Politics this week

American diplomats pressed Israel's government to extend a moratorium, due to expire on September 26th, on the building and expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. A compromise should allow direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, which resumed only this month, to continue. See article

South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, appeared, for now, to have fended off critics within his ruling African National Congress and among his trade union allies at a party conference of 2,000 members.

Somalia's prime minister, Omar Sharmarke, who has been criticised for failing to defeat the Shabab jihadist movement, resigned amid feuds within the beleaguered transitional government, whose writ barely runs beyond the capital, Mogadishu.

Thousands of civilians fled the south Yemeni town of Hawta, which has been besieged by government forces trying to flush out a jihadist rebel group said to be linked to al-Qaeda.

At least ten people were killed when a bomb went off during a military parade in Mahabad, the main town in Iran's Kurdish north-western region. The Iranian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which operates mainly in Turkey, fell under suspicion.

Territorial talks

An international summit convened in Moscow to discuss competing territorial claims to the Arctic Ocean. Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States have all made claims in the resource-rich region, which some believe could hold up to a quarter of the world's oil and gas reserves.

Sweden's four-party centre-right alliance was returned in a general election, but provisional results suggested it was short of an overall majority. The far-right Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time, winning 20 seats. See article

Ireland raised €1.5 billion ($2 billion) through a bond issue, slightly easing fears that it may be forced to tap EU bail-out funds. The auction was good news for Brian Cowen, the prime minister, whose leadership is under scrutiny after a recent allegedly drunken radio interview.

France raised its terror alert after receiving a tip-off from a foreign intelligence service about an imminent threat of attack by a female suicide-bomber on the public transport system. The alert came a week after the Senate, the upper house, voted to ban full Islamic veils.

In Germany's biggest anti-nuclear demonstrations for decades, tens of thousands took to the streets of Berlin to protest against the government's plans to extend the lifespan of Germany's nuclear reactors. More protests are scheduled. See article

Back to school

The White House announced that Larry Summers is to step down as director of the National Economic Council and return to Harvard. Mr Summers is the most senior economic adviser to Barack Obama to resign among a spate of recent departures. High unemployment and a lacklustre economy continue to dominate the mid-term election campaigns. See article

Democrats in the Senate couldn't break a Republican filibuster on repealing “don't ask, don't tell”, the policy that allows clandestine gays to remain in the armed forces, but under which thousands have been dismissed. The Pentagon is undergoing a review of the policy with a mind to repeal it and allow openly homosexual men and women to serve.

BP's Macondo oil well off the gulf coast was officially declared to be “dead”, or sealed by cement. An explosion on the rig in April killed 11 men and was followed by the release of some 4.9m barrels of oil. A moratorium on deep-water offshore oil drilling was then imposed.

Election and ethics

Opinion polls suggested that Dilma Rousseff, the ruling party's candidate, is on track to win Brazil's presidential election on October 3rd despite an ethics scandal. Erenice Guerra, who replaced Ms Rousseff as chief of staff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the outgoing president, resigned over claims that she was complicit in a scheme of her son's to extract kickbacks in return for help with public contracts and loans. Ms Guerra denies wrongdoing.

In a front-page editorial addressed to drug-trafficking gangs, the main newspaper in Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico's border with the United States, asked for guidance on what it could and could not publish without suffering violent reprisals. The editorial followed the murder of an intern at the paper. It also complained of the lack of government protection.

Argentina's government stepped up its campaign against the country's two main newspapers, filing a lawsuit accusing them of complicity in crimes against humanity when they bought a newsprint business during the country's military dictatorship of the 1970s. The papers say the charges are bogus.

In a continuing shake-up of his economic team, Cuba's president, Raúl Castro, sacked the minister of Basic Industries.

Commonwealth shame

India's first Commonwealth games, scheduled to start in Delhi on October 3rd, are looking as much like a fiasco as anyone had feared with unsafe buildings, a collapsed bridge and an outbreak of dengue fever contributing to the chaos. Indian newspapers called it a “national shame”. See article

More than a third of Afghanistan's eligible voters turned out on September 18th, defying the Taliban to vote in parliamentary elections. Official results are still weeks away, but NATO and other Western observers were quick to call the election a success. The country's main opposition leader claimed to have solid evidence of “massive rigging”. See article

An army column in Tajikistan was ambushed by a party of Islamist militants, including fighters from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya. At least 25 soldiers, who had been searching for a group of insurgents who escaped from prison last month, were killed.

North Korea's state media reported that a conference of the ruling Korean Workers' Party is due to begin on September 28th, following an unexplained postponement. The meeting's stated purpose is to “elect” a “supreme leadership body”. See article