As the death toll continues to rise in the aftermath of the powerful typhoon that swept through the Philippines last week, Southern California’s local Filipino community has been mobilizing to assist in relief efforts. A 5K Charity Walk was held in Van Nuys early Sunday to help raise funds for victims of Typhoon Haiyan, officials said. The walk was originally planned to help victims of a 7.1 earthquake that rocked the region last month, said Jovena “Bing” De La Vega, a chief organizer of the event.

The Venezuelan authorities on Saturday released an American journalist who had been detained and questioned by military intelligence officials. The journalist, Jim Wyss, is the Andes region bureau chief for The Miami Herald. He was detained Thursday near Venezuela’s western border with Colombia while on a reporting trip. In a telephone interview in Caracas, where he was released, Mr. Wyss said the authorities who had questioned him never explained to him why he had been detained.

Less than a month after Egypt publicly condemned an American decision to suspend portions of its annual military aid package, relations between the allies are back on track. Egypt’s foreign ministry announced Wednesday that Cairo now expects an “intense period” of diplomatic visits from Washington. Despite the public frostiness that hung over the alliance just a few weeks ago, analysts say the relationship below the rhetoric remains strong.

A little caviar and a lot of oil goes a long way. In recent years, Baku has spent millions of dollars to persuade politicians in Europe and the United States that the oil-rich Caucasus country is a reliable partner -- and to distract them from criticism that the country is authoritarian and fails to respect fundamental human rights.

Jews across the world must ratchet up pressure on their governments to stand in the way of an impending "bad deal" on Iran's nuclear program, Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett wrote Saturday night. In a letter sent to AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Russian Jewish Congress, and other groups, and later posted on his Facebook page, Bennett said that "the Free World stands before a fork in the road."

As of today, neither the United States nor Israel has a vote in UNESCO -- the United Nations’ organization that leads global initiatives on everything from HIV/AIDS and climate change to literacy and Holocaust education. (Its name is short for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.) The downgrade is the result of two sets of laws that the United States and UNESCO have had for years.

I was proud to be an American last night and honored to say a few words about Ambassador Thomas Pickering on the occasion of his delivering the Third Annual Walter Roberts Lecture at GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs which houses the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. It was Ambassador Pickering’s birthday and he was in fine form as he answered tough questions from Frank Sesno director of the School of Media and Public Affairs.

In 1979, George Lewis was an NBC correspondent in Iran covering the hostage crisis. Thirty-four years later and thousands of miles away, at a Zócalo event co-presented by Occidental College at MOCA Grand Avenue, Lewis asked a panel if the breakdown in U.S.-Iran relations he witnessed firsthand might finally be on the road to repair.