Research In Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry smartphone, found itself in a number of high-profile spats with Asian governments in the past year... But RIM has no stranger or more persistent foe than Indonesian Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring.

Yuliana Lestari is searching for universities. She takes a brief tour of Oxford in England and then zooms off to Harvard with the help of Google’s Liquid Galaxy. The 16-year-old Indonesian is one of a host of youths who have come to take advantage of the high-tech resources inside “@ America," an initiative supported by the US Embassy in Jakarta that puts an edgy, 21st-century twist on public diplomacy.

One of the more delicious forms of public diplomacy has recently emerged in the global consciousness: gastrodiplomacy. Public diplomacy is a field predicated on the communication of culture and values to foreign publics whereas gastrodiplomacy, most plainly put, is the act of winning hearts and minds through mouths and stomachs.

We believe that, at a time where citizens everywhere are more connected and more informed, governments acting alone cannot solve the problems which confront us or seize the opportunities which surround us. We are working hard to find new and innovative ways to expand and strengthen the relations between the people of the United States and people all over the world.

PDiN Monitor Editorial Staff
Sherine B. Walton, Editor-in-Chief
Naomi Leight, Managing Editor
Marissa Cruz-Enriquez, Associate Editor

Albert Einstein once said: “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.”

Hillary Clinton, genuinely funny and admiration-generating in a stint this week with two of Australia's broadcast comics, Hamish and Andy...Barack Obama, at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, making a speech about democracy in Indonesia, and a reprise on last year's appeal to Islam -- but also daring to talk a little bit in the Bahasa Indonesia ("language of Indonesia") he heard around him as a child.