In 1988, just as the Soviet army was preparing to pull out of Afghanistan, a rocket blasted off carrying the first and only Afghan to travel into space. Abdulahad Momand returned to earth a hero - but within three years he was forced to flee the country.

He was selected from more than 400 candidates to be the first Afghan to join the Soviet space programme, and moved at the age of 29 to the Cosmonauts' Training Centre in Star City, outside Moscow.

Both of them had need of their sense of humour as they made the return journey to Earth - and the computer systems on the Soyuz space-craft malfunctioned. They came within seconds of losing their engines and being trapped in space forever.

s America looked inward in the days, weeks and months after September 11, 2001, others around the world made extraordinary gestures toward the United States.  28We were all so focused on ourselves – understandably so – that many probably missed the fact that Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami condemned the attacks, that Ireland and Israel held full national days of mourning, that the Afghan Taliban told “American children [that] Afghanistan feels your pain”.

You are even less likely to have heard what could be one of the most touching reactions of all.  This is the story of how a destitute Kenyan boy turned Stanford student rallied his Masai tribe to offer its most precious gift to America in its time of need.

According to Kimeli, his family (or lack thereof) was so destitute that his Masai tribe didn’t even consider them people – they were sub-human. Moreover, nobody that Kimeli knew from his tribe had gone to high school, let alone college or medical school.

Might, militarism and humiliation: These are the memories that make Germans today reluctant to project their clout as, once again, Europe’s economic powerhouse. One hundred years on from World War I, German leadership in Europe is both desired and resented, a historically rooted ambivalence that is keenly felt by the Germans and by their wary neighbors.

Today, with nationalism and populism on the rise in Europe, Ms. Merkel is central in trying to untangle a tussle over European leadership that may hasten a British exit from the European Union, and she faces demands from two other major partners, France and Italy, to relax stringent budgetary demands.

t was at Makivka, according to a Ukrainian version of events that is celebrated in museum displays, monuments, patriotic songs and a recent movie, that Ukrainian soldiers achieved an extraordinary feat: They held their ground against the Russian Empire.

Their historic lands claimed by both the Russian czar and the Hapsburgs, Ukrainians fought on both sides of World War I. Some, like the 800 or so members of a unit called the Sich Sharpshooters that held off the Russians at Makivka in April 1915, served as volunteers for the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburg dynasty, which had governed the western part of Ukraine since the late 18th century. An additional 250,000 served the Austrians as conscripts.

About 3.5 million Ukrainians, a vast majority of them conscripts, fought for the Russians, who controlled the central and eastern parts of what is now Ukraine.

he top American military commander in South Korea said on Friday that he believed North Korea had most likely completed its yearslong quest to shrink a nuclear weapon to a size that could fit atop a ballistic missile

For years, American intelligence agencies have been scouring the evidence — from satellite photographs, human spies, intercepted calls and computer transmissions, and the tracking of nuclear suppliers — in an effort to assess when the North would be capable of marrying its nuclear and missile programs.

But even if General Scaparrotti is correct, it does not mean that the North is ready to threaten the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

merican troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs

For generations, among Cuban-Americans, once a largely monolithic voting bloc, the embargo was a symbol of defiance in exile — more gospel than policy.

a growing number of seasoned politicians to call the embargo a failure and argue that ending America’s enmity with Cuba represents the best chance of encouraging positive change on the island.

. Mr. Obama supported repealing the embargo when he was running for the United States Senate in 2004 but backtracked as a presidential candidate, saying in 2008 that the embargo gave Washington leverage over the Cuban government.

hen linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor.

Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram.