canada
A Gwich'in woman is using social media to get people speaking one of the most endangered languages in Canada. Although nearly 10,000 Gwich'in people live in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska, a United Nations study estimates just a few hundred fluent speakers of the Gwich'in language are left.
What makes a country the best? Is it leadership? Military might? Economic strength? A rich and deep vein of culture and history? Freedom, a stable government and transparency when it comes to business and the political process? In a word, yes. All of the above contribute to how people perceive what makes one country better than another – and ultimately which one ranks as the best overall.
The ten most notable PD moments from 2015.
In what can only be described as a back-handed compliment, the NYT declared in a recent style article that its neighbour to the north was no longer a "frozen cultural wasteland populated with hopelessly unstylish citizens". The reason for Canada's sudden cultural cachet? The Times mentions film and music idols, fashion designers and YouTubers, but the star of the show seems to be new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
A fresh and ambitious Justin Trudeau administration has mainstreamed the climate change agenda into its foreign policy engagement with Thailand, but comprehensive bilateral relations must await a return to democracy in Thailand, says Canada's ambassador to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.
Stories about art, music and theater were a key theme in this week’s PD News roundup.
About halfway through this five-act extravaganza there’s a tableau of a theatre audience: bejeweled matrons in brocade gowns [...] creaky mandarins in quilted robes. Just the sort of throng that might have greeted the house-counting eyes of a 1920’s Peking Opera actor onstage. [...] The Chinese government spent a lot of pre-devaluation RMB to buy this crowd.
Twitter has become the new soapbox of diplomats. It’s even given rise to a new lexicon — twiplomats practicing twiplomacy. Indeed, the website Twiplomacy writes that Twitter has become the “channel of choice for digital diplomacy between world leaders, governments, foreign ministries and diplomats.”