In a post made to his Chinese-language weblog on April 15, Ezzat Shahrour, chief correspondent for al-Jazeera Arabic in Beijing, voiced his frustration with Chinese state media reporting on the upheaval in the Arab world this year.

That the true intentions of a religious organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, would become the most hotly debated issue surrounding the overthrow of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, would have garnered guffaws among Western intellectuals only four decades ago.

Now, immigration is a hugely emotive subject . . . and it's a debate too often in the past shaped by assertions rather than substantive arguments.The assertion that mass immigration is an unalloyed good and that controlling it is economic madness . . . the view that Britain is a soft touch and immigrants are out to take whatever they can get. I believe the role of politicians is to cut through the extremes of this debate and approach the subject sensibly and reasonably.

The Arab Spring is in its third month, and some already express concern about its next phase. In Tunisia things are moving too slowly. In Egypt, the moment of the revolution has been replaced by the routines of national politics, and the revolutionaries are frustrated.

[Ambassador J Adam] Ereli was deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Qatar from 2000 to 2003 and at the beginning of the press roundtable he said: “When I left Doha in 2003 there were few publications, so it’s nice to see how much is happening in Qatar”.

Elements with the State Department are attempting to silence an American diplomat who believes he was personally charged by the White House with promoting President Obama's interfaith initiatives. The diplomat is the U.S. ambassador to Malta, Douglas Kmiec...

Britain should abandon its plan to cut funding for the BBC World Service or at least ring-fence some parts of it, including BBC Arabic, in the light of the upheaval in the region, parliamentarians said on Wednesday.

One implication of this is that the burden on U.S. public diplomacy has never been greater. As the role of publics expands, it becomes ever more urgent that the U.S. better understand them and effectively engage with them across a far wider spectrum (it's incomprehensible that Congress wants to slash funding for these functions at precisely the time they are most needed).