The world at a glance

New York

Trump’s feuds: The US VicePresident-elect Mike Pence was attending the Broadway show Hamilton last Friday when he was booed by fellow audience members and then lectured from the stage at the curtain call. The musical, about the US founding father Alexander Hamilton, features hip-hop music and a racially diverse cast. “Mike Pence, we welcome you here,” actor Brandon Dixon (who plays the 18th century vice-president Aaron Burr) told him. “We are the diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents… or uphold our inalienable rights.” The incident (pictured) provoked furious tweets from President-elect Donald Trump. “The Theatre must always be a safe and special place,” said one. “The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologise!” Trump also reprimanded TV show Saturday Night Live for mocking him, and summoned TV executives and journalists to Trump Tower to rail against “outrageous” and “dishonest” media coverage of the presidential transition.

Trump has also paid $25m to settle three fraud lawsuits related to his “Trump University” investment classes. Rather than contest them, he said, he needed to be fully focused on his new job.

Denver, Colorado

No end to “slavery”: Colorado voters have rejected, by 50.35%, a change to the state’s constitution that would have removed from it the last legitimising references to slavery. The clause, written in 1876, reads: “There shall never be in this state either slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Both Democratic and Republican politicians had wanted to get rid of it; but opponents argued that despite its antiquated wording, it was needed to legitimate forced prison labour as a form of punishment. Today, prisoners in Colorado aren’t compelled to work in the state’s jails, but those who do qualify for earlier parole. That so many voted against reform may have been due to the ballot paper’s ambiguous wording, which made it hard to tell what a “no” vote entailed.

Washington DC

Clinton’s pain: Hillary Clinton appeared in public last week for the first time since losing the US election. She told a charity event in Washington DC that she would continue to fight for a “hopeful, inclusive and big-hearted” America, but confessed “there have been a few times this past week when all I’ve wanted to do was just curl up with a good book or our dogs and never leave the house again”. Her lead in the popular vote has widened to 1.5 percentage points in the latest tallies. She won 64.2 million votes to Trump’s 62.2 million – more than any US presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama.

Lima

Obama’s warning: President Barack Obama has warned his successor Donald Trump that he may defy convention and speak out against Trump’s policies and actions if they were to threaten America’s “core values and ideals”. By tradition, former US presidents tend to leave the political fray and avoid criticising their successors; in recent years, George W. Bush has made hardly a single comment on Obama’s performance. In the final international appearance of his presidential term, at a news conference in the Peruvian capital, Lima, Obama said he too would respect the tradition of presidents giving their successors space to govern “without somebody popping off” at every turn of events. But, he added, he might return to the political fray if it became “necessary or helpful” for him to defend fundamental American principles.

New York

Solidarity with Muslims: The Jewish director of the AntiDefamation League, a US group that fights anti-semitism, has declared he will register as a Muslim if Donald Trump goes ahead with his campaign pledge to establish a database of Muslims. “If one day Muslim Americans will be forced to register their identities, that is the day this proud Jew will register as a Muslim,” Jonathan Greenblatt told a conference in New York last week. During the election campaign, Trump called for a “shutdown” of Muslims entering the country, “loyalty tests” for US Muslims, and a compulsory database to track them. On Sunday a Trump spokesman said there were no plans to create a registry, but that the idea could not be ruled out. Two prominent Trump supporters raised the prospect again this week: one approvingly cited the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII as a precedent.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Deadly shoot-outs: A series of shoot-outs between Rio’s police force and criminal gangs left at least 12 people dead across the city last weekend, in the most deadly outbreak of violence in years. Gunfire was reported at six different locations, highlighting fears of a public security crisis in cashstrapped Rio, which has seen a surge in murders and other violent crimes in recent months. The worst violence occurred in the Cidade de Deus (City of God) favela, where four police officers died when their helicopter crashed. Mobile phone footage seemed to suggest it was shot down. Soon after, the bodies of seven young local men were found, some apparently the victims of executionstyle killings: friends and relatives claim they were killed by police.

