“Two different flights of MV-22 Osprey and KC-130 aircraft, along with U.S. Marines, will arrive to support the whole-of-government effort to contain Ebola,” U.S. Army Capt. R. Carter Langston told The Associated Press in an email. They were to land later Thursday at Roberts Airfield outside the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker isn't afraid to travel to hot spots. Recently returned from a mission that took her to Ukraine, Poland, and Turkey, she is ready to enter another volatile area if she thinks her style of "commercial diplomacy" can make a difference.

With the widespread filtering, even blocking, of both traditional media Internet sites and social media sites by the Chinese government , Chinese-Americans have been finding other ways to keep tabs on the pro-democracy demonstrations taking place in Hong Kong.

If reaching a permanent agreement by next month’s deadline proves impossible, the West must lock in the status-quo.

Washington wants Erdoğan to do more to back the Kurds in Kobani, while Ankara insists Assad should be removed first.
 

The U.S. State Department is the same body that it has always been: handling relations between nations, maintaining peace and balancing tense situations around the globe.  But one office is doing that in a new way.  Moira Whelan is the deputy assistant secretary for digital strategy.  “It’s digital diplomacy,” she told the Centre Daily Times in an interview.

A delegation of five Ukrainian doctors in Great Falls studying U.S. health care this week spoke before an audience Monday morning of about 30 at Great Falls College-Montana State University. The delegates are participating in the Open World Leadership Program, a U.S. Department of State-funded program that allows cultural exchange between young leaders in former Soviet countries and politicians and ordinary people in the United States.

While the Chinese government perceives Americanideological influence as a potential strategic threat, the increase of US "soft power" leverage is merely an effect, and not an intentional policy, Robert Daly, Director of the Wilson Center Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, has told RIA Novosti.