India’s primary cultural diplomacy agency is suffering from a funds crunch and faces the ignominy of scaling down events at a prestigious European fete, which focuses on India, even as it puts on hold expansion plans for Indian cultural centres abroad.

The festival's incorporation into the forum - held in the provience's Xiamen city - highlights cultural ties between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, according to organizers. The forum opened on June 15 and will last through Friday.

Scores of hand-woven carpets were laid across the plaza—a sea of red surging over the steps to the library in Mary. A Turkmen drill team, in white uniforms fringed with green, paraded on the sidewalk in preparation for National Carpet Day. The plastic sheeting stretched across the steps forced us to pick our way up the granite siding to the entrance.

Taiwan and China have reached initial consensus on the exchange of representative offices after two rounds of informal consultations and three rounds of formal talks since early April, according to local media reports.

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Within the framework of the Public Diplomacy Mission “Everyone is going to Yerevan”, over 40 cultural events are being held in Yerevan and regions started June 12, including concerts, exhibitions, theater plays by artists from the former Soviet republics.

Big Brother – and millions of television viewers - will be watching every move of a group of outgoing, yet house-bound South Africans again in January 2014. M-Net announced that its proudly local brand, Mzansi Magic, will produce another South African edition of Big Brother, and this time the show will aptly be called Big Brother Mzansi.

At the official launch of the Qatar UK 2013 cultural programme in December, the talk was of mutual understanding of Arab Islamic and Anglo-Saxon cultures, building bridges between the two nations, and aims of long-term partnerships in the fields of education, sport, science and the creative industries.