In the desert city of Al Quweira, Jordan, Marines and sailors are making their best effort to maintain and renew regional cooperation with their Jordanian military counterparts through challenging training and in one particular case, through a spiritual gathering.

Apparently having trouble driving traffic to its websites, in 2011, State undertook a major campaign to boost its numbers, including buying sponsored ads to increase its English-language Facebook page “likes” from 100,000 to more than 2 million and to 450,000 on Facebook’s foreign-language pages.

The United States State Department spent $630,000 to increase the popularity of it's Facebook page over the course of two years, according to a recent report released by the department's Inspector General. Although the page gained nearly 2 million likes, State Department employees criticised the campaign for its failure to promote sustained engagement between the bureau and its target audience.

Werbel's new book Lessons from China: America in the Hearts and Minds of the World's Most Important Rising Generation chronicles her experiences in and out of the classroom. The book captures Werbel's Chinese students in their own words as they grapple with America's tragic and transcendent past and, in doing so, inevitably reflect upon their own country's past, present, and future.

The Snowden affair provides a teachable moment for a great many things, not least of them the need for robust U.S. public diplomacy. Today more than ever, global public opinion matters. The U.S. cannot conduct itself with disregard for how its actions will be perceived by the rest of the world; even public diplomacy at its best cannot fix bad policy. But modern public diplomacy is not at its best.

Perhaps the only thing that the average American knows about Rwanda is of the genocide that claimed over a million lives in 1994. When locating Rwanda, a small nation about the size of the state of Maryland, on a map of Africa, most would first notice their looming neighbor to the left, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The immigration reform bill that passed the Senate would almost double the number of H-1B visas. These temporary work visas allow employers to hire foreigners for jobs they say are hard to fill, like tech jobs and positions teaching math and science. But the visas aren’t a magic bullet and can be a nightmare for workers like Ingrid Cruz.

Mr Obama visited the country’s Ubungo power station as part of his “Power Africa” initiative, unveiled in Cape Town on June 30th, which aims to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. The Norwegian-built gas plant is the kind of public-private investment that America is seeking to encourage in Africa, where two-thirds of people have no access to power.