Nouakchott, Mauritania
President toppled in coup: Mauritanian President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi was overthrown this week by the head of his presidential guard. Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz detained Abdallahi and several government officials after Abdallahi fired four top army officers. Aziz will head the new ruling junta. The coup is expected to be popular in the desert country, where Abdallahi has been accused of corruption and incompetence and the parliament recently called for his resignation. Abdallahi’s civilian government had been in power for just a year; the previous military government took over in a 2005 coup.
Harare, Zimbabwe
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Everything costs billions: In an effort to battle a hyperinflation rate of 12.5 million percent, Zimbabwe’s central bank cut 10 zeroes from the currency last week. One-dollar coins that became worthless in 2002, when inflation began to skyrocket, were put back in circulation and are worth 10 billion of the old Zimbabwe dollars. That’s not as much as it sounds, since a loaf of bread costs about 200 billion Zimbabwe dollars—about two U.S. dollars. Still, people who didn’t throw away all their old coins are experiencing a windfall, mining sofas and closets for the suddenly usable currency. President Robert Mugabe blames the hyperinflation on profiteers and Western sanctions; most others blame his ruinous economic policies.
Kigali, Rwanda
J’accuse: French political and military officials played an active role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Rwandan government charged in a report this week. The report alleges that France knew of preparations for mass murder and that French troops took part in some killings. It accuses 33 French officials—including late President François Mitterrand and several prominent figures in current French politics—of complicity in the massacres, in which 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were killed. The French Foreign Ministry said the accusations were “unacceptable,” but said it still wanted to re-establish good relations with Rwanda. Rwanda cut ties with France in 2006, after a French judge alleged that Rwandan President Paul Kagame was implicated in the 1994 assassination of his predecessor, whose death was the catalyst for the genocide.
K2, Pakistan
Mountaineering disaster: At least 11 people died this week when an avalanche struck as they were trying to climb the world’s second-tallest mountain. Some of the victims died in the avalanche, while others were stranded as falling ice swept away ropes used for climbing the almost-vertical mountain face. Dutch climber Wilco van Rooijen said he saw people panicking on the descent. “People were running down, but didn’t know where to go, so a lot of people were lost on the mountain on the wrong side, and then you have a big problem.” He said he was screaming for people to work together, but many failed to respond. “Everybody was fighting for himself.” K2, which straddles the border between Pakistan and China, is considered a more treacherous climb than the slightly higher Mount Everest.
Kashgar, China
Terrorist attack in Xinjiang: Two ethnic Uighurs attacked a police barrack in Xinjiang province this week, killing 16 officers in what Chinese authorities called a terrorist strike. The two men reportedly drove a truck into a crowd of officers, then threw makeshift grenades at the wounded men. The attack comes just weeks after a Uighur separatist group called the Turkestan Islamic Party threatened to disrupt the Beijing Olympics. “We have strengthened security in all Olympic venues and in the Olympic village,” said Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Olympics organizing committee. “We are well prepared to deal with any kind of threat.” Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people, have been agitating for independence for decades.
Seoul
Cheers, boos for Bush: South Koreans turned out this week for competing pro- and anti-U.S. rallies, as President Bush arrived for a summit on his way to the Beijing Olympics. In the pro-Bush camp were aging veterans of the Korean War as well as Christians, who support Bush’s tough stance against North Korea, where Christians are persecuted. The anti-Bush camp was comprised mostly of young people opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as those still angry that South Korean President Lee Myung-bak lifted a ban on imports of U.S. beef originally imposed because of concerns over mad-cow disease. Violent protests over beef caused Bush to postpone a visit to Seoul earlier this year.
