Politics this week

India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, went to Beijing to discuss matters of trade and border defence. In April a contingent of Chinese troops had set back relations between India and China by taking up positions on the Indian side of a disputed boundary. Mr Singh hoped also to alleviate what he called an “unsustainable” trade deficit with China, which ran to $39 billion in 2012. See article

China charged an outspoken venture capitalist, Wang Gongquan, with using his wealth to organise crowds for “disruptive” purposes. Two days earlier a liberal economist at Peking University, which has many partnerships with Western colleges, was sacked for apparently political reasons. In the same week that a newspaper called for one of its journalists to be released from police custody, Chinese officials seemed unfazed by the prospect of a rebuke during its latest review before the UN’s Human Rights Council. See article

An “airpocalypse” descended on Harbin, in China’s industrial north-east. Smoke from burning coal and from fires in harvested fields combined with chilly weather to produce the putrid sooty haze, which made it impossible to see farther than 20 metres. The Chinese government has laid out plans to name and shame the country’s ten most air-polluted cities to try to get local governments to take action.

Brunei introduced the strictest interpretation of Islamic law in South-East Asia. Its sultan issued a sharia-based code that includes such penalties as stoning and amputation. He was quick to reassure minorities and foreign tourists that the law will apply only to the two-thirds of the oil-rich country’s 400,000 citizens who are Muslim.

Dotcom bust

Barack Obama acknowledged that the roll-out of the new government website through which Americans can sign up for health insurance had not gone well. Healthcare.gov is the portal for people who live in one of the 36 states that have not set up an insurance exchange under Obamacare; it has been plagued by technical glitches from the start. Republicans are calling for Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary, to resign. See article

New Jersey became the 14th American state to permit same-sex marriage, after its top court refused to stop the ceremonies from taking place (it citied the federal Supreme Court’s ruling in June that struck down federal discrimination against legally married gay couples). Chris Christie, the governor, opposes same-sex marriage but has decided not to appeal.

Calling charges

In the latest round of revelations linked to documents provided by Edward Snowden, Angela Merkel phoned Barack Obama to register her anger that America had eavesdropped on her mobile phone. Meanwhile, it emerged that Felipe Calderón’s e-mails were hacked when he was president of Mexico, and French diplomats were spied on in Washington and at the UN. Claims that the Americans had tapped millions of phones in France were dismissed by James Clapper, the head of America’s national intelligence, as “misleading”. See article

The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats began negotiating a governing partnership in Germany. Together they hold 80% of the seats in parliament. Most Germans want a stable “grand coalition”, though some worry that the subsequent tiny opposition may be too weak to keep German democracy vibrant. See article

A Basque militant was freed from prison after Spanish authorities obeyed a European Court of Human Rights ruling that overturned her continued detention. Inés Del Río was serving a 30-year sentence for bomb attacks in the 1980s carried out by ETA, a separatist group. Victims of its bloody campaign for independence denounced the ruling. See article

In Britain Sir John Major, a former Conservative prime minister, called for a windfall tax on power companies, which was seen as bolstering the opposition Labour Party’s push for a cap on consumer energy prices. The current prime minister, David Cameron, has struggled to respond to the political clamour about rising energy costs. Meanwhile, the government struck a deal with EDF, a French company, to build the first nuclear plant in Britain for 20 years. See article

The Vatican suspended a senior German bishop, dubbed the “bishop of bling”, from his post because of lavish spending on refurbishing his official residence.

No way out

The “Friends of Syria”, a group of 11 Western and Arab countries plus Turkey, met in London in the hope of paving the way for a second peace conference to be held in Geneva near the end of next month, but rebel groups said they would refuse to attend it unless President Bashar Assad first agreed to step down. He, on the contrary, said he would run for re-election next year.

After securing a two-year stint as a member of the UN Security Council, Saudi Arabia immediately renounced its seat, saying that the body had failed to bring peace to the Middle East. The unprecedented move was prompted partly by annoyance with America for its timidity, in Saudi eyes, over Syria and Iran. See article

At least eight policemen and two Islamist militants were killed in clashes in central Tunisia. Thousands of opposition campaigners demonstrated in Tunis, the capital, calling on the Islamist-led government to resign.

Renamo, a former rebel group which holds about a fifth of the seats in Mozambique’s parliament, renounced the 1992 peace deal that ended the country’s bloody 16-year civil war, after clashes with government forces in a central mountainous part of the country.

After a delay of three weeks, Guinea’s electoral commission released provisional results for the country’s first general election since 2002, and declared President Alpha Condé’s ruling party as the winner. His opponents cried foul. See article

Two sides to the same coin

Cuba confirmed that it would unify its two currencies. Since 1994 it has used a weak peso, in which Cubans are paid, and a “convertible” peso, pegged to the dollar, for trade and tourism. See article

Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, a former head of Mexico’s Tijuana drug cartel, was murdered at a family party in Baja California by an assassin disguised as a clown.