Abeera Akhtar and her colleagues at Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan launched the “FATE — From Apathy to Empathy” project against extremism. The LUMS group was one of 45 student teams from around the world that applied to this semester’s P2P (Peer to Peer): Challenging Extremism initiative. 

The U.S. government desperately needs new and better tools to fight the information war against the Islamic State (ISIS) and other terrorist networks. Once such new tool, The United States International Communications Reform Act (H.R. 2323), which was passed last May by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, remains in waiting mode and is pending a full House vote and Senate action.

It’s not an easy time to exude confidence if you’re Britain’s newly appointed ambassador to the United States. But as he sits on a plush couch beneath a towering portrait of Winston Churchill, Sir Kim Darroch, 61, makes a pretty good go at it.

For the second year in a row, #OscarsSoWhite has dragged America’s diversity problem back into the global spotlight. [...] Yet the recent report by USC’s Annenberg School found that not much has changed—only seven percent of films in the past year had casts that accurately reflected the nation’s actual demographics. 

Thinc Design is in the hole $1 million, after the State Department failed to raise enough private money to fund the display — and its owner wants John Kerry to help pay him back, [...] Behind the scenes, many in the State Department blame Congress for putting the secretary in this awkward position of having to rely on outside funding and inexperienced operators to mount a major public diplomacy initiative.  

John E. Reinhardt, who in 1971 became the first black U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and in 1977 the first career diplomat to lead the U.S. Information Agency, died Feb. 18 at a retirement community in Silver Spring, Md. He was 95. [...] Mr. Reinhardt led a transition for the organization, which had been renamed the International Communication Agency and included Voice of America broadcasts in addition to public-diplomacy outreach programs.

A recent Brookings Institution survey presented at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. indicated a growing American partisanship toward Israel and the Middle East. 

Stanford University will be a partner and will serve as the venue for the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit with over 1,000 global delegates and hosted by President Barack Obama, the U.S. State Department and the White House announced today.