The United States extended embassy closures by a week in the Middle East and Africa as a precaution on Sunday after an al Qaeda threat that U.S. lawmakers said was the most serious in years. The State Department said 19 U.S. embassies and consulates would be closed through Saturday "out of an abundance of caution" and that a number of them would have been closed anyway for most of the week due to the Eid celebration at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Standing in the shadows of the towering skyscrapers in the lower west side of modern day Manhattan, you would never know the heart of Arab America once beat from here. Just two short blocks south of Ground Zero and the 9/11 Memorial on Washington Street stands the tiny island of what remains of the historic ‘Little Syria’ neighborhood. “In my view it’s miraculous that these three buildings have been preserved,” said Todd Fine as he gazed up at them, squinting under the bright, hot summer sun.

The Muslim Brotherhood on Sunday continued to insist on the reinstatement of ousted Islamist President Mohammed Mursi, despite attempts by a senior U.S. official to find a peaceful solution to Egypt’s political crisis. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, William Burns, met with the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s political arm, for a second round of talks on Saturday.

Joseph Bookbinder assumed duties as Public Diplomacy Section Chief for the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) on Aug. 1, the AIT announced yesterday. Bookbinder, who has served as a Foreign Service Officer for 21 years, joined the United States Foreign Service in 1992 and has had overseas assignments in India, Taiwan and China, the AIT said in a statement.

On one side, an eagle reaches its claws out toward a big red apple. On the other side, a creature wearing multiple masks moves toward the apple. These are images in a mural meant to depict the struggles of people of different backgrounds to make it to New York City. The mural is coming to life on a wall in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that runs much of the length of a road that hardly counts as a road. Area street artists know the wall, stretching about 200 feet on Vandervoort Place, as a prized space to show off their talents.

As expected, most Australian foreign policy specialists agreed with one another that the Australia-U.S. strategic alliance remains a strong one. In fact, they pointed to signs that the partnership has only intensified in recent years, citing the particularly close relations between our countries’ political and military elites as evidence. However, these experts displayed clear demographic divides in how they view the alliance.

Al Jazeera America, the new American news channel that will launch on Aug. 20, today announced that Libby Casey, one of the hosts of the very popular program Washington Journal on C-SPAN, will become the first correspondent at the channel’s new Washington, D.C. bureau. Al Jazeera America will be a news, lifestyle and investigative journalism channel that will offer the U.S. audience objective, fact-based and in-depth news focused on issues that are important to everyday Americans. The Washington bureau is one of 12 that the new channel will have across the country.

A terrorism threat has closed U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia on Sunday of this weekend. More than 20 diplomatic missions will be closed including missions in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Department of State stated, “Current information suggests that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August.”