Today, American and French diplomats are preparing for talks with Iran that build on the agreement that has halted progress on and rolled back key elements of the Iranian nuclear program. French and American officials share information daily to combat terrorism around the world. Our development experts are helping farmers across Africa and on other continents boost their yields and escape poverty.

Al Qaeda has long struggled with controlling its Iraqi offshoot. Now it seems as if Ayman al-Zawahiri has had enough. The level of direct coordination between Al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan and the group that originally was known as Al Qaeda in Iraq has always been limited - and has appeared pretty much dead since 2006.

Egyptian prosecutors said on Wednesday that they were charging 20 journalists working for the Al Jazeera television network with conspiring with a terrorist group and broadcasting false images of “a civil war that raises alarms about the state’s collapse.” The charges are the latest turn in a widening clampdown on public dissent by the military-backed government that ousted President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood six months ago.

Four Egyptian embassy staff were kidnapped in Libya's capital Tripoli on Saturday, a day after another Egyptian diplomat was seized there by gunmen, the Libyan government said, underlining persistent disorder two years after Muammar Gaddafi's fall. No group claimed responsibility for any of the abductions, but they came soon after one militia group reported that its leader had been arrested in Egypt and had warned of a response.

How are sectarian politics affecting the lives of those in Lebanon? After a series of bombings fuelled by sectarian tensions, citizens have taken to social media, using the hashtag #NotAMartyr to express their frustration with Lebanon’s fragile state of security and politics. We'll continue that conversation and hear what some citizens have to say about shaping their nation’s future.

A long New Yorker profile of President Obama provides a great deal of insight into how the president and his administration view the undeniable expansion of jihadist groups claiming allegiance to al Qaeda. “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” President Obama said, distinguishing between groups that are “actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland” and those who are “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes.”

Jihadists have been on the internet a long time, and they probably know how to use it better than you do. Since the early years of the world wide web, radical Islamist groups used it for a number of different jihad-y means, from recruitment and financing to propaganda and communication. But how has this changed over the past decade, and in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA spying, what does the future hold for jihadists and the internet?

Colombian police reported that 292 cases of kidnapping were registered in 2013, of which 32 could be directly traced to the FARC, despite the rebel group's promise to cease the practice -- a government precondition for peace talks. In February 2012, the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced they would cease the practice of “retentions” (the guerrilla word for kidnapping), which was a government precondition for sitting down and negotiating an end to the 50-year civil conflict.