Pakistani rescue teams battled against multiple disasters over the weekend as the death toll from a week of blizzards and torrential rainfall climbed to more than 360. A second dam ruptured in Baluchistan province on Sunday, killing seven people, after at least 135 died and up to 1 500 were still missing when the Shadikor dam burst over several coastal towns on Thursday.

Iraq’s Shia Muslims sealed their historic political ascendancy on Sunday night when they won just under half of the votes in the country’s landmark multiparty elections, giving the long-oppressed majority its first taste of power in decades. Final results from the January 30 ballot released on Sunday showed the Shias won more than four million votes, or about 48% of those cast.

HIV and Aids scientists and advisers on both sides of the Atlantic urged caution on Sunday over suggestions that a new fast-acting strain of the HIV virus resistant to most anti-retroviral drugs had emerged in New York. Thomas Friedman, the city’s health commissioner, said on Friday the strain might be ”difficult or impossible to treat”.

Tensions between the United States and Europe over the conduct of the ”war on terror” — in particular, how to stop Iran building nuclear weapons — spilled over on Sunday at a high-level security conference. Sharp differences were exposed and even the usefulness of Nato was questioned.

The traditional world music album award won by Ladysmith Black Mambazo at the 47th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles made South Africa proud, President Thabo Mbeki said on Monday. He said: ”This is the epitome of success for a group which had entertained our country and millions abroad for more than four decades.”

With complete press censorship, one of the last remaining freedoms from the 1990 People’s Movement is gone. Since February 1, Nepal’s press, until then one of the freest in the world, has been subjected to absolute censorship. Nothing critical of the king’s move, in letter or spirit, is allowed to be printed or broadcast, and action will be taken against anyone who violates this ban.

The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the United Nations are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet last week. A report by the former chairperson of the US Federal Reserve was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN’s oil-for-food programme, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his hands. But Volcker came up with something else, writes George Monbiot.