Chinese authorities told Chen Guangcheng on Saturday to pack and then picked up him and his family without providing their passports or other travel documents. Chen told ChinaAid President Bob Fu that it wasn’t until he reached the airport and was ready to board a flight for the United States that he and his family were given the necessary papers to leave their homeland. In case you missed it, see Chen’s arrival at Newark International airport before he and his family headed to an apartment in Greenwich Village, where he will take up law studies at New York University.

Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Bill Frezza has 10 ways Greeks can save themselves—in short, by holding on to euros ahead of a Greek return to the drachma. Then, for Greeks who still know how to work, getting “a healthy black market up and running quickly.” Frezza’s bottom line: “Greeks are incredibly successful and hard working everywhere except in Greece. It’s not your genes that are holding you back; it’s your political culture.”

Greece’s short-lived parliament, elected May 6, was formally dissolved on Saturday. By presidential decree new elections are set for June 17 and are expected to favor radical leftist Alexis Tsipras (yes, his party goes by the name Coalition of the Radical Left). Tsipras vows to fight greater Europe, which has called for austerity measures to bring Greece’s spending and debt in line by threatening to halt payments on Greece’s enormous debt. Unless EU leaders craft yet another compromise, that could lead to Greece’s departure from the eurozone (leaving Europe and the United States holding a lot of Greek debt).

Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah, is on the warpath to eliminate Christian churches across the Gulf region. Recently visiting Kuwait, he lobbied government leaders to destroy churches there. But writing from Dubai, John Folmar reports: “The sheikh may threaten to destroy churches here, but Jesus, the Sheikh of sheikhs and Lord of lords, promised to build them, and he is doing just that.”

NATO heads continue meeting today in Chicago. They’re expected to announce a more formal exit strategy from Afghanistan this week, but a big sticking point is reopening needed supply lines from Pakistan to Afghanistan for NATO forces. According to a New York Times report, President Obama has refused to meet with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan until the roadblock is resolved.

To watch from the Chicago sidelines: Europe’s new left leaders like French President Francois Hollande will try to press the United States into serving as referee with EU debt-holding nations. Spain and Italy are likely to back Hollande’s proposal to create eurobonds that will share the wealth—err, debt—of failing European nations. Could the United States become broker to an EU stimulus package?

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Travel with WORLD news editor Jamie Dean to “the new Egyptian wilderness” in the magazine’s cover story this week, and hear the stories of Christians who have survived government crackdown and Islamist attacks since Egypt’s own Arab Spring began.

Ahead of Egypt’s presidential elections next week, Memri has good breakdown on the presidential candidates.

Iraqi Chaldeans and other Christians who flee physical danger in their homeland are finding themselves unprepared for the moral dangers that await them in the West. “They escape from gunfire in Iraq trying to save their family so they go to the United States and they find physical security, but then they face moral attack,” said one parent who finds many Iraqi refugees fearful at what their children are exposed to in U.S. schools and via American entertainment.

In the home village of now well-known Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, fear and suspicion dominate as authorities crack down on Chen’s extended family. This is what we like to call proper shoe-leather reporting—datelined Linyi, not Beijing. Chen’s brother has told a Hong Kong magazine, “They put me on a chair, bound my feet with iron chains and locked my hands with handcuffs behind my back,” as authorities sought information about how Chen escaped from house arrest two weeks ago. Chen remains confined to a hospital room, where Chinese authorities have barred U.S. officials from visiting. Earlier this week, the State Department said his visa to enter the United States had been completed, while Beijing is saying his passport and other travel arrangements should be ready “within 15 days.” Sources all week have been telling WORLD that his departure is imminent, and some reporters have continued to stake out Dulles airport outside of Washington in anticipation of his arrival. But for the moment, China clearly is in charge of Chen. (See “Blind justice,” by Jamie Dean in the just-released issue of WORLD.)

President Obama will announce today a new initiative (sigh) to help feed those starving in Africa. This time, say White House advisors, “it’s about combining aid with private capital.” But look who’s likely to be in charge of implementation: the leaders of Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, and Benin. And today, even as G-8 leaders gather at Camp David to unveil the program, human rights groups have sent a letter to Obama warning that Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is becoming more repressive, and the United States should “reassess the terms” of U.S. aid to Ethiopia.

