The State Department is embracing a new approach: It's invited community leaders from around the world to Washington to compare notes about the best ways to counter extremism on a grassroots level.

Abeera Akhtar and her colleagues at Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan launched the “FATE — From Apathy to Empathy” project against extremism. The LUMS group was one of 45 student teams from around the world that applied to this semester’s P2P (Peer to Peer): Challenging Extremism initiative. 

The U.S. government desperately needs new and better tools to fight the information war against the Islamic State (ISIS) and other terrorist networks. Once such new tool, The United States International Communications Reform Act (H.R. 2323), which was passed last May by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, remains in waiting mode and is pending a full House vote and Senate action.

It’s not an easy time to exude confidence if you’re Britain’s newly appointed ambassador to the United States. But as he sits on a plush couch beneath a towering portrait of Winston Churchill, Sir Kim Darroch, 61, makes a pretty good go at it.