In Pakistan Raja Pervez Ashraf was chosen as the new prime minister by the ruling party after a judge issued an arrest warrant for Makhdoom Shahabuddin, the party's preferred candidate to replace Yousaf Raza Gilani. Mr Gilani was dismissed by the Supreme Court for refusing to pursue corruption charges against Asif Ali Zardari, the president. The court gave Mr Ashraf two weeks to decide whether he might like to reopen the case. More than a hundred Taliban fighters made a rare cross-border raid from Afghanistan into Pakistan (the raids are usually the other way round) and killed a dozen soldiers, mostly by beheading them. Japan's lower house of parliament passed a contentious plan to double the consumption tax, which now proceeds to the upper house. The bill has split the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and may force the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, into calling an election. Two separate incidents of boats packed full of migrants that sank as they headed to Australia did little to break a deadlock over asylum-seekers in the Australian parliament. Scores of people are missing from the first incident. The Labor government wants to press ahead with a plan to send people seeking asylum in Australia to Malaysia in exchange for refugees already in that country. Chinese astronauts, including its first female one, successfully linked the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft to an orbiting laboratory in China's first manual space docking. China aims to finish its space station by 2020. Never-closer union Europe's leaders convening in Brussels for a European Union summit were under intense pressure to come up with a new plan to save the euro, but they seemed as divided as ever. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, used uncommonly strong language when she rejected the idea for common Eurobonds by saying Europe would not share debt liability "as long as I live." Antonis Samaras had a difficult first week as Greece's new prime minister. He was rushed to hospital for eye surgery and had to miss his first EU summit. Also, his finance minister and his deputy shipping minister both resigned. François Hollande, the French president, increased the minimum wage, in a bid to boost consumer spending and help the stalling economy. Mr Hollande's Socialist government is levying more taxes on the wealthy and big companies to reduce the budget deficit. Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland and a former senior commander in the IRA, shook the queen's hand at a reception in Belfast, a small formality that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. Russia expressed outrage over an American Senate committee's approval of a bill that would penalise Russian officials for human-rights abuses, and warned Washington that adopting the sanctions would force Russia to respond in kind. The Sergei Magnitsky accountability act is named after a Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in custody while awaiting trial in 2009. Federal rights The Supreme Court struck down most of Arizona's controversial law that cracks down on illegal immigrants, because it interferes with federal discretion in the area. However, the court did decide that Arizona's police officers could still check the papers of people they suspect are in America illegally (but now can detain them only briefly). Council members in Stockton, in California's Central Valley, voted for a plan that will lead the city into bankruptcy protection, the biggest American municipality to do so. Utah held the final primary in the Republican presidential nomination race: Mitt Romney took 93% of the vote. The cauldron gets hotter Violence in Syria escalated on all fronts. Rebels of the Free Syrian Army attacked a pro-government TV station near Damascus. Defections from the armed forces accelerated. Tension between Syria and Turkey sharpened after a Syrian missile downed a Turkish aircraft that was said to have entered Syrian air space. The embattled president, Bashar Assad, admitted that his country was "at war." Muhammad Morsi, a Muslim Brother, narrowly won a run-off for the Egyptian presidency, beating Ahmed Shafiq, who had been the last prime minister of the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak. The election commission took a week to announce the result, giving rise to suspicions that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had cut a deal with the Brotherhood to let the generals retain many powers. Mr Morsi said he would be a "president for all Egyptians." Unusually large demonstrations took place in Kuwait's capital city, where Islamist members of the recently dissolved parliament, which had anyway been subordinate to the ruling Al Sabah family, called for proper democracy. After a week's violence perpetrated by Boko Haram, an extreme Islamist sect, had left around 150 people dead in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north, President Goodluck Jonathan sacked his defence minister and national security adviser, saying that "new tactics" were needed. Angry protests against the 23-year-long regime of the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, persisted in several districts of the capital, Khartoum, and in other towns. Parliamentary procedures Paraguay's left-wing president, Fernando Lugo, was voted out of office in a lightning impeachment by the Congress, and was replaced by Federico Franco, his vice-president. After accepting his ouster, the unpopular Mr Lugo then vowed to fight it, with the support of several South American governments. An agent of the United States" Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) killed a suspected drug-trafficker during a raid in Honduras. The American embassy said the agent fired in self-defence. Commando squads of DEA agents in Honduras have been present during several fatal incidents in the past 15 months. Authorities in Mexico admitted that a man they arrested as the suspected son of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa drug mob, was in fact a second-hand car salesman with no ties to organised crime.