawi over al-Maliki’s Shiite bloc and found no fraud. As the largest bloc, Iraqiya has the first chance to try to form a government. But the delay in confirming the vote gave al-Maliki time to hammer out a deal with the other main Shiite bloc, and he now leads a coalition with a near-majority, giving him a good chance of succeeding in forming a government should Allawi fail.

Uranium deal prompts sanctions: Iran struck a deal with Turkey and Brazil this week to outsource its enrichment of uranium, prompting all five permanent U.N. Security Council members to back new sanctions. The deal mirrors a swap endorsed by the U.S. but rejected by Iran last October, in which Iran would have shipped low-enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for higher-enriched material for its research reactor. But now, seven months later, Iran has much more nuclear material stockpiled, so the same swap would leave Iran with enough fuel for a bomb. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she has secured the backing of Russia and China, longtime opponents of Iran sanctions, for a new sanctions resolution. “This announcement is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide,” Clinton said.

Protesters surrender: The Thai military has routed thousands of “Red Shirt” anti-government protesters from their camp in the center of Bangkok, ending a two-month standoff. After days of running battles between protesters and soldiers that left 38 dead, the military this week moved in on the encampment, and the protest leaders called on the crowd to disperse. “We cannot resist against these savages anymore,” said Jatuporn Prompan, one of the leaders. Protesters left a trail of destruction as they fled, setting fire to the stock exchange, a shopping mall, and other buildings, and although five people were killed, the rout did not become the bloodbath many had feared. The Red Shirts began as a group of loyalists of Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire prime minister ousted by the military in 2006, but it now includes many of Thailand’s poor as well as various militant groups.

Rags to riches to jail: China’s most successful entrepreneur was sentenced to 14 years in prison this week for insider trading and bribery. Huang Guangyu, a high school dropout and the son of poor peasants, started out at age 16 selling radios at a roadside stall and eventually built his home-appliance company, Gome, into the country’s largest consumer-electronics retailer. In 2008, he was China’s richest man, with a fortune of more than $6 billion. Similar high-profile corruption convictions have brought the death penalty, but authorities said they were being lenient with Huang because he was cooperative and repentant.

Hideous shirt choice hurts PM: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama may have doomed his political career with an egregious fashion faux pas. At a recent photo-op lunch with ordinary voters, Hatoyama showed up in a flamboyant color-block checked shirt appropriate for a 1980s-era music video, prompting an influential fashion critic to write that the garment was proof that Hatoyama’s “ideas and philosophy are old.” The critique caught on, and Japanese news outlets gave prominent play to photos and videos of the unfortunate look. Now Hatoyama’s already dismal approval rating has plunged to 24 percent.