Israel’s Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Ministry has opened a Public Diplomacy Department in Arabic. A statement released by the Ministry states that the department “will be responsible for conducting public diplomacy activities for the media and public opinion on a global level in general and among Arab countries and the Middle East in particular.”

Audiences in Burma will soon have a new way to watch Voice of America television programs following a breakthrough agreement between the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. government agency responsible for VOA, and Sky Net, a regional direct-to-home satellite provider.

The State Department has no policy that forbids former diplomats to lobby on behalf of nations where they served or returning to them for profit, beyond the one applying to federal employees as a whole, which prohibits senior officials from contacting agencies where they once worked for one year and bans all federal employees for life from advising on the same matters.

To give a fillip to the cultural ties between India and Pakistan, the first edition of “Delhi International Film Festival”, to be held in the Capital from December 21 to 27, will see the participation of 12 film-makers from the neighbouring country.

U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Platt, Vassar’s first “Ambassador-in-Residence”, made students aware of the rewards of a career in foreign service­­­—part of which is being able to bring back roadmaps from those paths less traveled.

With the Arab Spring still unfolding, our mission was to open a real-time window onto the realm of digital diplomacy, showing dialogues between key actors and ranking their influence. Facebook arguably played a greater role in driving the changes in Tunisia and Egypt, but Twitter was the vector through which news flowed to the rest of the world (and back again), and we wanted to harness that.

Clark, who led the campaign to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo in 1999 and is now the chairman of a Canadian energy company called Envidity, was responding to questions regarding the outfit’s desire to turn Kosovo’s estimated 14 billion tonnes of coal deposits into synthetic diesel fuel.

When you turn diplomatic missions into something resembling Fort Apache, and when diplomatic practice is limited by inordinate restrictions arising from concerns about personal safety, the establishment of vital local connections, and of relationships based on confidence, trust and respect, is next to impossible.