Rob Schmitz

When he was 22, Octavian Ursu watched the Berlin Wall fall on television from his hometown of Bucharest, Romania. As a college student, he had taken part in the bloody democratic uprising in his own country, and he cheered along with those peacefully tearing down the symbol of a divided Europe.

"After the Bucharest uprising, I graduated, and suddenly the border was open and everything was free," he says.

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."

As the bells of evening Mass begin to ring, Kazimiera Sokolowska carefully makes her way up the steps to the Immaculate Conception Church in her hometown of Gora Kalwaria, Poland, in the heart of a bucolic river valley an hour outside of the capital of Warsaw. She attends Mass at least three times a week because, she says, that's what Poles do.

"Being Polish means religion, God, children and family," she says with a warm smile.

For as long as Germany has been a unified country, since 1990, the center-left Social Democratic Party has helped govern Brandenburg, a state in the country's east that surrounds Berlin. Tina Fischer, an SPD member of Brandenburg's state parliament, is concerned about how long that will last.

Updated at 1:10 a.m. ET Monday

Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday in a show of defiance against a government proposal that would allow people to be extradited to mainland China to face charges.

Organizers of the protest say more than 1 million turned out to the streets, or roughly one in seven Hong Kong residents, but police estimated the crowds were far smaller.

He Qiang should be manning his convenience store, but today he's collecting tiny green berries along the road and shooting them at birds with his slingshot. The 26-year-old is distracting himself from his worries. He spent all his savings — the equivalent of $35,000 — on a store that no longer has any customers.