The United States, along with a host of other nations, has refused to sign the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR) put together by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the World Conference on International Communications (WCIT) in Dubai this week.

On Wednesday morning, Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata stood in front of Michelangelo’s David-Apollo in an atrium of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture last graced the museum in 1949 as a post-World War II sign of friendship between the two countries. The statue — one of the master’s many unfinished works — was not the only unfinished project in the room.

APDS Blogger: Sarah Myers

In January 2013, a group of nine Masters’ of Public Diplomacy students will embark on a trip to Beijing, China. A mixture of native Chinese and Americans, we hope to accomplish an ambitious set of goals: to gain an understanding of how public diplomacy is thought about and engaged in academic contexts as well as how it is innovatively used in practice—through film, at airports, over the Internet, in media, and by corporations.

Audiences in Burma will soon have a new way to watch Voice of America television programs following a breakthrough agreement between the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. government agency responsible for VOA, and Sky Net, a regional direct-to-home satellite provider.

The State Department has no policy that forbids former diplomats to lobby on behalf of nations where they served or returning to them for profit, beyond the one applying to federal employees as a whole, which prohibits senior officials from contacting agencies where they once worked for one year and bans all federal employees for life from advising on the same matters.

U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Platt, Vassar’s first “Ambassador-in-Residence”, made students aware of the rewards of a career in foreign service­­­—part of which is being able to bring back roadmaps from those paths less traveled.

Clark, who led the campaign to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo in 1999 and is now the chairman of a Canadian energy company called Envidity, was responding to questions regarding the outfit’s desire to turn Kosovo’s estimated 14 billion tonnes of coal deposits into synthetic diesel fuel.

Last week, the Pew Research Center released its annual survey of European attitudes to America. While anti-Americanism has declined in Europe, a large "values gap" remains between Europeans and Americans. Meanwhile, anti-Americanism in the rest of the world seems actually to have increased since 2009, with confidence in President Obama noticeably down, especially in Muslim countries. Will America's reputation and influence abroad improve under Barack Obama's second term?