PD News: The State of Palmyra's Ruins

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March 29, 2016 How to Create ‘Wikiplomacy’ GW TODAY According to Matthew Barzun, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, diplomats in the digital age have a lot to learn from the story of Encarta, Microsoft’s ill-fated digital encyclopedia. […] Instead, he suggested, managing relationships between countries in the 21st century will be most successful when it focuses on “analog diplomacy in a networked world”—what Mr. Barzun jokingly called “Wikiplomacy.” Read More... USC to Provide Scholarships to Syrian Students THE DAILY TROJAN The Provost accepted the Graduate Student Government Senate’s request for USC to become a member of the Institute of International Education’s Syria Consortium for Higher Education in Crisis. […] Among USC’s other efforts in providing educational opportunities to endangered scholars, as mentioned in the statement, are its membership in Scholars at Risk and the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund. Read More... The State of Palmyra's Ruins THE ATLANTIC The loss of Palmyra, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, was one of ISIS’s biggest setbacks since the group declared itself a caliphate in 2014. […] [Maamoun] Abdulkarim said he and other historians and archaeologists would travel to Palmyra to more deeply assess the damage, and to plan how they’ll restore the ancient ruins and sites. Read More... Was There Another Way With Cuba? THE ATLANTIC There’s something strange about the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s recent visit to Cuba: It’s largely revolved around whether the Castro government deserved restored relations with the United States and a visit from the U.S. president. [...] If diplomacy is three-dimensional, the political debate in America over U.S.-Cuban affairs has been occurring on only one plane.Read More... How Colombia's Fight for LGBT Equality Differs From Ours ADVOCATE The Advocate hosted Marco Jaramillo, a Colombian journalist who launched one of the country’s most prominent LGBT multimedia outlets, EgoCity. Jaramillo was the first out journalist to take part in the International Center for Journalism’s multipart fellowship [...] which brought experienced journalists from five different Latin American countries to the U.S. to work in 10 different newsrooms. Read More... The ‘Soft Power’ of Kuwait KUWAIT TIMES Kuwait is one of the masters of soft power in the Middle East. As I was having dinner with two Emiratis, two non- Kuwaiti Arabs were having dinner at a table beside ours; the two non-Kuwaiti Arabs were stuck to one phone watching the second episode of “Swar Shuaib,” Kuwait’s Shuaib Rashed’s popular talk show. Read More...