Move over Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Lay witness to yet another Arabic 24/7 television news channel to enter the high-stakes game of international broadcasting in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has a new chairman in Walter Isaacson, and the former CNN and Time magazine chief is calling for even more money for the BBG to combat the public diplomacy efforts of America's "enemies," which he identifies as Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China.

Distinguished journalist Christian Caryl will lead RFE's efforts to step up news coverage from the nation's capital as he assumes the role of Chief Editor of RFE's Washington, D.C. bureau. Caryl is a regular contributor to Foreign Policy and the New York Review of Books and is a Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies.

Supported by NTM-A advisors, Afghan forces have established a basic, but rapidly growing, communication capability. During the course of the last twelve months they have more than tripled their number of trained Public Affairs Officers - from fifty-five to over two hundred...

Beyond the harsh rhetoric on who is to blame for 9/11, this appearance on BBC Persian has a few notable implications for U.S. public diplomacy apparatus in general and its policy towards Iran in particular.

Iran was to start broadcasting television programmes in Spanish in a bid to promote its ideology, a news report said Thursday...'This new Spanish network will have a major role in reflecting the ideological legitimacy of our system to the world,' [head of Iran's state television network IRIB, Ezatollah] Zarqami added during a meeting with the country's mass prayer leaders in Tehran.

The Vietnam News Agency (VNA) on September 28 launched a website which provides readers with Vietnam and world news in Chinese language at http://news.vnanet.vn and http://cn.vietnamplus.vn.