A week and a half after a military coup in Mali, other countries in the region and around the globe are nervously waiting to see what comes next. If the coup leaders don’t take steps to form a new, democratic government soon, problems with insecurity and terrorism in the African Sahel region could worsen and spill into other parts of the world.

Nearly 2,500 miles from the scene of the crime and 15 years later, a Special Tribunal for Lebanon ruled Tuesday that the main defendant charged with conspiracy to kill former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was a member of Hezbollah and used a cell phone critical in the 2005 bombing. It left Hariri and 21 others dead. 

The tribunal, meeting in the Netherlands, acquitted three other men indicted in the case.

At least 39 people died and 50 others sustained injuries after a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a car at the main entrance to a prison in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Sunday. Other armed militants stormed inside the facility and opened fire. Afghan security forces regained control of the prison by Monday afternoon and recaptured about 1,000 prisoners who escaped during the attack, said Attaullah Khogyani, the provincial governor’s spokesman.

Over the past few months, we’ve posted in the Saturday Series a few of my never-published speeches on topics that are still relevant.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in jail, but how he dies will depend on the jury in a new penalty phase trial, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found bias among the jurors who sentenced Tsarnaev for carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing with his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

During his inauguration, Malawi’s Pentecostal pastor–turned-president said he came to serve, not rule. Adding that the nation must clear out the rubble caused by corruption before it can start to rebuild, Lazarus Chakwera promised to “challenge the leadership of the judiciary to do more to root out the culture of corruption and selective justice that has shipwrecked too many of our lowest courts.”

Families seeking refuge from Islamist violence arrived July 9 in Boga, a town of about 30,000 people in the northeast Democratic Republic of Congo. They came from villages fewer than 10 miles away. Some carried personal belongings or brought goats and chickens they had snagged while on the move.