When India decided it wanted to form its own Model United Nations conference – just like the one in New York – the U.S. State Department wanted to help. But the department required a little help too and called upon Alma College for assistance. The choice of Alma College was something of a no brainer.

For the past month at least, the world seems to have been discussing nothing but whether, how and when the United States will engage in a punitive air strike of some sort against the Syrian regime of Bashir al-Assad. Three things stand out about this discussion.

When contemplating the logistics of a possible war with Iran, it is helpful to consult maps indicating the multitude of US military bases that already encircle a country under crippling economic sanctions. No similar visual aids are available for Iranian bases in the vicinity of the US, for obvious reasons.However, there are various ways to compensate for the lack of an apparent Iranian threat in the western hemisphere. One is to blame it on "invisibleness".

Given revelations of widespread clandestined data collection by the National Security Agency, you'd think the U.S. government would have a PR problem. But that's nothing compared to the tech companies that provided data to the NSA, according to a new study of smart phone users in the U.S.

Taliban militants set off two suicide bombs in an attack on a U.S. Consulate in western Afghanistan Friday morning, triggering a gun battle with security forces that left at least two Afghans and seven attackers dead. The U.S. said all its personnel from the consulate in the city of Herat were safe and American forces later moved in to secure the site.

Something got lost in translation between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday - and it served to illustrate the level of distrust in U.S.-Russian relations. It happened when the two diplomats delivered opening statements before their high-stakes talks about how to inventory and dismantle Syria's chemical weapons.

In a first-of-its kind arrangement, the editors of Russian newspaper Pravda have tentatively agreed to publish a column by Sen. John McCain that will attack the leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The agreement comes one day after Putin criticized the United States in a widely-read column in The New York Times.

News has broken that the new nominee for the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department will be Richard Stengel, who is leaving his position as Editor of Time Magazine. If confirmed, he will be the 8th Under Secretary since the creation of the position in 1999. Stengel will be replacing Tara Sonenshine, who left the R Office this June.