Now, more than a half-century later, the Soviet Union has disintegrated, the Kennedy Center has recently featured dozens of Russia's top opera, ballet and musical superstars and, perhaps more to the point, Russia has been chosen to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Syrian President Bashar Assad said Monday that the United States has lost its influence in the Middle East due to its failure to contribute to regional peace, in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Republicca.

Amid the big U.S-China issues of the day—rising tensions over North Korea, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the two countries this week in Beijing — U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took some time out Sunday for a half-court game of four-on-four with some students from a high school affiliated with Renmin University in the Chinese capital.

Facing an uphill diplomatic struggle to win China's support for penalizing its ally North Korea over the sinking of a South Korean warship, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday highlighted the benefits of U.S.-Chinese co-operation at the World Expo in Shanghai.

The United States (US) is aiming to increase educational exchange with Brunei, said a visiting US official. Public Diplomacy Country Coordinator at the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs of the US Department of State, Rhonda Ferguson-Augustus told The Brunei Times that the department is interested in developing educational exchanges between the two countries.

The Miss USA judges may have done more to further American cultural diplomacy than all of the efforts of USAID, the State Department, and Karen Hughes combined — this, after all, is the highest honor American popular culture can bestow...

When it unveiled an accord among the big powers of the United Nations Security Council for new sanctions on Iran, the US said it was a rebuff of a deal reached this week by Turkey and Brazil for an Iran nuclear fuel swap. But now, the Obama administration says, both sanctions and the fuel swap should be able to proceed: Both address aspects of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, although they take separate paths in doing that.

Anglo and Hispanic cultures have profoundly influenced each other far beyond their 2,000-mile-long border. On both sides, a great cultural fusion has been taking place. From conjunto music to business deals, tourism to sports enthusiasms, the fusion is mostly happy and productive. Sometimes it is not.