Politics this week

Mar 31st 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Russian security services said that two female suicide-bombers blew themselves up on Moscow’s metro system, killing 39 people. There was no claim of responsibility, but blame immediately fell on Islamic insurgents from Russia’s north Caucasus region. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, vowed to drag the bombers “from the bottom of the sewers”. Two days later, two explosions killed around a dozen people in the north Caucasus region of Dagestan. See article

The presidents of Russia and America confirmed an agreement to cut their respective nuclear arsenals by about a third. The deal was received more warmly in Washington than in Moscow; Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, emphasised that Russia could withdraw from the arrangement if America pursues plans for a missile-defence shield. See article

The Serbian parliament formally apologised for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. It declined to describe the killings as genocide. Meanwhile, John Sheehan, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, said his recent statement blaming the presence of openly gay UN peacekeepers for making the massacre possible, was wrong. See article

The conservative coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi outperformed expectations in Italy’s regional elections, winning four of the 13 regions at stake from the left-wing opposition. The Northern League, Mr Berlusconi’s coalition partner, did particularly well. See article

Pope Benedict XVI remained resolute as criticism mounted of the role he played, when a cardinal, in the child-abuse scandals engulfing the Catholic church. In his Palm Sunday sermon, the pope said his faith helped him avoid being intimidated by “the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. See article

The Large Hadron Collider, Europe’s newly repaired particle accelerator, officially overtook America’s Tevatron as the world’s most powerful. It collided two streams of protons at an energy of 7 tera electron volts, three-and-a-half times the previous record. See article

Done and dusted

Barack Obama signed a “reconciliation” bill that fixes some measures in the recently passed health-care act. The reconciliation bill was part of the Democratic leadership’s parliamentary manoeuvre to avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Meanwhile, the two parties cranked up the rancour over health care, with each accusing the other of exploiting voter anger on the issue. See article

In a busy week for a reinvigorated Mr Obama, the president prepared a plan that would allow new drilling for oil and gas off America’s east coast, from Delaware to Florida, in waters off northern Alaska and other offshore areas, in some places for the first time. Environmentalists were not pleased.

Rallying the troops

Barack Obama flew unannounced to Afghanistan where, besides visiting American troops, he held a meeting with his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. American officials said he told Mr Karzai his government had to do more to root out corruption. See article

The National League for Democracy, Myanmar’s main opposition party, which won an election in 1990, announced it would not register to take part in an election to be held later this year because it refuses to recognise the constitution under which the ballot will be held. Many of its leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest, are anyway barred from contesting the poll. See article

More than 40 sailors were missing, and 58 rescued, when a South Korean navy ship sank off North Korea after an explosion. A diver died searching the wreckage. The defence minister said the explosion might have been caused by a mine laid by North Korea during the Korean war, from 1950-53.

After two weeks of mass anti-government demonstrations in Bangkok by red-shirted supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, an exiled former prime minister, protest leaders held televised talks with Abhisit Vejjajiva, the present prime minister (above). But Mr Abhisit rejected their demand for an immediate dissolution of Thailand’s parliament and talks broke down with no agreement. See article

Narendra Modi, chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, was questioned for several hours by a panel investigating the riots in his state in 2002, in which more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Mr Modi denies charges that he and his government connived in the pogrom.

The people have spoken

The final results of Iraq’s general election gave the Iraqi National Movement led by Iyad Allawi, a former prime minister and secular-minded Shia with Sunni support, 91 seats out of the parliament’s 325, pipping the incumbent prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, whose State of Law alliance got 89. A Shia religious front, including followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, got 70. The two main Kurdish parties together got 43. Various coalition combinations are being mooted. A new government may take months to emerge.

Israeli politicians argued over the fallout from Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent unfriendly encounter in Washington with Barack Obama. The American president’s advisers were said to be hoping that a new ruling coalition might emerge in Israel, with or without Mr Netanyahu as prime minister.

The mute button

The head of the Catholic church in Venezuela accused President Hugo Chávez’s government of using judges and prosecutors to punish political opponents, after Guillermo Zuloaga, the majority shareholder in Globovisión, the last remaining anti-government television channel, was charged with making “offensive” comments about the president. Two opposition politicians have also recently been arrested.

Colombia’s FARC guerrillas released two soldiers they had been holding hostage. One of them, who was captured as a teenager, had been held in captivity for 12 years.

The first oil-well drilled in the sea off the Falkland Islands for more than a decade appears not to have found commercial quantities of oil, according to Desire Petroleum, a British company that last month brought a drilling rig to the islands. The presence of the rig prompted Argentina, which claims the British territory, to place restrictions on shipping. More wells are to be drilled.