People have spent years trying to learn from past foreign aid disappointments and still, with all these resources, the results are discouraging. This experience should have a chastening influence on the advocates of smart power. But it could be that cultural and economic development works on a different timetable than traditional foreign policy.

The library clearly has reevaluated its role within the Internet information ecosystem and found a set of new identities. Let's start from here: One, the New York Public Library is a social network with three million active users and two, the New York Public Library is a media outfit. The library has become a social network with physical and digital nodes.

Dominic Deng Diing, who escaped the violence in Sudan, raises funds to help schoolchildren there. More than 3,000 children in South Sudan attend the two-year-old New Hope Primary School, a project of Diing's Buffalo-based nonprofit group Aid and Care for Africa.

Americans continue to strongly support charitable work with their dollars last year, despite the lingering recession, says a new report. The biggest area of growth in charitable giving was in aiding international causes, such as the earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

Once upon a time, Matt Damon went for a long walk in rural Zambia. The devoted family man and method philanthropist was accompanying a 14-year-old Zambian girl who had no idea that her hiking companion was an Academy Award-winning international heartthrob.

China and the United States are competing to win the hearts and minds of Third World nations by treating the sick on visiting hospital ships. A new study by the Royal Australian Navy Sea Power Centre says China embarked on its foray into naval medical diplomacy last year...such missions furthered China's new desire to expand its influence and lift its image as a responsible global stakeholder.

Task Force Bon Voizen, which translates as “good neighbor,” serves as a picture-perfect image of the U.S. military's soft-power efforts, and the task force's only enemies here are time and budget. Since the task force began its mission at the end of April, it has treated more than 800 dental patients and nearly 23,000 medical patients.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, arguably the world’s best-known advocate of women’s and girls’ rights, is facing criticism for not jumping on the bandwagon of a women’s cause recently in the news: the right of Saudi women to drive. But this can be a tricky cause to take on – as one advocate of American ideals in the Bush administration, Karen Hughes, discovered during her time in office.