Ellen Barry

Almost a week after a Himalayan avalanche struck a remote Indian military outpost, rescuers had all but given up hope of finding anybody alive. But on Monday, a search team pulled a survivor from an icy coffin deep in the snow.

A column of 4-by-4s turned off a dusty road in rural Punjab last week, past ox carts and farmworkers holding sickles, and came to a stop in an unmarked field. Servants circled around to the backs of the vehicles and unloaded, ever so carefully, the animals everyone had come to see. There were greyhounds from Canada, from Ireland and England, and a few from the United States. The track of plain tractor-groomed dirt belied the colossal investment represented by the dogs, many of which are housed in air-conditioned kennels and fed buttermilk and chicken.

India, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas polluter, has emerged as a pivotal player in shaping the outcome of a deal on which Obama hopes to build his legacy — or whether a deal emerges at all.

A team of the United States’ most renowned search-and-rescue workers drove into the shattered city of Bhaktapur on Wednesday, having traveled to Nepal from Fairfax County, Virginia. They brought with them sniffer dogs trained to detect live bodies, acoustic and seismic listening devices designed to pick up noises from entombed victims, and engineers capable of cutting through 6-inch walls of reinforced concrete.

In many places in earthquake-damaged Nepal, the detritus of centuries-old temples and palaces has been left unguarded, diminishing chances to eventually rebuild one of the world's largest clusters of cultural heritage sites.

With one suspect dead and the other captured and lying grievously wounded in a hospital, the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings turned Saturday to questions about the men's motives and to the significance of an overseas trip one of them took last year.