A few thousand people will gather today in Washington, D.C. to honor the life of ambassador Richard Holbrooke, one of the world's finest diplomats, whose life ended suddenly one month ago...The ambassador was known to work round the clock, though he never lost sight of personal priorities. He had hired me in 2001 to help build his HIV/AIDS outfit, the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS.

Kim A. Snyder's “Welcome to Shelbyville” is a melting-pot movie, asimmer with social issues: immigration, racism, unemployment, intolerance. Its examination of the clash between Somali Muslims and rural Tennesseeans does not sugarcoat the kinds of conflicts that have bedeviled the country for centuries; it questions, in its way, what America means. And it’s been shown around the world by the United States State Department.

A swath of cables released by WikiLeaks show that Iceland looked to fellow pro-whaling nation Japan to bolster its case to ease the international ban on whale hunting. But Japan was hard-pressed to help.

As more and more South American countries – Chile is the latest – proclaim their recognition of a Palestinian state, the clamor grows in Jerusalem to declare a major failure of Israeli diplomacy.

Diplomats from many countries complained to U.S. government officials Thursday about the decision by several American banks to close the accounts of their diplomatic missions and their difficulty in finding new banking facilities.

South Korea and Japan have held their first talks on creating unprecedented agreements to share military intelligence and equipment. It is something the United States has encouraged because of recent attacks blamed on North Korea and Pyongyang’s continuing nuclear threat.

Is it possible that Iran's blustering president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, long thought to be a leading force behind some of Iran's most hard-line and repressive policies, is actually a reformer whose attempts to liberalize, secularize, and even "Persianize" Iran have been repeatedly stymied by the country's more conservative factions?

It was meant as a symbol of friendship that would help to heal the wounds of a long history of bloodshed, bitterness, and recrimination between Turkey and Armenia. Instead, an imposing monument in the eastern Turkish city of Kars near the two countries' border threatens to become yet another victim of their tortured relations after incurring the wrath of Turkey's mercurial prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.