Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has fixed on an unlikely source of salvation: Chinese teenagers. Never mind that Millinocket is an hour’s drive from the nearest mall or movie theater, or that it gets an average 93 inches of snow a year.

In the past, the United States has sent artworks abroad to leverage its soft power. Most famously sending Abstract Expressionist paintings to Soviet-threatened Europe as a symbol of American freedom during the Cold War. Now, instead of dispatching art, the State Department has announced that it will launch the artists themselves.

More than 190 countries and 50 organizations are represented at the event, which has had at least 52 million visitors thus far. Of those 52 million, there are roughly 160 American college students working at the U.S. pavilion in the Student Ambassadors Program run by the University of Southern California. The event runs through the end of October.

Let's play connect the dots. After the US midterm elections, President Obama will visit India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan. Trace a line between the nations, noting how it loops down through the Indian Ocean and back up through the South China Sea and East China Sea, forming a semicircle around China.

As the U.S. population of illegal immigrants swelled over the past decade, Democrats and Republicans have attempted various iterations of immigration reform with little success. After Arizona's governor signed a controversial immigration law in April 2010, immigration reform was thrust back into the national conversation and became a flashpoint for the midterm elections.

The event, hosted in Verona NY by the Association of Old Crows in partnership with the MountainRunner Institute, brought together military practitioners, commanders, academics, media, consultants and others, for a range of talks and discussions relating to propaganda, strategic communication, public diplomacy, information operations (IO) and influence.

The second item, reform of [Voice of America’s Persian News Network] PNN, underscores just how important U.S. international broadcasting continues to be in closed societies like Iran. According to [Amir Abbas] Fakhvarar, VOA’s Persian service is only one of two outside networks reaching Iranian audiences—the other being the BBC’s Persian service.

But under a new $1 million program being announced this week, the Obama administration is planning to expand its cultural diplomacy programs to include visual artists like painters and sculptors, who will be asked next year to create public art projects in 15 foreign countries.