The Ministry of Defense announced Thursday that it would host a global meeting to discuss how the rules and regulations of international humanitarian law can be integrated into Colombia’s military’s planning and operations.

In the dead of night, around 30 gunmen in pickup trucks and motorbikes sped onto the grounds of a college in northeast Nigeria. They headed into the male dormitories and opened fire. At least 41 students were killed when the suspected Boko Haram Islamists attacked the Yobe State College of Agriculture, in a rural area 30 miles south of the state capital Damaturu. They killed students in their sleep. Others were assembled in groups outside before they were shot dead. Some fled into the darkness and were cut down by gunfire. The surviving 1,000 students left the college in terror.

Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, is a place of extremes. It’s a sprawl of one- and two-story mud-brick houses that lack power lines and running water, but it’s also home to the garish, McMansion-style estates of Cocainebougou, or “Cocaine Town,” a deserted neighborhood that once belonged to Arab drug lords who controlled the region’s smuggling routes for hashish and cocaine but fled, fearing reprisals from local citizens who blamed them for the Islamist invasion.

Mexico saw the highest number of reported kidnappings in the first half of 2013 since at least 1997, according to a national civil society organization, a figure that reflects the increasing diversification of criminal activities in the country. According to a report from the National Citizen Observatory (ONC), there were 757 reports of kidnappings recorded between January and June this year, the highest number for any semester in the time period 1997 to 2013.

"I am French," explains the young man in the YouTube video carrying a Kalashnikov and wearing a kufiya cotton headdress as he sits in front of a waving black-and-white flag of al Qaeda. "Oh my Muslim brothers in France, Europe and in the whole world, Jihad in Syria is obligatory," says the fair-skinned youth with sandy hair, wispy beard and southern French accent, imploring viewers to join him and his younger brother in Syria.

Nearly half of Salvadorans believe the "maras" benefit most from the country's gang truce, according to an opinion poll, which could spell political trouble for the pact as presidential elections are looming. In a public opinion survey of 2,119 Salvadorans, El Salvador's Universidad Tecnologica found that 47 percent of respondents believed the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) street gangs benefitted most from the truce brokered between the two groups in March 2012.

In the heat of a Cairo summer, the battle lines have been drawn. In the tense standoff, Abdelazim Fahmy, better known as Zizo Abdo, finds no room on the street for revolutionaries like himself. I met with Zizo at a downtown Cairo café called Hikayitna—Arabic for “our stories.” We’re a stone’s throw away from Tahrir Square, which has been cordoned off by the military with barbed wire, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. Soldiers man checkpoints into the square, searching bags and requesting identification.

One of his daughters and three of his grandchildren are using the former South African president's name in such pursuits as wine marketing and a reality television show, Being Mandela. His relatives also were embroiled in two lawsuits to secure control over his trust funds and the burial places of the remains of three of his children.