Over the last two weeks, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) grabbed international headlines, particularly those of the African francophone and southern European press.

U.S. relations with Latin America gained a new level of complexity on August 17, 2010, when Colombia's Constitutional Court invalidated the nearly year-old agreement with the U.S. to allow the use of seven of its military bases.

Two young, but prominent Japanese companies, Fast Retailing Co. and Rakuten Inc., recently made public their plans to start conducting all official internal communication in English in 2012.

Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobrás does not yet possess the technology to drill 22,965 feet beneath the ocean floor to recover all of the country's "pre-salt" oil reserves, but it plans to get there soon enough.

On July 2, 2010, a joint US-Ecuadorian law enforcement-military operation led to the capture of a submarine in Ecuador, which presumably would have been used to ship cocaine from South America to Mexico.