ROME, Italy — “Exploit your holidays to discover your unique, magical Italy,” intones Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a new TV ad encouraging Italians to vacation at home this year.

PANJWAYI, Afghanistan — Looking out from their hilltop vantage point, a group of Canadian soldiers can see the entire farming village below, nestled into a valley in the restive Kandahar province. Somewhere in the grape fields and mud huts, they know it’s a virtual certainty that an ambush is waiting for them or another Canadian patrol that’s also in the village.

ROME, Italy — Prisons are, by design, unpleasant places to stay. But what really kept Pasquale — a 45-year-old Sicilian father of four — awake at night was the thought of life outside prison.

TOKYO, Japan — It was supposed to be the perfect solution to a seemingly intractable problem: how to care for the sick and elderly in a country suffering from a declining, and quickly graying, population.

WARSAW, Poland — There is a revolution brewing in Polish higher education as universities grapple with wrenching demographic changes as well as trying to figure out how to train students for advanced degrees while producing top-flight research — something they currently do very badly.

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania and NEW YORK — When it came to a choice between a hydropower dam that would provide electricity to one-third of Tanzania and a tiny endangered toad, the dam won.

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — A U.S. warship capable of deploying more than 1,000 military personnel and dozens of helicopters is headed this way — right for Costa Rica’s peaceful Caribbean coast.

BOSTON — "Chinese Economy Eclipses Japan," said the headline in the Financial Times. "China surpasses Japan," the Korea Times stated. "China rising on world stage," warned the San Francisco Chronicle.

FRANKFURT, Germany — It wasn’t too long ago that apartment dwellers in Germany assumed that someone, somewhere in the building, was taking notes on everything they did. Even people who owned their own homes could never be certain whether a government mole was listening in on their conversations.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Farah Diena is taking catechism, the religious courses that will prepare her for baptism. The 20-year-old English teacher decided to convert from Islam to Catholicism two years ago, but as she prepared to fully commit, she also had to come to terms with the ostracism she would face from Indonesia’s Muslim majority.