Amid an uproar in China over the planned American move to send home dozens of Chinese teachers, the US has withdrawn its "sloppy and incomplete" order directing 80 Confucius Institutes teaching Mandarin to seek reaccreditations.

I frequently teach a large introductory class titled “Foundations of Journalism and Mass Communication.” One section of the course addresses international news in the United States as well as global media trends and public diplomacy issues. At one point, I usually ask the class of 160 undergraduates how many of them have heard of Voice of America. The answer is always the same: very few.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has established a cyber wing to counter the propaganda and hate being preached by terrorist outfits like al Qaeda on the Internet. Being described as an alternative to hacking, a team of interagency officials at this recently established the Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication (CSCC) indulges in counter-spoof to the nasty propaganda of the terrorist and radical outfits like al Qaeda.

Rachael Williams, Murray High School alum and current Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, recently received an award for Public Diplomacy in Seoul, South Korea. U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Sung Kim presented the award at the conclusion of a three-day Youth Diplomacy Program. Williams has coordinated the program since 2010.

Today, the U.S. Department of State announced it will raise the curtain June 19 on its groundbreaking cultural diplomacy initiative, Center Stage, which brings performing artists from Haiti, Indonesia, and Pakistan to the United States to engage American audiences in 60 medium- and small-sized towns and cities.

The congressional drive to update a 1948 law on how the U.S. government manages its public diplomacy has kicked off a heated debate over whether Congress is about to allow the State Department to propagandize Americans. But the actual impact of the change is less sinister than it might seem.

The US State Department on Tuesday announced the selection of two winning websites for its 2012 Doors to Diplomacy Award...This site Water, the New Petrol was built by a team from CEP Santa Rosa Brothers Marist School in Sullana, Peru and IES Manacor School in Mallorca, Spain. Their web project aims to raise awareness of the current state of water issues in the world.

The paper provides a round-up of some of the major turns of events between 2005 and 2011 in the realms of Internet governance, the development of online public diplomacy at the State Department, the evolution of the Internet-fueled Arab Spring, and the establishment of the shadowy U.S. Cyber Command in Fort Meade, Maryland, among other things