Sabha, Libya

Clashes sparked by monkey attack: At least 16 people have died and a further 50 have been wounded in the lawless city of Sabha, in southern Libya, after five days of armed clashes between tribal factions. The fighting erupted last Thursday when three young men let a pet monkey loose on a schoolgirl. The monkey, which belonged to a shopkeeper from the Gaddadfa tribe, reportedly then scratched, bit and ripped the headscarf off the girl, a member of the rival Awlad Suleiman tribe. Seeking revenge, Awlad Suleiman fighters returned with heavy weaponry, and killed the monkey along with three people from the Gaddadfa tribe. Over the next few days, the clashes escalated to involve the use of tanks, mortars and snipers. The attacks have shut down parts of the city, a hub for the smuggling of weapons and people.

Nsanje, Malawi

“Hyena” guilty: An Hiv-positive Malawian man accused of having sex with more than 100 women and teenage girls as part of a traditional “cleansing” ritual has been convicted of “harmful practices” and sentenced to two years in jail. Custom in parts of southern Malawi dictates that a man, known as a “hyena”, is paid by the village to have sex with bereaved widows in order to exorcise evil spirits and to prevent further deaths. Parents also pay the “hyena” to have sex with their adolescent daughters as a ritual marking the accession to womanhood. The custom is illegal and there is much debate about the extent to which it is still practised. The man convicted, Eric Aniva, became a cause célèbre in July after giving an interview to the BBC; the criminal case against him is the first of its kind.

Aleppo, Syria

Hospitals bombed: All remaining hospitals in the besieged, rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo were reported to have been destroyed or put out of action following a series of air strikes late last week by Syrian and Russian bombers. Among the buildings destroyed was the last remaining children’s hospital, which was treating victims of a suspected government chlorine attack when it was hit. “You can’t imagine what it’s like living in Aleppo right now,” one surgeon told The New York Times. “We no longer have hospitals to operate in. It feels like we are living in hell. Our neighbourhoods are in flames, and bombs are raining down from the sky.” According to the UN, the number of people living under a state of siege in Syria – of whom some 275,000 are in Aleppo – has doubled in the past six months to almost a million.

Dubai

Rape warning: A Uk-based charity has issued a warning that British tourists and residents in Dubai and across the United Arab Emirates should not report incidents of rape to the police. The statement by the Detained in Dubai organisation was triggered by the case of Zara-jayne Moisey, 25, a British software consultant, who was on holiday in Dubai last month when she was allegedly raped by two British men. When she went to the police station to report the crime, she was arrested and charged with extramarital sex, a crime punishable by jail, and even by flogging and stoning to death. This week Dubai prosecutors said that after reviewing the video of the encounter made by the alleged rapists, they had concluded the sex was consensual, and they threw the case out, allowing all involved to go home. Moisey’s is the latest in a series of recent cases in which Westerners have been arrested after reporting rapes.

Seoul

Quiet please: Planes grounded; roads closed; building work suspended; offices and businesses across South Korea ordered to open late. All this was done last week – as it is each year – to ensure that high-school students were on time for the national college entrance exam – and had peace and quiet while they sat it. More than 600,000 teenagers took the ultra-competitive eight-hour test (pictured); pressure to score well has been blamed for Korea’s remarkably high rates of teenage depression and suicide.

Kanpur, India

Rail tragedy: At least 146 people died and more than 200 were injured, dozens of them critically, in a train derailment in Uttar Pradesh in the early hours of Sunday morning – India’s worst railway accident for 14 years. The Indore-patna Express came off the rails at high speed, at 3am local time, about 40 miles from the city of Kanpur, wrecking 14 carriages, of which two were mangled beyond recognition. More than 25,000 people are killed on India’s creaking railways

each year.

Manila

Hero’s burial: President Rodrigo Duterte’s highly controversial decision to have the body of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos reburied in the Philippines’ “Cemetery of Heroes” in Manila has sparked a series of angry street demonstrations. Marcos (pictured) – who killed, tortured and jailed opponents, and looted an estimated $10bn of state funds, before being driven from power in 1986 – remains a bitterly divisive figure: previous presidents refused to allow his reburial in the cemetery. The Supreme Court has endorsed Duterte’s decision, but it is now the subject of a legal challenge.