They're involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that's just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the US military is at work.

Looking to widen business arrangements with South American countries and increase trade with the region to $25 billion by 2015, India has lined up a series of high-level visits over this month and next, and is offering sops to exporters to explore markets in the continent. Talking to FE external affairs minister Salman Khurshid said, “India and Latin America have a large scope and potential to cooperate in the fields of energy, education and several other fields.” On the importance of the region, Khurshid said, “Latin America is something we need to work on.

I'm sometimes asked how, as someone who testified 42 years ago against the Vietnam War in which I had fought, I could testify in favor of action to hold the Assad regime accountable today. The answer is, I spoke my conscience in 1971 and I'm speaking my conscience now in 2013. Secretary Hagel and I support limited military action against Syrian regime targets not because we've forgotten the lessons and horrors of war -- but because we remember them.

North Korea has agreed to restore a cross-border military hotline with South Korea, in another sign of easing tensions between the rivals in recent weeks, the South Korean government has said. On Thursday, the two Koreas agreed at a meeting in Kaesong to restart the hotline starting Friday, Seoul's Unification Ministry said. North Korea in March shut down the telephone and fax lines used to coordinate cross-border travel to a joint industrial park in Kaesong that has since been shuttered.

"I belong to the Syrian people," Syrian president Bashar al-Assad told the French journalist George Malbrunot, of the newspaper Le Figaro, earlier this week. "I defend their interests and independence and will not succumb to external pressure." Yes. That's what he said. There are many, many caveats to that little assertion, obviously, but one of the most noteworthy is this: The message wasn't just sent from President Assad to George Malbrunot. It was also sent from President #Assad to George #Malbrunot.

After months of standing firm (and almost alone) against international intervention in Syria, by the end of August, Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed resigned to the prospect of a U.S. strike against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. To be sure, he was not happy about it, but the use of chemical weapons against civilians in a Damascus suburb appeared to have brought the current phase of the Syrian crisis to its inevitable climax.

When President Obama touched down in Sweden early Wednesday morning, he notched his 43rd foreign country visited since taking the oath of office. The president probably doesn’t need the frequent flyer miles or the sense of worldliness that comes with a well-stamped passport, but presidents are still judged on their global itinerary. Obama’s two most recent predecessors each visited 74 different nations or sovereign states during their eight years in office, according to the State Department’s history of executive travel.

In 2012, Australia reported spending $5.4bn (£3.2m) on official development assistance (ODA), making it the eighth-largest aid donor in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) group of rich countries, and just ahead of Sweden ($5.2bn). As a percentage of gross national income (GNI), Australia seems far less generous and was closer to reaching the international target to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid in the 1960s and 70s than it is today.