In the spring of 2003, Hal Brands watched the first  accounts of the Iraq War trickle in from the battlefield as reporters embedded with U.S. military divisions recorded the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.Now Brands, along with a team of other researchers, has helped to make thousands of internal Iraqi documents and transcripts   captured by coalition forces during the ground invasion available to scholars.

Sarah Cohen, founding director of The Reporters’ Lab at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, will leave Duke in July to join the computer assisted reporting team at The New York Times.

Sweeping changes in the Middle East, such as the reduction of terrorism, the end of the Iraq war and the Arab Spring, call for a new U.S. strategy for the region, argues Sanford Professor Bruce Jentleson in a newly released report. The report, Strategic Adaptation: Toward a New U.S. Strategy in the Middle East by Jentleson, Andrew M. Exum, Melissa G. Dalton and J. Dana Stuster, outlines a framework for new policy approaches.

In graduation ceremonies on Saturday the Sanford School of Public Policy congratulated 277 new alumni, including the school’s first PhD graduate. Among the class of 2012 were 165 undergraduates, 63 Master of Public Policy (MPP) graduates and 48 Master of International Development Policy (MIDP) graduates from 23 countries.