Vice President Joe Biden said this week that President Obama had no intention of ending the embargo of Cuba when he attends the Summit of the Americas in mid-April, but as Senator Richard Lugar and his senior staff member, Carl Meacham, outlined in a Senate Foreign Relations Commitee Print on US-Cuba relations, there is a…

This manatee floated up to the surface in one of the canals in Ft. Lauderdale when I was there a week ago. It was a magnificent creature and stayed with us quite a while — sort of posing. Maybe since Spring is upon us, I’ve been more tuned into nature than normal.

Barack Obama is having America up the ante on its investment in rolling back the Taliban and those who follow them in Afghanistan. We are sending more troops and trainers, and are committing to civil reconstruction programs whose outlines are unclear.

This is a fascinating session with Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf and former Clinton administration National Economic Adviser to the President and UC Berkeley Haas Business School Professor of Global Management Laura Tyson.

Juan Cole is such a refreshing, extraordinary force attempting to drag Americans toward a more enlightened and constructive understanding of the Muslim world. I had the privilege this week of hosting Cole for a discussion of his just released book, Engaging the Muslim World.

At this morning’s superb economic event at the New America Foundation and in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, there was a lot of discussion about China’s recent proposal to consider a move away from the US dollar and towards the use of a new “super-sovereign reserve currency.

The New America Foundation is hosting today the first in a series of Bernard L. Schwartz Economic Symposia from 8:45 am – 1:00 pm EST.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of hosting Advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestine Minister for Economic Development Mohammad Shtayyeh in my office to discuss the status of Palestinian Government unity government talks between Fatah and Hamas.

Juan Cole has just published a new book about America’s interaction with the Middle East, called Engaging the Muslim World.

I’m not a protectionist type — but I do believe in smart industrial policy, national commitments to infrastructure, and the promotion of the American jobs base when tax dollars are involved – particularly during the greatest financial meltdown in generations. And yet, U.S.