What we’ll be watching for: An accountability report from the G-8 summit this weekend that should detail how much of the $22 billion the G-8 pledged for food aid to Africa in 2009 has actually been raised and spent there.

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Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic appeared in a courtroom at The Hague today to begin his trial for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. On the run for more than 15 years, Mladic is accused of organizing the slaughter of more than 8,000 civilian men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 and of laying siege to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, resulting in the deaths of more than 10,000 as commander of the Serbian Army. He was captured in May 2011 hiding in a Serbian farmhouse.

Republican Sen. John McCain has joined Democratic Sen. Jim Webb in calling for a suspension of most sanctions against Burma, also called Myanmar since its military junta formally changed the name in 1989. McCain has traveled to Burma twice in the last year—and as a former Vietnam POW, it could be said that he knows something about Southeast Asia—and believes now that the country’s moves toward democratization and reform are sufficient to reopen some forms of trade and relations. “The right kind of investment would strengthen Burma’s private sector, benefit its citizens, and ultimately loosen the military’s control over the economy and the civilian government. The wrong investment would do the opposite, entrenching a new oligarchy and setting back Burma’s development for decades,” McCain said in a speech this week in Washington. Under his proposal, McCain would keep in place an arms embargo.

In the good news happens category, one of the newest countries in the world, Timor-Leste, is reporting a dramatic reduction in infant mortality rates. Since the last survey in 2003, reports the UN, the infant mortality rate dropped from 60 to 44 deaths per 1,000 births, while the rate for those under the age of 5 fell from 83 to 64 deaths per 1,000 births. Hooray! The UN, of course, also wants to bring down fertility rates, in keeping with its Millennium Development goals and the prevailing wisdom that big families are only a hardship, but more babies surviving is good for any country. Timor-Leste, once known as East Timor, gained independence from Indonesia in 2002 after decades of military occupation.

Elsewhere in Indonesia environs, advancing a more “pure” form of Islamic law is gaining ground in Aceh province, which is about 98 percent Muslim and 1 percent (mostly Protestant) Christian. In late April local administrators shut down 17 places of Christian worship, claiming they were built without permits.

In the bad news perpetuates itself category, I just don’t want to say anything about Greece today. Europe’s belt-tightening refuseniks are getting way too much press.

Upcoming: Patrick Sookhdeo, head of the UK-based Barnabas Fund and an expert on Islam, will speak in Washington next week. On May 22 he will join a Westminster Institute panel (free but registration required) to discuss the “dangerous embrace” between the United States and Islamists. And on May 24 at the Heritage Foundation (also available live at heritage.org), he will talk on lessons learned in Britain in trying to accommodate Islamic ideology, a policy now in practice in the Obama administration.

In an open letter from his prison cell in Iran, Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani thanked “beloved brothers and sisters” for praying for him, and reported that he is in “perfect health.” Authorities jailed Nadarkhani in 2009 and have sentenced him to death for practicing Christianity and renouncing Islam. He writes that he is taking “a little different approach from others to these days, and consider it as the day of exam and trial of my faith.” As Fox News reports, if the letter is real (and reliable sources believe it is), it is the first time Nadarkhani has been heard from in a year. Remember his chains.

Tomorrow, Francoise Hollande will be sworn in as France’s president—its first Socialist head of state in 17 years—and will fly straight from his inauguration to a dinner in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Later this week he flies to Washington, where he will meet with President Obama and attend a NATO summit in Chicago. Hollande wants France’s troops out of Afghanistan by the end of this year … and it’s tempting to say, so what? The French contingent of 3,300 forces represents about .025 percent of all NATO troops on the ground. But the reality is, from my visits to NATO headquarters and other operations in Afghanistan, NATO contingents are mixed by country across all sectors, and an early pullout will hamper many units. Merkel is right to call for solidarity in the Afghan mission (“We go in together, we leave together”). And here’s an early lesson in cooperation for the new French president: Since you don’t own enough transport aircraft to ferry your people home, guess who will have to do that?

