diplomacy

NFL star tweets North Korea should bomb New England

North Korea appears currently to be banging the (conun)drum for world instability.

Its apparent enmity to all things American has recently been pierced by such luminaries as Google's Eric Schmidt and the slightly noodly Dennis Rodman.

You might be tickled or troubled by the fact that today, North Korea's Twitter and Flickr accounts were mercilessly invaded by Anonymous.

My emotions, on the other hand, have been moved by the fact that an NFL star is encouraging Kim Jong-un's missiles to be targeted at New England.

There is no known additional antipathy on behalf of North Korea'… Read more

U.S. nuclear regulator a policeman or salesman?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission exists to police, not promote, the domestic nuclear industry--but diplomatic cables show that it is sometimes used as a sales tool to help push American technology to foreign governments.

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and provided to Reuters by a third party, shed light on the way in which U.S. embassies have pulled in the NRC when lobbying for the purchase of equipment made by Westinghouse and other domestic manufacturers.

While the use of diplomats to further American commercial interests is nothing new, it is far less common for regulators to be acting in even … Read more

Facebook takes down Palestinian intifada page

A Facebook page called the Third Palestinian Intifada has been removed from the site following a request from the Israeli government.

Yuli Edelstein, Israel's minister of public diplomacy and diaspora affairs, sent a letter directly to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on March 23. In the letter, which has been posted on the Web site The Jerusalem Gift Shop, Edelstein asked the company to take down the page calling for a third intifada, translated by some as violent uprising, to begin against Israel on May 15.

Pointing to remarks and movie clips on the page calling for the killing of … Read more

Ashton Kutcher in U.S. tech delegation to Russia

Perhaps you, like me, were forcefully encouraged to see the new movie "Valentines Day" last weekend. In the course of diplomacy, perhaps you, too, said that it was a wonderful movie.

You will be fascinated, then, to discover that the movie's star, Ashton Kutcher, has become a U.S. government diplomat.

No, not one of those who takes an overseas posting, sleeps with women who are not his wife, and, having embarrassed himself by dropping his trousers at an official function, is forced to function at a slightly lower level for the remainder of his career.

According to the LA Times, … Read more

Clinton plans to stump for global Net freedom

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is preparing to deliver a major speech on Thursday elevating the importance of Internet freedom and placing the influence of the United States' diplomacy behind efforts to protect it, according to multiple people who have been briefed on the speech's contents.

Clinton's speech at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., is intended to announce that support for online liberty and press freedom will become a State Department priority and will address the importance of cybersecurity, people who have been briefed said. For example, the U.S. could be prepared to require countries … Read more

TEDGlobal: Connected consequences

One of the main themes at TEDGlobal this year was a lively debate between optimistic and pessimistic voices on the social potential (or doom) of the web. This outlook was somewhat more somber than I expected at a TED conference, perhaps – as some attendees suspected – due to the cultural differences between Long Beach and Oxford. There was definitely a palpable sense of enlightened skepticism at the conference, a distinctly European tone that serves as welcome counterweight to the Californian brand of optimism that TED is often associated with (just read this amusingly British commentary in the Times of London).

One … Read more