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most everybody around the world stopped what they were doing — on television, on the Internet and on the street — to look and listen.

as the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, showed in 1997, communal sorrow is moving, public frenzy is alarming, but the two together make for irresistible television.

Brian Williams of NBC, who sat on a special platform outside the Staples Center, told his colleague Lester Holt that the public had a way of deciding for itself what matters, “despite, at some times, the news media’s better wishes.” He added ruefully, “And this is an event because it is.”

“I want to go to school,” he said in English. “I would like it if I could be — it sounds like a lot to ask — an engineer of computing.”

Although some are as young as 12, most are teenagers seeking an education and a future that is not possible in their own country, which is still struggling with poverty and violence eight years after the end of Taliban rule.

Once in France, the boys face more hardship. The Paris police have started conducting nightly searches to prevent Afghan migrants from sleeping in Villemin Square. The 15-year-old was placed in a cheap hotel, while others were put in temporary shelter in an unused subway station. Others find their own shelter under bridges and beside a canal

ens of thousands of protesters thronged to a historic square in one of Europe’s largest capitals on Saturday to defend press freedom amid concerns of growing government interference in how the news is reported in Italy.

Free information, not on a leash

Mr. Berlusconi dismissed the protest as “a real farce.” Speaking at a political convention in northern Italy, he said, “Freedom is far greater in Italy than any other Western country,”

new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

But it appears they are finding ways around Big Brother.

For South Koreans, efforts to replace credit cards and cash hit their stride in 2004, when banks began issuing integrated circuit chips that slot into the mobile phones and allow them to work like credit cards at A.T.M.’s.

Mobile payment has been adopted in many parts of Europe and Asia, especially in Japan. Still, phones have a long way to go before replacing plastic.

For Kim Hee-young, her mobile is the Swiss Army knife of the digital era. When she wants ice cream, she just asks her phone, and it shows a list of ice cream shops — complete with their menus and customer reviews — and the shortest way to get there.

This year more than a thousand Web sites have been shut down for “vulgar” content, although some critics complain that academic or public service sites that deal with sexually transmitted diseases have also been swept up in the juggernaut.

Industry experts say that at least 90 percent of all online games in China have some form of violence, whether they involve homicidal kung-fu masters, sword-wielding hobbits or monsters with a taste for human flesh

There are summer camps for teenagers who spend too much online,

A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200

“I will not pay a penny,” she told The Associated Press.

The judge had threatened to jail her for one month if she did not pay the fine.