Gunmen assassinated another member of the Afghan High Peace Council on Sunday in Kabul. Assailants opened fire on Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, one of the most senior members on the council, as his car was stuck in traffic in the Afghan capital. Set up by President Hamid Karzai two years ago, the council has been controversial for its attempts to negotiate with insurgents. Last year, a suicide bomber killed council head Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan, at his residence in Kabul.

Authorities in northern Mexico found on Sunday 49 bodies with their heads, hands, and feet hacked off and dumped on a northern Mexico highway leading from Monterrey to the Texas border.

A drawing based on information from inside an Iranian military site shows an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests that UN inspectors suspect Tehran has conducted there. Iran denies such testing and has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such a chamber.

Everyone is talking about a provocative op-ed on Sudan in The Washington Post by Andrew Natsios. The case that the former Bush envoy to Sudan makes for arming South Sudan to defend itself against aerial bombardments and advances from the north actually is more obvious than provocative. And Natsios, a former VP at World Vision and head of USAID, is no warmonger. He’s a longtime expert worth listening to.

Are we watching the slow unraveling of the European Union? The EU’s troubled economies are trying to roll back austerity, and Germany is having none of it. In a speech to the German Parliament today, the foreign minister said Greece could stay or go but it will have to stick with austerity measures like spending cuts and tax hikes if it wants to keep its EU/IMF loans. Greece, France, and others find themselves in political crises: Vowing to end austerity measures may be a ticket to political victory at home, but it makes it tough to sit down at the negotiating table with the outsiders who hold your purse strings.

Kuwait’s parliament has passed a law making blasphemy punishable by death and broadening the definition for the offense. And it is one of the “progressive” Arab states. The Gulf nation and U.S. ally is majority Muslim, but about 14 percent Christian—many of them expatriate workers.

Before the Syrian uprising against the government—which has left 9,000 dead—began over a year ago, there were an estimated 40,000 Christians in Homs. Now less than 5,000 are left according to Open Doors, and many in the exodus have been driven out by the extremist rebel groups that are there as “freedom fighters.” With the upheaval across the country, and growing deprivation due to Western sanctions, most of these Christians have nowhere to go and few resources.

Despite ongoing peace talks, Sudan resumed aerial bombardment of South Sudan this week, deepening a humanitarian crisis in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan areas of South Sudan. “The Sudanese government forces are conducting indiscriminate bombings and abuses against civilians,” Human Rights Watch reports. All continues despite the UN Security Council passing Resolution 2046 last week, calling for ceasefire in the cross-border conflict and withdrawal of forces.

From time to time readers question Human Rights Watch reporting, and their concerns about leftward bias have a basis in reality. But from following the group’s work in South Sudan now for more than a decade, I can attest that its on-the-ground reporting is some of the most comprehensive available.

Nearly everyone breathing now knows who Joseph Kony is, thanks to a viral (and controversial) Invisible Children video released earlier this year. But do you know about Congo’s Terminator? Human rights groups are calling on Congo to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court who is leading a group of ex-soldiers in attacking the government. Ntaganda stands accused of recruiting child soldiers and other abuses, like Kony, but unlike the leader of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, Ntaganda operates openly in Goma—and no one has the guts to capture him. Enough Project has a full report on Ntaganda and a helpful timeline.

Upcoming in WORLD: A full report from Cairo ahead of the Egyptian presidential elections, including how evangelical and Coptic Christians are handling political transition.

Human rights activist Chen Guangcheng’s status in China remains unclear, but former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton writes a clarifying op-ed on how the Obama administration compromised Sino-American relations and Chen’s life in first giving him an official escort into the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, then releasing him to a hospital where he remains effectively under police control: “Our halting, confused and so far inconclusive diplomacy has increased China’s determination to exploit our perceived weaknesses across the broader relationship.”

The tale of the new and improved underwear bomb has a lot of holes in it to date. If the bomb carrier was our own CIA operative but the bomb maker is still at large, why are CIA and FBI agents talking about it? And why are U.S. officials touting the “foiled plot” while also saying it never posed a threat to U.S. security?

