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.

On the same day the United States announced the arrest of a 19-year old attempting to leave the country to join ISIS, a top State Department official said the American efforts to combat ISIS' powerful online message are working.

Last weekend, the paradisiac island of Rhodes, Greece played host to the most recent debates on the budding ‘information war’ between Russia and the United States. The United States has traditionally invested enormous funds in perpetuating its ‘soft power’ abroad, particularly in the former territory of the USSR .

India’s economy could be a catalyst for development if the region can open up.(...) Modi’s foreign policy, like that of many of his predecessors, is greatly reliant on South Asia. India’s role in the larger world has often been constrained by turmoil in its neighborhood. 

Russia has pulled out of a longstanding American high-school exchange program after a teenage Russian boy who befriended a gay couple sought asylum in the United States on the grounds that he faced persecution at home as a homosexual.

Social media companies and governments in the United States, France and the United Kingdom have struggled to quell the noxious online presence of the Islamic State group. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have undertaken a systematic effort to purge accounts affiliated with the militant organization.