In his first-ever interview last week with the BBC Persian Service, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inadvertently elicited a combination of outrage and ridicule with an offhand comment about the aspirations of Iran's population. Responding to a question about the prospects for change under Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, Netanyahu dismissed Rouhani and the election that elevated him as incompatible with the true preferences of the Iranian people, if they could be freely expressed.

“I would like to emphasize once more the great significance of tourism as one of the most important means of public diplomacy that can help create relations and interactions among nations and lead to cultural proximity and mutual understanding of cultures and traditions,” Iran's President Rouhani said while addressing a conference on tourism.

Boris Johnson has said forcing children to wear a burkha to school is “completely wrong” and contradicts British values and freedoms. Speaking after it emerged a number of UK secondary schools forced girls as young as 11 to wear the full Islamic veil, the Mayor of London said a burkha cannot be described as part of a school uniform, adding that he was “totally against kind compulsion in this matter”.

Muslims entertainers performing stand-up comedy is not a new concept, but a recently released documentary entitled “The Muslims are Coming,” aims to shake up the American comedy scene. Starting this week, a troupe of Muslim-American comedians will tour the United States, entertaining audiences with Islam-related jokes in a witty bid to combat Islamophobia and publicize their documentary.

For Yuki Ota, who won Olympic silver for fencing in Beijing in 2008 and again in London in 2012, Tokyo’s winning bid for the 2020 Summer Games and Paralympics was like receiving his first gold medal.

A three-day archive exhibition portraying the shared culture of Pakistan and India concluded at the National College of the Arts, Rawalpindi on Saturday. The exhibition, part of a 14-month project titled, “Exchange for Change: Pakistan and India 2012-2013”, involved around 3,500 students from Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Mumbai, Delhi and Chandigarh. Participants from the two nations said their stories are the same and worth sharing with the general public to dispel misconceptions prevalent on both sides of the border.

When former NBA player Dennis Rodman returned last week from his second visit to North Korea to meet with leader Kim Jong-un, he announced the next step in his unofficial diplomacy: He would try to take other NBA stars to Pyongyang to train the North Korean basketball team. Then, he said, he would try to have an international basketball tournament in North Korea.

In the capital of haute cuisine, fast food is getting complicated. For starters, it's not always fast. At Le Camion Qui Fume, a food truck, the lunch crowd can wait up to an hour to get a made-to-order burger. And in a city where chefs can easily find everything they need to make sophisticated sauces and posh pastries, getting the goods for some fast food isn't so easy.