With his just concluded visit to Washington marked by expansive public diplomacy and substantive talks with US President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has begun to put an imprint of his own on India’s engagement with the US.

As ISIS and its supporters have turned to social media to spread extremist messages across the Middle Eastern region and world, the U.S. State Department has become an active player in the social media war against ISIS.

Supporting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and African partner nations, service members from U.S. Africa Command help facilitate the building of an Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) in Liberia as part of Operation United Assistance, a humanitarian relief operation in Ebola-stricken West African nations.

China’s effort to project soft-power has suffered another serious setback after a second US university in a week announced it would close its on-campus Confucius Institute because of an apparent disagreement over Chinese government controls.

Amid political tensions with the West, Russia is pulling out of a popular high school exchange program funded by the U.S. government, according to the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

The interesting thing about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden — lapped up by his NRI audience — was that it rendered the boundaries of nationalism porous, so that the resources and talent of NRIs, the vast majority of whom left India for economic reasons, can be leveraged for India’s economic transformation.

What Share America is serving up is bite-sized nuggets of video, photos and text, all optimized to be as shareable as possible on the Web. The goal is to feed content aligned with stated American values -- "democracy, freedom of expression, innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and the role of civil society," reads the site -- in the ever-hungry maw of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks.

The Public Diplomacy Officer at the United States Consulate-General in Lagos, Mrs Rhonda Watson, said on Monday that no fewer than  4,000 Nigerians had,  so far, benefited from various US cultural exchange programs in the past 20 years. Watson told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that such Nigerians had benefited from the US Full Bright, Hubert Humphrey Programs and the International Visitor Leadership Program.