As the pandemic enters its sixth month, it has cost nearly 240 thousand lives — by far an unprecedented death toll in the 21st century. The battle to tame the deadly disease seems far from over, even as western countries are easing home confinements, and some businesses are re-opening. Coronavirus cases now exceed 3.3 million…
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Over the last weekend in April, the worldwide total of new COVID-19 cases declined over a three day period for the first time in weeks. The total death toll, however, was close to reaching 3,000,000 around the globe. Unprecedented efforts by medical doctors and nurses and those heeding stay-at-home restrictions appear to have slowed the…
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My esteemed colleague and friend Gene Pell was well known in his primary profession, international broadcasting, to a world often denied high quality, objective news and information. Gene died on April 7 after a three-year battle with cancer at his home near Syria, Virginia. He was 83. Gene is the only leader to have occupied…
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“One of the great American fallacies is the notion, prevalent among people in all walks of life, that all we need to do is to explain ourselves, our policies, and our way of life to foreign peoples and they will love us — or at least will understand and sympathize with our point of view.” …
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When Public Diplomacy practitioners engage with counterparts from other nations, they must listen carefully when universal values are discussed. They must find ways to clarify goals and values when language may obscure them. Abraham Lincoln addressed this point in a plain way in his “Address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore: A Lecture on Liberty,” on…
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The Voice of America is the nation’s largest publicly-funded international broadcaster, reaching 280,000,000 multimedia users in 47 languages each week, many of whom access it daily for honest, balanced and accurate world news. To most senior VOA officials, past and present, including this writer, an unsigned White House blog on April 9, 1600 Daily, omitted…
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Imagine, for a moment, if you were responsible for covering a worldwide threat now regularly compared with World War II in its devastation and future deadly impact? As The Hill correspondent Reid Wilson reports: “The pandemic spreading across the globe has been slow to spread throughout Africa, a continent of 49 countries. But public health…
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Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian has promoted at least two blame-the-U.S. conspiracy theories about the outbreak of the coronavirus. Secretary of State Pompeo’s reaction to these allegations may have been sharp because the Chinese accusations so echo an infamous 1980s Soviet disinformation campaign – that the AIDS virus had originated at a U.S. Army…
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The March 29 edition of the Washington Post carried the sad news of the passing of one of our country’s foremost cultural diplomats: Yale Richmond. Yale’s geographic area specialization was Russia and Central Europe. When he began working in the region, Russia was still the Soviet Union and the United States referred to anything west…
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Nearly three months after the first reports of the disease in China, more than 40 countries have reported at least a thousand cases of COVID-19, with the United States, Italy, China, Spain and Germany, France, and Iran registering at least 30,000 each. Altogether, 200 countries and territories have reported coronavirus outbreaks. American media registered at…
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