The United States is looking to triple the number of Americans going to India for higher studies in the next five years...“That is still far from our goal of 15,000 in five years,” Tara Sonenshine, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, told the visiting Human Resources and Development Minister in a roundtable earlier this week.

For the past 12 years, volunteers with International Cultural Exchange have provided an opportunity for visiting college students from around the world to become better acclimated in America and Houston...Most of the activities put on by International Cultural Exchange volunteers take place during the academic year, and LSCS students have the chance to attend sports games in Houston or dinners with local volunteers.

While highlighting the educational opportunities in India, he announced that in 2012, over 1,200 Nigerians studied there, while he expressed hope for an increase. According to him, “Nigerian stakeholders are discovering the attractiveness of Indian education.

Coupled with our concerns about human rights are our concerns about the well-being of the Iranian people. Every day, we hear from the Iranian people directly through our public diplomacy programs and Farsi-language social media platforms. The Virtual Embassy Tehran, launched in December 2011, has over 2 million hits and our Farsi-language Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube channel have also been enormously successful.

Economic prosperity, an aging population and stark gender imbalance have combined to turn Korea into a major destination for Asian migrants. But Asia’s fourth-largest economy appears to lack institutional systems to keep pace with the change. To better manage the gushing inflow of foreigners, experts call for more vigorous, open discussions over immigrant policy and a multicultural Korea, as well as reinforced public diplomacy and know-how exchanges with other countries.

Starting in early March 2013 the Russian government launched a nationwide campaign of inspections of nongovernmental organizations, unprecedented in its scale and scope. The inspections were highly extensive, disruptive, invasive, and often intimidating...It is clear that the main objective of these inspections is to identify organizations the government deems “foreign agents” and force advocacy groups to either assume this false, misleading, and demonizing label or suspend their work.

Current attempts at virtual diplomacy have little government backing and are limited in scope. They are directed mainly at public diplomacy (PD), not official state-to-state channels. Some governments have attempted to change diplomatic conditions through virtual PD campaigns and the use of social media. But, crucially, the public does not decide to go to war, even in a democracy.

In February 2013, the interagency LGBT Working Group collaborated to host a half-day workshop at the U.S. Embassy for leaders from the LGBT community in order to better understand their needs and priorities and to inform them of policy changes and upcoming opportunities for U.S. Government support of their work.