For two nations whose exchanges are perennially fraught with tension and distrust, the arrival of blind activist Chen Guangcheng in New York during the weekend marked a tidy conclusion to a month-long diplomatic drama and an encouraging sign for U.S.-Chinese ties.

CHICAGO —NATO leaders began a two-day summit here Sunday that will finalize plans to turn control of Afghanistan over to its own security forces by the middle of next year, a milestone on the way to concluding the alliance’s combat role by the end of 2014.

Eusebio Leal, a diminutive, silver-haired man in a dark suit, sips sweet Cuban coffee in an elegant salon of the Cuban Interests Section mansion on 16th Street NW and recalls the day they began calling him crazy in Havana.

KOLKATA, India — She spent her life fighting communists but is the biggest obstacle to economic liberalization in India today. She is the leader of a small regional party but wields more power than the prime minister.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s telecommunications regulators shut down Twitter for about eight hours Sunday because the social networking site would not remove content that the government found objectionable to Muslims, but the nation’s prime minister stepped in to reverse the ban, officials said.

In this rugged northern valley ringed by pink-hued mountains, a conflict between Yemeni factions is siphoning away resources from a more significant war against al-Qaeda-linked militants in the country’s restive south.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a shadowy Libyan intelligence officer who was convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, and whose release from prison in 2009 sparked international uproar, died May 20 at his home in Tripoli. He was 60.

The blind Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng, who had been at the center of a diplomatic row between the U.S. and Chinese governments, completed a four-week journey from confinement in a rural Chinese village to the freedom of New York, arriving Saturday night after a flight from Beijing with his wife and two children.

The decision that would launch one of the most intense and improbable negotiations in the history of U.S.-China relations was made in the space of hours — and it was sparked by a series of phone calls to the American Embassy.

The decision that would launch one of the most intense and improbable negotiations in the history of U.S.-China relations was made in the space of hours — and it was sparked by a series of phone calls to the American Embassy.

HUSSEINYIA, Egypt — Thousands of people crowded into a tent on a dirt lot in this all-but-forgotten town north of Cairo on a recent afternoon to hear Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh.

Some came because they had already decided to vote for the moderate Islamist, a front-runner in the presidential campaign. Others wanted to know more. But all shared the anticipation and sense of responsibility that are building here as the May 23-24 vote approaches, the first time in modern Egypt that the winner of a presidential election is not a foregone conclusion.

CAMP DAVID, Md. — Leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations opened the door Saturday to more government spending in Europe as way to revive the continent’s struggling economy, shifting away from the idea that the surest way to recovery was through strict fiscal austerity.

LONDON — The Olympic flame began a 70-day journey Saturday that will end on July 27 when a final torchbearer lights a caldron at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games.

For many Britons, the torch relay is the beginning of the countdown to the Summer Games, arguably the world’s greatest sporting spectacle.

The Obama administration is accelerating its planning with Middle Eastern allies for a series of potentially fast-moving crises in Syria in the coming months, including the possible loss of government control over some of the country’s scattered stocks of chemical weapons, U.S. and Middle Eastern security officials say.

Dozens of dredging boats scour the bottom of the Vaitarna creek all day as workers build pyramids of excavated sand in the villages along its banks. By night, thousands of trucks clog a narrow highway to deliver the sand to construction sites in the sprawling commercial hub of Mumbai nearby.

SPEAKING THURSDAY at the Library of Congress, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau highlighted an intriguing dynamic of satire: The more the intended target reacts, he said, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. If the victim flinches or returns fire at a cartoon, the illustration only gains in power.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When scholars gathered at Harvard last month to discuss the political tumult convulsing China’s ruling Communist Party, a demure female undergraduate with a direct stake in the outcome was listening intently from the top row of the lecture hall. She was the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and heir apparent for the party’s top job.