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Prominent women and tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province delivered the same hostile message that she'd heard the two preceding days from students and journalists: Pakistanis aren't ready to endorse American friendship despite an eight-year-old anti-terrorism alliance between the countries and a multi-billion-dollar new U.S. aid package.

"We are fighting a war that is imposed on us. It's not our war. It is your war," journalist Asma Shirazi told Clinton during the women's meeting. "You had one 9-11. We are having daily 9-11s in Pakistan."

"The problem is that we want American dollars but we, as a country, hate Americans," Abida Hussain, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, told McClatchy. "We're not perfect, but we want the Americans to be perfect."

"We are becoming increasingly certain that the world's marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points," Bruno said, adding, "We really have no power or model to foresee" the impact.

"It's a lot worse than the public thinks,"

"Chavez once again shot his mouth off," said Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister and respected writer on the Latin American left.Castaneda, speaking at the Nixon Center in Washington Wednesday, said that Zelaya apparently was on his way to the U.N. Mission in Tegucigalpa when Chavez took to the airwaves and urged Hondurans to greet their returning president.After Chavez's broadcasts, Zelaya was unable to get there, and in the heat of the moment fled to the Brazilian embassy, Castaneda said.Castaneda, who's no friend of Chavez, ended Mexico's decades-old foreign policy of not criticizing human rights abuses in Cuba and its financial patron, Venezuela. Castaneda is considered center-left and is one of the region's most prolific political scientists.

Brazil had no warning of Zelaya's return to Honduras three months after his June 28 ouster, in which he was unceremoniously flown out of the country and dumped in a Costa Rican airport wearing his pajamas.

A leading Honduran businessman has put forth a plan that calls for Zelaya to serve out the rest of his term with limited powers, and the Organization of American States and the Roman Catholic Church are serving as emissaries between Micheletti and Zelaya in an effort to break the stalemate.

The arrangement is "one more step in the blurring of the lines between military activities and State Department or diplomatic activities," said Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington research center. "This is no longer (just) the foreign service officer standing in the canape line, and the military out in the field.""The State Department is trying to become increasingly expeditionary," he said.

Kennedy defended the decision to use contractors to operate military assets. The State Department doesn't have enough Diplomatic Security agents to do the job, and it makes little sense to undertake a mammoth hiring effort for a temporary need, he said."This is the kind of surge activity that it seems very, very logical to use contractors for," he said.Critics say it would be more logical for the military to leave several thousand troops behind to protect government officials and property.However, that would require renegotiating the U.S.-Iraqi status of forces agreement, a sensitive step. There's "no thought of that right now," the senior administration official said.

should the North collapse, millions of undereducated, traumatized and malnourished North Koreans might come flooding across the border

a nation of people who would be startled, if not stunned, by the bright lights and hustle of Seoul, and might in turn overwhelm South Korea's ability to absorb them

Officials in Seoul acknowledge the myriad issues that a reunification of the Korean Peninsula would present, though the list of problems is more obvious than their solutions

Seven months into the Trump administration, the world’s diplomatic community has gone from throwing its hands in the air to now leaning back in their chairs and laughing, albeit morosely, at Trump’s cringe-worthy display of diplomacy during the infancy of his presidency.

Since Trump took over, diplomats from the two countries have had so many meetings trying to smooth over their leaders differences that other Latin American and European governments are looking to Mexico for advice on dealing with the Trump administration.

the reality is that people expect more from the United States and any leader with a “shred of dignity” is not going to allow themselves to be spoken to in that way.