There’s a real spectrum of celebrity activity. George Clooney really stands out, along with Angelina Jolie and Bono -- you can disagree with some of the cases that they pick up, but they’re very conscientious, they’re advised well, they’re in it for the longer run.

The February issue of PDiN Monitor focuses on The Future of Public Diplomacy and will introduce a new structure for CPD's regular analysis of public diplomacy in the news. Beginning this month, CPD will graph overall trends in public diplomacy news aggregated daily in PDiN.

Bryant entered the gym at Gertz-Ressler High School Thursday where he oversaw a Mandarin exchange program partnered with the Kobe and Vanessa Bryant Foundation, an event that featured Chinese exchange students participating in defensive, shooting and dribbling drills. The enthusiastic response obviously highlights the popularity the Lakers' star commands.

The rap star from New York flew briefly to the Somali town of Dolo along the Ethiopian border to visit a refugee camp run by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. Rap and rock stars, action heroes, and yes, even comic book characters...do their job well, raising public awareness about world crises. But some critics have begun to ask whether any of this attention does any actual good.

Celebrity diplomacy is nothing new. On Tuesday, Madonna has announced plans to build 10 schools in Malawi with a new partner after mismanagement forced the singer to scrap her first project there last year. The singer said she hoped the schools would educate at least 1,000 children a year, half of them girls.

Flashy pop culture figures and sports icons may not negotiate an armistice or prevent war, but they could be valuable levers to get top diplomats into the right place at the right time while lowering the stress of high-stakes diplomacy.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a group that says it is working to prevent Iran from "fulfilling its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons"...It has now called on Jennifer Lopez to end her partnership with the car manufacturer Fiat, if the company refuses to terminate its business with Iran.