Gil J. Stein, the Director of the Oriental Institute and Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, who is in Iran now has called on Abdolmajid Arfayee, the translator of the Cyrus Cylinder, to translate the Achaemenid tablets which have been confiscated by a court in the US.

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane.

Three disclosures this week show that the United States is losing its way in the struggle against terrorism. Sweeping government efforts to stop attacks are backfiring abroad and infringing on basic rights at home. CIA drone strikes are killing scores of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. The National Security Agency is eavesdropping on tens of millions of phone calls worldwide — including those of 35 foreign leaders — in the name of U.S. security.

Two sensitive and potentially explosive issues have always clouded the relationship between the Jewish community in the United States and the State of Israel. The first relates to claims of “dual allegiance” to both Israel and the United States; the other concerns the pro-Israel, American “Jewish lobby.”

Advocates of official U.S. public diplomacy have long defended the value of its programs and argued for resources to do even more. But what exactly could be accomplished with such resources if they were, indeed, available? In fact, we may already have an answer to that question, albeit in the context of a single country at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy—Afghanistan.

It hasn't been the best of times — this week, this month, indeed, this year — for American foreign policy. The US looks imbecilic abroad when a few dozen members of Congress can bring the government to a standstill — later striking a compromise that only offers the same hotheads another shot in the new year. Nor, of course, did the amateurish roll-out of Obamacare enhance the reputation of the leader of the free world.

Attacks on US forces by uniformed Afghan security personnel are now Afghanistan's signature threat, just as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were in Iraq. And that new and disquieting reality has me thinking hard about the idea of ‘force protection’ here and how it is changing, or, more precisely, needs to change. During my first trip to Afghanistan in 2010, it was shocking to see how lax the soldiers there seemed to be in their own force protection.

A new book by Naomi Sakr, Transformations in Egyptian Journalism (I.B. Tauris, 2013), should be required reading for American public diplomacy specialists who want to engage Egyptians through the media. Bilingual Sakr, a media policy professor at the University of Westminster and director of its CAMRI Arab Media Centre, draws on new research and decades’ experience tracking Arab media trends to offer a readout on how Egyptian journalists and their employers have been struggling and coping yet also innovating since the 2011 revolution.