Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth Scott Laderman gave a lecture last Thursday entitled “Surf Diplomacy in the Twilight of the Cold War” on how the activist culture of surfing developed globally in the Reagan era.

Papers are exuberant over an ambitious state plan to help China's football team qualify for the World Cup. The plan hopes to make the sport more popular in the country to attract young talent. The council also wants the country to host the World Cup tournament in the future.

Malaysia's government has unveiled plans to create a new airline and signed a $1.5bn (£1bn) deal with Bombardier for 20 new aircraft. The new carrier would be called flymojo and be based out of Johor Bahru in the south and Kota Kinabalu in East Malaysia.

Belden found himself leading his band Animation in Tehran, with Iranian listeners cheering him on. That performance last month made him the first American musician to play Iran since the country's 1979 revolution and, perhaps, the spearhead of a kind of cultural diplomacy.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian is the first Iranian artist to have a solo exhibition at the museum. Many others are featured at gallery spaces across the U.S.

China announced Monday an ambitious plan to overhaul the nation's soccer management hoping to achieve World Cup recognition, a move observers believe will boost China's soft power.

China will host the Fourth International Forum on Buddhism in Wuxi, Jiangsu province in late October to promote international exchange on Buddhist learning and practice, the country's Buddhist association has announced.

The notoriously hermetic and isolated country of North Korea closed its borders to tourists last fall due to concerns about the threat of Ebola. Remarkably, it has recently decided to reopen them in order to hold a sporting event: the Pyongyang Marathon.