Addressing years of complaints about slow and inconsistent processing of visa applications for foreign performing artists, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services told arts groups this week that it was making an effort to speed up and improve its visa operations.

The Kremlin is getting more Internet-savvy every day. Not only has President Dmitry Medvedev joined Twitter, the Russia government now has an English language web portal to help funnel business and advertise their foray into the information age.

Muslims On Screen and Television (MOST) was formed; not as a way of converting Hollywood, as Lauren Levy, the creative executive at Miramax said, but “instead, they want to work with writers, producers, show-runners, agents on their own terms... to create more balanced, diverse and authentic characters and themes”.

On July 16, 2010, The Huffington Post published an opinion piece authored by John Brown, former U.S. Foreign Service officer and currently Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown University.

I was intrigued to see several recent calls for bids by the U.S. Agency for International Development for programs that would, among other things, train young Arabs how to better use the Internet and other digital technologies for political activism, advocacy, greater transparency and accountability, and other such democratic practices.

While U.S. public diplomacy since September 11, 2001, has focused on countering terrorism and the radicalization of the Muslim world, a job increasingly supervised by the Pentagon, China has been moving ahead methodically with its own ambitious global agenda.

...annual service trip that brings students from UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources to this desert city [Arad, Israel] – a sister city of Burlington, Vt. – to help locals make the most of their ecologically-sensitive surroundings.

In Tere Bin Laden, pop star Ali Zafar makes his debut as a Bollywood hero - a notable coup for a Pakistani actor.