state department

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a wide-ranging probe this week to find out how much money the federal government is spending on art. Chaffetz, the chair of the committee, signed a letter dated March 21 and addressed to 25 different agency leaders, including every cabinet-level secretary.

What is public diplomacy, quite often mentioned in the news? And how has it — and its variants/related terms — changed the nature of traditional diplomacy, if at all? Dictionaries define traditional diplomacy as “ the profession, activity, or skill of managing international relations, typically by a country’s representatives abroad“ or “the art and practice of conducting negotiations between nations.”

Jack Masey, a designer for the United States Information Agency whose model American kitchen, part of an exhibition in Moscow in 1959, provided the stage for an argument about communism and capitalism between Nikita S. Khrushchev and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, one of the Cold War’s most memorable confrontations, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 91.

President Obama has produced a video every Nowruz in which he directly talks to the Iranian people inside Iran as well as the Iranian diaspora. His messages have not always been the most appealing, but in the last couple of years, they have drastically improved to connect with the majority of his audience.

Stanford University will be a partner and will serve as the venue for the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit with over 1,000 global delegates and hosted by President Barack Obama, the U.S. State Department and the White House announced today.

Irfan Durmić sees the metro-east through the eyes of a visitor, but also of someone who truly feels at home. [...] At age 16, he would be a sophomore in his home country, but with his transfer credits, American schools place him as a junior. That means he will probably still be a junior when he gets home, but he’s okay with that because he is having so much fun learning about America.

February 12, 2016

Right now, legislation is pending in the House of Representatives that would do the unthinkable – restrict our government’s ability to broadcast news and information in Arabic to the Arabic-speaking world. As a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon, I know that whether discrediting ISIS’s murderous ideology, providing a clear explanation of American policy, or better explaining the hallmarks of American culture in places where it is not well understood, there is no substitute for the ability to talk people across the Middle East in their own language.

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