In the near future, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban may have their own top level domain names on the internet, which could spark innovative ways of promoting business and tourism in South Africa's main centres.

The initiative, titled the “Global Conversation,” uses digital media, mobile phone technology, and meet-ups to enable people from the world over to take part in setting priorities for the future global development agenda.

The only parts of the Palestinian territories with reliable mobile coverage are in major cities or Israeli settlements; high-speed mobile Internet is all but nonexistent. So here's an idea: Light up the West Bank with long-denied 3G wireless Internet connectivity and create an exception in the Arab League boycott of Israeli products for those that have Palestinian-controlled companies in their supply chains.

Scores of hand-woven carpets were laid across the plaza—a sea of red surging over the steps to the library in Mary. A Turkmen drill team, in white uniforms fringed with green, paraded on the sidewalk in preparation for National Carpet Day. The plastic sheeting stretched across the steps forced us to pick our way up the granite siding to the entrance.

In 2010, C.C.A. Lagos introduced its International Art Program, which brought more than a dozen artists and curators from across Africa to Lagos for four weeks of lectures, seminars, workshops and projects. This year, the third edition of the program was held from May to June in Accra, Ghana, beginning what Ms. Silva called a “roaming campus” that she hopes could next stop in Senegal and Mozambique.

Olympic sports will lose young fans and viewers unless the IOC sets up a television channel to broadcast events in the years between the games, IOC presidential candidate Thomas Bach said Friday. “Many Olympic sports do not appear enough across the world on TV,” Bach said. “If you do not see enough sports on TV and the internet, then these sports will lose more and more the kids and young athletes.”

Packer dismissively discusses Google's work on developing smart parking meters for San Francisco, but doesn't mention that the company has a former State Department staffer running an internal think tank working on topics ranging from media coverage of the Mexican drug war to human trafficking.

Both sides are motivated to seek peace. The FARC is a much-weakened military force kept alive with profits from drug trafficking and extortion, analysts say. For its part, the government sees resolving the half-century conflict as the key to opening up the country to more investment, infrastructure projects and social programs.