The Pope loves convertibles – India finally acts a decade long series of gruesome attacks against women – And their will be no Olympic Boycott over American surveillance leaks.

The Pope will shun bulletproof vehicles during his visit to Brazil, which is to begin on Monday.  The Argentine Pope wants to have direct contact with crowds, and will instead use the same open-top jeeps he has preferred to use during his general audiences in St. Peter's Square to enable him to reach out and touch people.  The bulletproof vehicles were introduced after a Turkish gunman shot Pope John Paul II in 1981.

India’s government is finally moving on restricting sales of acid, used all too frequently by spurned lovers and angry families to splash on the faces of young women to permanently and horrifically disfigure them.  Only very diluted forms of acid can be sold under the new law, and sellers much get the names and contact information from anyone trying to buy it.  The Acid Survivors Foundation India says hundreds of women are targeted every year, and despite the frequency of the crime, hospitals are not equipped to deal with disfiguring acid burns.

A Bangladeshi tribunal handed a death sentence to a senior official of the Jamaat-e-Islami party for atrocities committed during the 1971 war for independence.  65-year old Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed shouted, “wrong judgment,” when the judge handed down the sentence for him to be hanged.  He directed the murders of Bangladeshi intellectuals in the end days of the war.

Libyan tourism officials say Muammar Gaddafi’s demolished compound will be transformed into an amusement park and green space.  Bab al-Aziziya is now mostly rubble.  It was a sprawling 6.5-square-kilometer fortress with everything from sports fields to an underground bunker for Gaddafi and his inner circle.  With Libya’s government in flux, the speed of this transformation isn’t certain.

An independent audit of Zimbabwe's voters roll has found it contains the names of more than a million people who either are deceased or have left the African country.  And the Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) says there is a marked registration bias in favor of rural strongholds of President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.  Zimbabwe’s national elections are in less than two weeks.

North and South Korea ended the latest round of talks aimed at reopening the joint Kaesong Industrial Complex without a breakthrough.  Another round is scheduled for Monday.  Seoul wants Pyongyang to ensure the safety of South Korean workers at the complex, as well as to take legal measures make sure another shutdown will never happen again.

The US Olympic Committee is rejecting a senior lawmaker’s call to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics, if Russia grants asylum to fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden.  The committee says America tried that once before and it didn’t work.  The boycott of the 1980 Olympics didn’t solve the underlying issues at hand and denied athletes their chance to compete at the world level.