Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned that US was "not trustworthy", after former US officials and legislators urged diplomacy with Iran’s incoming president Hassan Rowhani. “I said at the beginning of the (Iranian) year that I am not optimistic about negotiations with the US, though in the past years I did not forbid negotiating (with US) about certain issues like Iraq,” he said on Sunday during an “Iftar” party meal that breaks the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

After having served for three-and-a-half years as the US Ambassador to the Asian Development Bank under presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, I finally made my first trip to Myanmar last April, to Mandalay, as a private citizen. In early July I returned, landing in Yangon two days before US Independence Day.

Two years from Wednesday, more than 7,000 world-class athletes and 500,000 spectators will descend on Los Angeles for the biggest sporting event in the region since the 1984 Summer Olympic Games...Mayor Eric Garcetti said it is an honor for L.A. to again serve as host city, after also holding the games in 1972. "Los Angles is the city of hope, opportunity and inclusion, and these games are the embodiment of our spirit," Garcetti said. "This unique event will foster greater understanding and respect for all the world's people."

Last month’s U.S.-India strategic dialogue in New Delhi was widely viewed as a failure. As Ambassador T.P. Sreenivasan, a former Indian diplomat, put it, “The India-US Strategic dialogue, by all accounts, accomplished little….

Pacific Partnership partner-nation military, U.S. service members and nongovernmental organization volunteers delivered more than 200 textbooks to Stephen Whitmee High School in Abaiang, Republic of Kiribati, July 18. The textbooks were donated by the nonprofit organization Project Handclasp. “The students need books to learn,” said Abitaroma Taribo, principal of the school. “Right now we have to photocopy pages of books to give to the students. The books that were brought will help students better prepare for national exams.”

Though entirely operated by local civilians, Radio Khorasan is nonetheless a product of the ongoing, uneasy marriage between Afghan society and the American-led NATO military mission in the country. Its roots trace back to an earlier time in the war, when a stable, peaceful Afghanistan seemed only a few battlefield victories and successful infrastructure projects away. From the very start, media was part of the strategy.

In a July 15 Roll Call opinion piece, “Don’t Devalue Exchange Programs in Immigration Reform,” Michael Petrucelli argues that the Senate immigration bill was wrong to include basic labor protections for the more than 100,000 student guestworkers who come to the U.S. each year through the J-1 visa program. Petrucelli argues that these workers aren’t really workers, but cultural exchange participants, and that the J-1 Exchange Visitor program isn’t really a guestworker program, but a tool of public diplomacy.

The scandal caused a decline in American soft power. After the presidency of George W. Bush, Barack Obama incarnated the promise of a new, value-oriented America, a promise for which he received – rather prematurely – the Nobel Peace Prize. Five years later, the PRISM affair has dealt a heavy blow to Obama's – and America's – reputation, which was already dented by the unresolved question of the Guantanamo detainees and Obama's secret drone war.