APDS Blogger: Alex Laverty

The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, on Sunday criticized the German Football Association after only three members of the national team visited the Auschwitz death camp on Friday in the run up to the Euro 2012 soccer championship...

Since its inception in 1986, the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) has reduced the workload on U.S. consulate offices while encouraging travel to and tourism in the United States. The program also offers tremendous benefits in terms of economics, public diplomacy, and national security.

It bears repeating. The European Union's soft power works. Not always, not everywhere, and not without reverses, but the EU has a transformational capacity to make others adopt their values: free, fair elections; rule of law; market economies that maximize the welfare of citizens; and a pan-European outlook.

The Poland-Korea Education and Science Conference will bring together leaders from their field in both countries to better understand and share good practice of Korea’s quick progress in the educational sciences.

Remember Czech artist David Cerny's "Entropa"? The sculpture, which showed stereotypes of all 27 EU member states, was perhaps the most memorable symbol of the otherwise ill-fated Czech EU presidency in the first half of 2009.

The financial crisis and Arab Spring migrants have given rise to a "new euroscepticism" inside the union, Polish leader Donald Tusk has warned as Poland takes over the EU presidency..Tusk said the Polish presidency "has enough energy" to fight the new EU-hostile trend.

Obama’s project to remake the U.S. image abroad has always relied, at its core, on his own against-the-odds story. And the adoring reception he received, from the public and its elected leaders, suggested the message still resonates here.