Denny Wood

CHICAGO — President Obama met here Sunday morning with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, just hours before opening a NATO summit where the alliance plans to formalize plans to turn over primarily responsibility for the war to Afghanistan’s security forces next year.

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

ARHAB, Yemen — In this rugged northern valley ringed by pink-hued mountains, an ongoing conflict between Yemeni factions is siphoning away resources from a more significant war against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen’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 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.

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.