A week before the Tunisian government collapsed on Friday, with its longtime dictator fleeing the country in the face of massive popular protests, a Washington, DC public relations firm that had been hired by the government abruptly severed its relationship the North African nation.

Diplomats from many countries complained to U.S. government officials Thursday about the decision by several American banks to close the accounts of their diplomatic missions and their difficulty in finding new banking facilities.

Airports are great, but on a continent where people fly, as some of my seat-mates on this itinerary have, from Washington to Addis Ababa in order to get to Lagos, what is needed most are flights -- many more flights -- both between the U.S. and Africa (there are currently precious few), and between African countries themselves.

Katie Couric's recent comments recommending a Muslim Cosby show to combat anti-Muslim bigotry has been decried by some as a naïve, simplistic remedy for the festering sore of Islamophobia in America. However...authentic and accessible American Muslim narratives can emerge as popular, effective tools of cultural diplomacy in helping bridge the divides between Muslim Communities and the U.S.

I went to Angola as a delegate with the American Documentary Showcase, a State Department-funded program that sends American documentaries around the world, accompanied by filmmakers who teach filmmaking workshops.

The digital revolution is finally starting to penetrate that most traditional of organizations: the foreign ministry. Not surprisingly, given the pace of change in the digital world as a whole, the conduct of diplomacy is set to undergo a major evolution as these technologies shake up the status quo.

Many cultural diplomacy endeavors within governments, particularly when using the visual arts, present art in the safety of the traditional museum or mega-gallery. While the reasons for doing so are understandable, it's much more exciting to hear about programs that accept a bit more out-of-the-box type of approach.

Yuliana Lestari is searching for universities. She takes a brief tour of Oxford in England and then zooms off to Harvard with the help of Google’s Liquid Galaxy. The 16-year-old Indonesian is one of a host of youths who have come to take advantage of the high-tech resources inside “@ America," an initiative supported by the US Embassy in Jakarta that puts an edgy, 21st-century twist on public diplomacy.