The U.S. Department of State announced today that Haitian troubadours Ti-Coca & Wanga-Nègès will travel to communities across America as part of a groundbreaking cultural diplomacy initiative, Center StageSM, from September 18-October 14, 2012.

“At a time when the United States seems very much in need of public diplomacy in the Middle East, in cases such as these, scholars, the host countries and the American public are all losers,” said Maurice Pomerantz, a Fulbright scholar who’d planned to spend the year teaching comparative literature in Lebanon but was relocated to Jordan because of the State Department’s security concerns.

The campaign team behind the incumbent Transnistrian president, Yevgeny Shevchuk, appreciated the strength of the internet during the 2011 presidential election, and it is believed that the use of online social networks contributed to Shevchuk’s unexpected victory over Igor Smirnov,

In his hour-long documentary, “Live To Dive” (Lusong), Ang explores how Totoy, 11, and Pirot, 10, eke out a living for their families by diving for scraps of garbage like discarded plastic bottles and bits of metal in the severely polluted waters beside the ramshackle coastal village of Puting Bato...Now he is taking his film to North Korea.

The use of social media for the purpose of public diplomacy has increasingly drawn the attention of U.S. diplomacy professionals, observers and political analysts especially after the recent attacks on the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya that were triggered by outrage over an anti-Islamic video released on Sept. 11.

Over the past several weeks national sentiments in China and Japan have been enflamed by activists from both countries landing on disputed islands in the East China Sea. As this battle has raged, a separate one has been held on the Chinese microblog site Weibo, which boasts more than 300 million users.

Last week, before the world caught on fire over a film clip, I wrote about the paradox of value promotion in public diplomacy. No matter how appealing promoting one’s values may be, trying to do so in a global arena is fraught with difficulty. Yet, because values are integral to a nation’s communication, public diplomacy will inevitably reflect those values. What’s happening between the U.S.