Peter Lilley is the only member of the British Parliament to ask for a government impact assessment on global warming during a vote on the Climate Change Act. Actually, the only person in the country to request it. He became one of three MPs to vote against the bill, he said, “not on the basis that the science is still so uncertain, but on the evidence provided to Parliament by the government about the costs and benefits of the Act.” The government’s own report showed that the cost of reducing climate change over 20 years would be more than £200 billion (US$322 billion) while benefits to UK citizens would be £105 billion (US$169 billion). Still, he said in a recent speech (courtesy of the Cornwall Alliance), he and other opponents find themselves “effectively irrelevant” on the subject: “The extraordinary thing about the UK is that our political media and scientific elites are more committed to the doctrines of climate change alarmism—not the general science.” Apparently media elites don’t want to listen to the right on this issue because Conservatives are “acting as a dangerous and expensive drag on the developing green economy.” So Greens are capitalists after all!

Islamists and secular ideologues in the West aren’t the only ones who persecute Christians. Read the latest on Hindu nationalists attacking Christians in India. Elizabeth Kendal of Religious Liberty Monitoring writes, “Hindu militants went to the home of Pastor Ratnababu in Kakinada, East Godavari, Andhra Pradesh. They seized Pastor Ratnababu’s son, Madhu, whose mouth they stuffed with cloth before tying his hands and legs, sprinkling chili power in his eyes and stabbing him repeatedly.”

He actually wrote a book about this! Speaking of secular ideologues, Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann turns his scholarly eye to the species known as “evangelical Christian” in a New York Times blog post, apparently because “some Democrats are flummoxed by evangelical voters.” Read this with a sad smile, as Luhrmann must’ve missed some American history core classes along the way to becoming an anthropologist—believing, as he seems to, that American evangelicals are some newly discovered dark tribe.

Claiming, “Austerity can no longer be the only option,” French socialist candidate Francois Hollande beat French President Nicolas Sarkozy with just a little more than 51 percent of the vote in a runoff election on Sunday. Sarkozy will be remembered for a successful fight to advance France’s retirement age from 60 to 62, but he was hardly an austerity president—raising both sales and capital gains taxes while enacting few real anti-spending measures. Hollande now must face his next opponent in heading off the eurozone debt crisis: Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The latest poll ahead of presidential elections in Egypt shows former Arab League head Amr Moussa leading a slate of 13 presidential candidates ahead of the May 23-24 elections with 35 percent. No candidate yet has a full majority, making a June runoff all but certain. In second: “former” Muslim Brotherhood candidate Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh at 24 percent, followed by former Air Force chief and Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, who during Arab Spring rioting was seen as a possible successor to ousted President Hosni Mubarak. Moussa led the Arab League for 10 years and took the lead in calling on NATO to take military action against Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi. His nephew Nour was an early investor in what became known as the Ground Zero mosque in New York. This is only the second election with multi-party candidates in Egypt’s history, following the February 2011 ouster of Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally.

President Obama announced last month an increase in Special Forces deployments to Uganda to boost the search for fugitive Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony. African leaders have second-guessed that show of force, as Kony’s strength and whereabouts continue to be questioned.

The real deployment to watch: Marines training Ugandan soldiers and other members of an African Union force battling growing threats from Somalia’s al-Shabaab militants. If you like to sing top of the morning then here’s a training video that could make anyone want to go to war with the Africans.

But the al-Shabaab threat is serious—and migrating, as the group has attacked two sites of Christian worshipers in Kenya.

Read the latest on Chen Guangcheng’s case at CHINAaid.org.

Quote of the day: “They left off the ‘h’ in ‘whining,’” wrote Will McCants of Jihadica after al-Qaeda-linked magazine Inspire carried the headline, “Wining on the ground,” on its cover (above).

“But you don’t look Jewish.” That’s the common refrain to Ethiopian and other African Jews. Here’s a fascinating look at the struggles of non-white Jews occasioned by the new documentary 400 Miles to Freedom. The film’s website has an extended trailer and upcoming screenings.

Muslim Brotherhood outreach to the United States: The story continues.

Can bad guys change course? That’s the question in Burma (also known as Myanmar), and there are some encouraging signs that the military junta, which has been one of the most brutal regimes in the world, is melting, or stepping back, or something: President Thein Sein, who took power 14 months ago, now says he will probably step aside when his term ends following elections in 2015. On Thursday, longtime political dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and 42 newly elected colleagues from the National League for Democracy (NLD) officially took their seats in parliament for the first time.

