On Saturday, the International Olympic Committee will change the destiny of one city forever. Yes, tomorrow's the big day when committee members will decide whether Istanbul, Madrid, or Tokyo will host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. For the chosen city, it's a decision that could catalyze transformative infrastructure projects and long-term investment. Of course, more likely, it will shackle the host city with cost overruns, underused venues and displaced and disaffected citizens.

It's among the few things that many Cubans and Americans can agree on: Baseball should return to the Olympics. Antonio Castro, son of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, is in Argentina to argue before the International Olympic Committee that baseball — now in partnership with softball — should be returned to the Olympic games in 2020.

Now in its tenth year of construction, Israel's separation wall stretches almost 450km. In some places, it cuts deep into the occupied West Bank, excluding Palestinian communities and annexing land around illegal Israeli settlements. This film introduces some of the people protesting against the wall: from Palestinian villagers to Israeli and international activists.

“You Irish people are white because you eat potatoes!” a Beijing taxi driver announced to my Irish husband on a trip before moving here, about a decade ago. We all laughed, though he didn’t seem to be entirely joking. “Who’s Irish?” asked the Chinese-American writer Gish Jen in her story collection of the same name, exploring cultural differences and misunderstandings in the United States. “Who’s Chinese?” is the question here.

I’m standing outside the Egyptian Palace nightclub in Pyongyang’s Yanggakdo Hotel, a place that promises all the advantages of a combination bar, nightclub, sauna and massage service, geared toward the tired and terminally lonely (which, like all other services at the Yanggakdo, means “foreigners only”). The only problem? It’s nearly midnight, and the bar is firmly, implacably closed.

For observant Muslim travelers, Japan’s Kansai International Airport has long been a food desert. Now they can slurp noodles with everyone else. In July the kitchen at The U-don, a Sanuki udon noodle shop, was halal-certified. This was no mere act of cultural kindness: From 2011 to 2012, the Renzo Piano-designed airport witnessed a 70% increase in visitors from Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous nation and home to its largest Muslim population.

Former basketball star Dennis Rodman arrived in Pyongyang Tuesday on a five-day visit amid speculation he may try to negotiate the release of jailed U.S. citizen Kenneth Bae, China's Xinhua news agency reported. In Beijing, the gateway for flights to Pyongyang, Rodman told Reuters he was on another "basketball diplomacy tour" and would not be discussing the release of Bae.

Why do they hate America? What can we do to make them like us? There has been much talk about the promise and limits of U.S. public diplomacy in the Islamic world ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and an assumption that our efforts need to be adapted from the Cold War. But many of these discussions ignore that the robust, global system of public diplomacy funded by the State Department from the 1920s until the 1990s pre-dates the Cold War.