The Internet, and particularly left-leaning U.S. blogs, are abuzz with a story in the Mexican newspaper El Universal alleging that the United States cut secret deals with one of Mexico's largest drug cartels. The nature of those deals change based on which English-language rewrite you're reading, but in the most extreme and widely circulated tellings, the U.S. allowed the Sinaloa cartel to "smuggle billions of dollars of drugs" and granted the organization "immunity and undisturbed drug trafficking" in exchange for information on rival cartels.

In 2010, I sat across the table from Assistant US Trade Representative Barbara Weisel, who was responsible for negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the mega-regional free-trade treaty among Vietnam, Malaysia, and ten other Pacific Rim countries that President Barack Obama’s administration wants to conclude in the coming weeks.

Israel's defence minister has accused US Secretary of State, John Kerry, of an "incomprehensible obsession" with his push for Middle East peace, drawing an angry response from the country's chief ally. The US State Department on Tuesday described Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon's comments as "offensive," in a mark of the degree of outrage in Washington at the latest public spat between the two allies, which follows a major row over Iran policy.

Ever since Ariel Sharon sank into a coma eight years ago, many have wondered whether he would have taken the peace process with the Palestinians any further after the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. A series of cables from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to the State Department that were leaked to Wikileaks show that in fact, even before the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon was planning his next big diplomatic move.

What’s a U.S. ambassador to do when he wants to get his message out in a country that enjoys making America look bad, has little patience for Western values and tightly controls the media? Call him @McFaul, the tweeting ambassador. For Ambassador Michael McFaul, the unfiltered communication offered by social media means he can tweet U.S. policy, blog it and post it on Facebook, an alternative to the mostly hostile traditional media here.

Iran and six world powers reached an agreement Sunday on how to implement a short-term deal that was struck in November and gives the parties a six-month time frame, beginning on Jan. 20, in which to conclude a long-term agreement about Iran’s nuclear program. The Islamic Republic will open its nuclear program to daily inspection by international experts, starting the clock on the six-month deadline for a final nuclear agreement.

In its last-ditch attempt to get moderate Syrian opposition groups to the negotiating table, the Obama administration faces the prospect that a no-show wouldn't be such a bad thing. With less than two weeks to go before a long-planned peace conference in Switzerland, the main Western-backed moderate political group seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad has still not decided if it will attend. It's the latest frustration for the U.S. and allies who have spent the last 18 months trying to negotiate a transition of power from Assad to a new, representative government.

Almost as soon as a Russian court convicted activist Alexei Navalny of embezzlement, on highly dubious grounds, in July 2013, U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul tweeted his disappointment at the “apparent political motivations in this trial.” Within minutes that comment echoed across Russia’s social media landscape, eventually generating nearly 1,000 retweets and getting picked up by numerous media outlets.