Afghanistan policy “at war with itself”—that’s Max Boot on President Obama’s speech at Bagram Air Field earlier this week: “I fear that President Obama may have put his objective of troop withdrawal ahead of his competing objective of stabilizing Afghanistan and ‘delivering justice to al-Qaeda.’”

UN envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan in Syria is “on track,” reports the Associated Press, but don’t believe it. Heavy weaponry remains in place, and of 300 UN ceasefire observers needed, only 150 have been recruited, and only 24 are in place.

Weekend reads:

• Read for yourself the 17 declassified documents taken during the raid in Abbotabad that killed Osama bin Laden .
• A few decades ago the United States led the world in rare earths production, but today China produces more than 90 percent of the world’s supply. Here’s how Beijing cornered the rare earth’s market.
• Profiles in preparedness: WORLD’s Jill Nelson finds most people living in Israel “not prepared” for a possible confrontation with Iran.

Listen to Mindy Belz discuss international issues on WORLD’s radio news magazine The World and Everything in It.

President Barack Obama’s dramatic overnight visit to Afghanistan this week will perhaps close a chapter on what has been an increasingly fractured relationship between him and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in their joint war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Obama stepped off Air Force One at Bagram Air Field, the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, in the late evening Tuesday, and was greeted under cover of darkness by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker. The president and his team boarded a waiting helicopter for the short trip into Kabul, where Karzai awaited his arrival at the presidential palace downtown. The two appeared sober and rarely made eye contact as they proceeded through the palace to sign the Strategic Partnership Agreement—which has been under negotiation for months and was announced completed on Sunday.

Obama seemed to quickly look away as the two shook hands. Later the president spoke to the American people, flanked by military vehicles, and said with the newly penned agreement, “War ends and a new chapter begins.”

The agreements commits Afghanistan and the United States to “foster close cooperation” on defense and security arrangements. The United States agrees that it will not seek “permanent military bases” in Afghanistan but grants access to those bases through 2014, and beyond, subject to a now to be negotiated bilateral security agreement.

The agreement also pledges Afghanistan to reaffirm “its commitment to protecting human and political rights under its constitution,” a controversial position given government persecution of Christian converts and other minorities. … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Mindy Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

President Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan, his first in 18 months, closed a chapter of tension between U.S. and Afghan leadership. Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement overnight that will inaugurate a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in 2013 but will allow some troops to remain in the country up to 10 years after. Underscoring charges that Obama used the dramatic overnight arrival and 1 a.m. signing of the agreement for campaign gain, campaign strategist David Plouffe accompanied him on Air Force One. To watch: NATO reaction to Obama-Karzai agreement ahead of a NATO summit later this month in Chicago. Danish army Gen. Knud Bartels, chairman of the alliance’s military committee, has warned of the importance of “staying the course” in military intervention and training of Afghan army units—and has said that the withdrawal by next year outlined by Obama is not feasible.

Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has reportedly left the U.S. Embassy in Beijing for medical care, following his escape from house arrest. Chen reportedly reached a deal with Chinese authorities to guarantee the safety of him and his family. That should end what U.S. officials had described as a diplomatic nightmare ahead of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to China. Two days ago President Obama himself sidestepped questions about Chen’s whereabouts. “It would be inspiring sometime to hear an unqualified and spirited defense of freedom instead of dry diplomatic calculation,” said Bob Fu of ChinaAid.

Nigerian forces raided the hideout of Islamist militant group Boko Haram in Kano on Tuesday, killing the suspected mastermind of an attack on Christian worshippers at a Kano university on Sunday.

Somali extremists Al-Shabaab remain alive and well in Kenya and ready to attack a Nairobi church, where a bomb explosion killed a university student.

Experts on international religious freedom will hold a press conference on Thursday morning at the National Press Club in Washington to address the plight of Christian communities around the world. Speakers will include Carl Moeller, president and CEO of Open Doors USA; Nina Shea, director for religious freedom at the Hudson Institute; Katharine Rhodes Henderson, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City; Yitzchok Adlerstein, director of Interfaith Affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. To see the “dramatic increase of persecution” they seek to highlight, check out Open Doors World Watch List map.