A group of 17 North Korean taekwondo performers will visit the United States from late next month through early June to present the Korean traditional martial art to an American audience, according to the Voice of America, a U.S.-funded radio broadcaster.

Foreign high school students are scheduled to arrive soon for academic semester and year home-stay programs, and the sponsoring organization needs a few more local host families. The students are anxiously awaiting news of their new families.

The State Department has a "rigidly narrow" view of diplomacy that neglects religion's role in foreign affairs, a prominent Catholic ambassador charged on Sunday (April 17) as he announced his resignation.

APDS Blogger: Carolina Sheinfeld

As part of my duties of outreach coordinator, since 2004 I participate at local forums hosted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In Los Angeles, USCIS conducts two regular monthly meetings: the Adjudications Information Forum (AIF) and the Naturalization Advisory Committee (NAC). Advocates attending these meetings are members of community-based, faith-based and ethnic-based organizations; ESL teachers; volunteers; members of expats associations and NGO employees like myself.

Ensor spent 19 years with ABC News, covering the White House and then the national security beat. In 1999, he joined CNN, and he is currently working for the government in Kabul, Afghanistan, as the U.S. Embassy’s Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy in Kabul.

The importance of people-to-people relations in disaster diplomacy shouldn’t be underestimated -- beneath the prickly problems of diplomacy and defence in the Sino-Japan relationship lay deep layers of people-to-people relationships.

If public diplomacy helps determine which countries are on the way up and which are on the way down, U.S. actions speak louder than the broadcasts themselves. "We are in an information war, and we are losing that war," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted to Congress last month.

The State Department has secretly financed Syrian political opposition groups and related projects, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables.