The looming federal budget crunch, coming as the United States reduces its military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, should not slow the State Department’s push to hire more Foreign Service officers, a new report from retired diplomats said.

Ms Sonenshine has been using her new office of Public Diplomacy to engage groups of Pakistani and American media people in a series of joint outreach seminars with Ambassador Rehman over the last few weeks in Washington.

While intelligence analysts squinted at their reporting ... struggling to understand who the Libyan rebels were, the exiled diplomats recognized some surprising old contacts. A number of the opposition leaders, it turned out, had participated in the U.S. embassy's public diplomacy programs.

To Western diplomatic corps that depend on their contacts to supply information about the post-war ground situation in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka to fill their diplomatic cables to the respective foreign ministries, for them it is a military rule in the former LTTE-held vast territory.

An amusing episode from my first Foreign Service posting -- in London, where, doubtless by computer error, given the ordinariness of my name, I was assigned in the early 1980s as a USIA officer -- took place in the US Embassy cafeteria, where Secret Service agents assigned to cover a high-ranking official visit were having their midday meal.