The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, criticised Mr Putin and his associates for rigging elections, imprisoning and murdering opponents, fostering corruption and "destroying" Russia's reputation on the world stage.

Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani has given an interview to NBC–his first with a US media outlet. In it, he said his country will never build nuclear weapons and added that he has full authority to negotiate with the West over the country’s nuclear program. Rouhani’s interview comes a day after Iran freed noted human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and another 10 detainees.

It has been 6 years since my Washington Ireland Program (WIP) journey began. I was standing on a hockey pitch in freezing Scotland, clambering into my not-so-flattering goalkeeper gear, when Kate Hardie-Buckley (WIP '07) came running up to me and declared that I had 'W.I.P.' written across my forehead.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be meeting with President Obama in Washington next week to discuss economic and trade cooperation between the United States and India. One of the most critical topics on the table will be immigration reform as it relates to Indian workers in the United States.

Commenting in January on his country’s blacklisting of America as a destination for Russian child adoptees, Alexey Pushkov cited the deaths of nineteen children and the U.S. legal system’s “very laxative decisions” concerning the fate of the adoptive parents. When Mr. Pushkov is not tweeting about American exceptionalism, he is on state television spreading the pro-Putin and anti-American propaganda which is the staple of his TV Tsentr program “Post Scriptum.”

The U.S. spent roughly $25 billion last year on what’s loosely known as security assistance—a term that can cover everything from training Afghan security forces to sending Egypt F-16 fighter jets to equipping Mexican port police with radiation scanners. The spending, which has soared in the past decade, can be hard to trace, funneled through dozens of sometimes overlapping programs across multiple agencies.

It started as “a new beginning” and ended as “America is not the world’s policeman.” Between President Barack Obama’s historic 2009 address to the Islamic world in Cairo to his address to the American people on Syria last week, Obama has zigged and zagged on Mideast policy, angering supporters and detractors alike. But he has stuck to a clear pattern: reduce American engagement, defer to regional players and rely on covert operations to counter terrorism.

The new U.S. ambassador to Brazil landed in the capital Monday amid increasing tensions over a U.S. spy program that aggressively targets Latin America’s biggest nation, reportedly including the personal communications of its president. Ambassador Liliana Ayalde is a career diplomat with three decades of experience and a former ambassador to Paraguay. She most recently served as the deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, covering Cuba, Central America and the Caribbean.