Rob Schmitz

Among pop culture's great mysteries: How exactly did David Hasselhoff become a rock 'n' roll God in Germany?

The 67-year-old star of decades-old television series Knight Rider and Baywatch doesn't skip a beat when asked the question.

"It all started with a girl named Nikki," Hasselhoff said during a recent interview with NPR in Berlin, where he was on a concert tour of Germany.

It was two years after the Berlin Wall had fallen when Karsten Hilse realized the people in his town had changed. It came to him in a blast of hot, white light.

"It was the first time that a firebomb was thrown at me," Hilse remembers. "Things like that didn't happen in the GDR."

On a typical day, Prague's City Hall is buzzing with discussions about contracts to upgrade the centuries-old city's network of cobblestone streets or sewers. But this month, assembly members have been debating a bigger topic — China, and what to do about it.

"This is clearly a topic for our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a complicated one at that," city assembly member Patrik Nacher lectures Prague Mayor Zdenek Hrib during open debate. "And here you are, pulling Prague into a matter of such importance."

Residents of Christchurch, New Zealand, are trying to recover and heal following Friday's attack on two mosques, which claimed the lives of 50 people and left more than 30 others in the hospital.

Police say the shooter — a 28-year-old Australian man who live-streamed the attack on Facebook and who is now in custody — likely acted alone. In the wake of the horrific attack, he left a community in pain.

In the fall of 2017, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV aired a series promoting China's achievements in science and technology. One episode profiled a Chinese scientist who claimed to have invented a gene-sequencing machine that outperformed those in the West.

"Somebody said we shocked the world with our machine," a man in his mid-30s says with a proud smile into the camera. "Yes, they're right! I did that — He Jiankui! That's me who did that!"

It wasn't the last time He Jiankui would shock the world.

When he started at Beijing's Renmin University, one of China's best schools, a freshman scanned a list of student clubs and landed on the one that made him the most excited: Young Marxists.

On the day he became leader, Xi Jinping gave a speech about his dream for China. "To achieve the China dream," Xi said, "we must take a Chinese path."

That path, Xi went on to say, was forged by decades of Communist rule and thousands of years of Chinese civilization. It's a path that some in Beijing believe has led China straight into a trade war with the world's largest economy.

Beijing is mounting an aggressive influence campaign targeting multiple levels of American society, according to a report published Thursday that is written by some of the top China experts in the U.S.

The working group that compiled the report includes scholars who for decades have agreed that as long as the U.S. continued to engage the People's Republic of China, the paths of both countries would eventually converge and that when they did, China's political system would become more transparent and its society more open.

By the time Chinese guards began torturing Kayrat Samarkand inside a re-education camp last spring, he says his life had prepared him for this.

The ethnic Kazakh grew up in the mountains of China's rural Xinjiang region, just miles away from the border with Kazakhstan. When he was 11 years old, his parents died. A man from his village lured the young orphan to a nearby city with the promise of work and then sold him to a criminal gang of ethnic Uighurs, the predominant ethnic minority in Xinjiang, who managed a network of child thieves throughout China.

A tiny office in the heart of the Kazakh city of Almaty is filled with weary-eyed visitors clutching photos of their missing mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. Each morning they arrive, lining up behind two desks staffed with workers who enter their information into a database of the disappeared.

Kalida Akytkhan, 64, clad in a white sweater and matching headscarf, has traveled 300 miles in the hopes that people here can find her two sons.