BEIJING — China says it has sentenced 11 people for inciting religious extremism and related crimes in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang.

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CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan authorities say the undersea wreckage of a small plane that disappeared five years ago with 14 people aboard has been found.

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SAO PAULO — With massive protests by middle-class Brazilians demanding wholesale government reforms, people all over this continent-sized country have reached a verdict on the streets and online: "The giant has awakened."

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CARACAS, Venezuela — A group of masked assailants has attacked a leading university in the Venezuelan capital, torching two buses and seriously damaging its rectory building.

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Some comments by Brazilians participating in protests across South America's biggest country:

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LIMA, Peru — Police in central Peru say a bus veered off a highway and fell into a river, leaving at least 30 people dead and nine missing.

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KABUL, Afghanistan — Less than a day after the Taliban opened a new political office in Qatar, the prospects for peace talks that it represented for war-weary Afghanistan faltered.

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SANTIAGO, Chile — A magnitude-5.7 earthquake shook central Chile on Wednesday, causing buildings to sway in the capital but apparently causing no major damage.

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WASHINGTON — While State Department officials are fond of saying they’re providing hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to the Syrian opposition, only a fraction of the promised funds has arrived, and none has gone to the political body the U.S. looks to as an alternative to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

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TEHRAN, Iran — To understand the changes likely to occur under Iran’s new president, Hasan Rowhani, consider this summation of the outgoing regime by a veteran foreign policy analyst.

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CAIRO — Lawyers for defendants in Egypt’s case against American nongovernmental organizations charged with operating illegally in the country accused the military government Tuesday of delaying the release of key documents the lawyers say are needed to defend their clients.

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• Link | Thousands protest as Mubarak life sentence fails to satisfy Egypt’s revolutionaries
• Link | American NGO worker in Egypt faces his fate in court
• Link | Anger over NGO trial threatens Egypt's interim government

CAIRO — A draft Egyptian law regulating so-called nongovernmental organizations would limit the private, nonprofit groups in many of the same ways that the government of President Hosni Mubarak sought to control their operations – a sign, analysts here say, that President Mohammed Morsi fears that the groups could be used to oppose his government in the same way Mubarak supporters felt they’d helped topple his.

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CAIRO — Amir Salem is all too familiar with Egypt’s long-standing laws against insulting the government, blasphemy and plotting to overthrow the government. A lawyer with four decades of political activism behind him, he faced those charges under the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. But now, as he contemplates new charges under Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, it feels more personal, he said.

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• Story | Proposed Egyptian law on nonprofits seen as echo of Mubarak era
• Story | Egyptian soldiers kidnapped in Sinai released after talks
• Story | Egyptians don’t like Morsi’s presidency, but opposition flounders anyway

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Tuesday sentenced 43 democracy promotion workers, including 16 Americans and a German, to as many as five years in prison for working for unlicensed civil-society organizations in an internationally watched case that renewed fears of a growing crackdown on democracy-promotion efforts here.

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• Story | Sherif Mansour, U.S. citizen who faces NGO charges in Egypt, freed until verdict is reached

CAIRO — On the outskirts of the vast Egyptian capital, Egypt ends and the latest Syria enclave begins. Women tie their headscarves in a distinctly Syrian way. They buy Syrian spices and trinkets from vendors whose shops are now tables lined along the streets. There is a constant murmur of stories about the desperate circumstances that forced the residents to flee places such as Homs and Damascus in the past year.

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CAIRO — Seven soldiers kidnapped last week by suspected Islamist militants in the restive Sinai were freed after a six-hour negotiation between local tribesmen and the kidnappers, the Egyptian government announcement Wednesday.

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• Story | Egyptians don’t like Morsi’s presidency, but opposition flounders anyway
• Story | Egypt’s Morsi dispatches army to Sinai after suspected Islamists snatch soldiers
• Story | In Cairo, desperate Egyptian men search in vain for Syrian brides

CAIRO — As Egypt’s first democratically elected president nears the completion of his first year in office, there is growing resentment among Egyptians about his tenure. The dismal economy has grown worse, sectarian tensions are greater, and government services have declined – something many people thought would have been impossible.

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CAIRO — Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi ordered army reinforcements to the restive Sinai on Monday amid rising tensions there over the kidnapping of seven soldiers by suspected Islamist militants.

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CAIRO — The decision by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to name 17 new provincial governors, including several who belong to his former party, triggered another round of violence here and the reported resignation of a top minister. The events stoked fears that Egypt’s first democratically elected leader was increasing Islamists’ control over the nation.

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• Story | Egypt court sentences NGO workers; U.S. denounces verdict

ZAIN, Jordan — Jordan's military says infiltrators from Syria have clashed with Jordanian soldiers near the border. One infiltrator was killed and two wounded.

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