Did People Outside the U.S. Care About Our Election?

While everything stopped here in America to watch the alleged nail-biter, or what the TV told us would be a nail-biter, how did the rest of the world react?

• “Today’s table topics: Egypt’s constitution-to-be, a proposed restaurant and shop curfew, the need for interior ministry reform. The U.S. presidential election? Not on the menu. ‘We’ve got more than enough to worry about with Morsi,’ the 42-year-old Somaya says, roughly chopping a bundle of molokheya, bitter greens common in the Egyptian kitchen. ‘I didn’t even know about the U.S. election, and I don’t care. Whoever wins won’t make a difference to us.’”

• “I confess to forgetting repeatedly about the US elections today. I was reporting on a mass hunger strike by some 700 prisoners demanding Kurdish education and court rights and an end to the isolation of PKK rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence on an island jail. It is Day 55. They are surviving on sugar water and liquid vitamins.”

• “Islamabad woke to news of an Obama victory with an unimpressed yawn…. ‘The main thing people care about is the drone strikes,’ said a TV cameraman, setting up his gear outside the residence of the US embassy’s chargé d’affaires. ‘We all know that will not change whoever is in power.’”

Plus dispatches from South Africa, Hong Kong, Dubai, Jakarta and more.