The day after President Obama ended his historic trip to Havana, Cubans turned on their TV sets and watched his surprise guest appearance in a skit on the popular weekly show Vivir del Cuento (Live by Your Wits). [...]  It was actually Obama’s second appearance on Vivir del Cuento; he’d taped a mock phone call with Pánfilo from the Oval Office for an episode that aired just before his arrival in Havana. 

"My cheeks are sore from smiling," says Loyce Maturu. The 24-year-old, who lives in Harare, Zimbabwe, is posing for a photo at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. She's come to be interviewed about her activism. She's a champion for people with HIV/AIDS and TB (she's been diagnosed with both). So really, the pain of smiling is nothing compared to what she's been through.

It's 9:30 on a Thursday night and Chinese and foreign jazz fans descend on the JZ Club in Shanghai's former French Concession. Glasses clink and the splashing sound of cymbals ripple through a cabaret setting bathed in soft red light. Andrew Field, an American historian, says clubs like JZ represent a return to Shanghai's cosmopolitan past.

[...] American ambassador to the Dominican Republic in November 2013, Wally Brewster got [...] advice from the Vatican’s envoy [...] “If you keep your private life behind the walls of your embassy, you’ll be O.K. here" [...] He meant that Mr. Brewster, to be an effective diplomat, would be wise to keep his husband, Bob Satawake, out of sight in a country where prejudice against gay people remains widespread.

The students at the District’s H.D. Cooke Elementary School, in Adams Morgan, are learning Arabic as part of a State Department-sponsored exchange program that places teachers from China and Egypt in classrooms throughout the United States to teach their native languages — languages U.S. officials say will be increasingly important as the country competes in a global economy.

Seventeen-year-old Muslim student Usman Nawaz was nervous about coming to the United States. [...] Usman is a high-school student ambassador from Pakistan who arrived in Winona last August through a grant from the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs youth exchange and study program.