Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne, infectious disease that infected 8.6 million people and killed approximately 1.3 million worldwide in 2012. UNAIDS has summed up this situation by concluding “TB anywhere is a threat everywhere.”

The soft-power age has almost ended. The key players of global politics no longer use their soft power to influence other states, nor the general route of international politics. Worse, there are not many actors with the ability to perform decisively at the international level.

Even as the crisis inUkraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russiathat applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.

As languages go, English is a notoriously promiscuous one, borrowing caricatures from Italian, chutzpah from Yiddish and faux pas from French. And yet despite the English-speaking world’s deep and wide confluences with Chinese culture, for some reason, few Chinese words have lately entered the English-speaking world’s vocabulary.

Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill to forbid an Iranian diplomat from entering the U.S. got President Barack Obama’s signature Friday, though the president noted he still considers the law “advisory.” The law spearheaded by the typically polarizing Texas Republican was a rare moment of consensus in D.C.: Obama’s sign-off follows unanimous passage in the Senate and House last week.

George Kennan knew a thing or two about how nations treat one another. In 1946, while serving as deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Moscow, he penned “the long telegram.” That assessment of what motivated the Soviet Union shaped U.S. policy toward Moscow for decades.

From Kiev to Damascus, Moscow to Caracas, there are very few international conflicts and debates where the actions and position of the United States is not influential. In Ukraine, the United States stands solidly behind the interim government, and slapped some sanctions on Russian officials after Moscow annexed Crimea.

The United States plans to carry out small ground-force exercises in Poland and Estonia in an attempt to reassure NATO’s Eastern European members worried aboutRussia’s military operations in and nearUkraine, Western officials said Friday.