In 1971, artist Chris Burden performed his iconic "Shoot" piece before a dozen friends gathered in the F-Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt while standing in front of a white wall, a friend shot a copper jacket bullet from a .22-long rifle into Burden's upper left arm from a distance of 15 feet. The bullet was intended to merely knick the arm, but it went clean through, sending Burden to the hospital and requiring that he report the "accident" to the police.

It was the other guy’s fault, no question. That’s pretty much the explanation for why a major science conference scheduled for December came close to being torpedoed. Astronomers from all over the world were planning to gather at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California, to talk about new results coming from the planet-hunting Kepler mission.

Germany is paraphrasing Ricky Ricardo today: America's "got some 'splainin' to do." The German Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador in Berlin Thursday and told him Germany wants an honest and full explanation of US surveillance operations in Europe.And Chancellor Angela Merkel repeated her concerns that her own mobile phone is being monitored. She told a European summit that "spying among friends" is simply not done, and accused the United States of an unacceptable breach of trust.

Earlier this week, Germany’s Der Spiegel reported the latest leak of confidential documents from former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. According to these reports, the NSA monitored former Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s e-mail account and personal communications, gaining insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.

When chipotle and kimchi abound in the suburbs and Univision co-hosts a presidential debate, it is easy to forget how sudden and extraordinary our ethnic makeover has been. Americans middle-aged or older were born into a country where immigrants seemed to have vanished. As recently as 1970, the immigrant share of the population was at its lowest level on record, and the foreign-born were mostly old and white.

Don't expect much in the way of breakthroughs. That's the message in the media, as Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif meets US President Barack Obama on Wednesday. That the two men are even meeting should be viewed as a sign of progress, the Associated Press said.

I join my GWU and IPDGC colleague Tara Sonenshine in saluting Donald M. Bishop for a thoughtful speech on the state of U.S. public diplomacy and the challenges it faces. Let me add my two cents to the discussion. I agree with the bottom line: public diplomacy is not a sufficiently vital dimension of diplomacy, foreign policy and national security. In an increasingly interconnected world of the Internet, global media, personal media and billions of smartphones, it should be, but isn’t.