Peng Liyuan, China’s new First Lady, is glamourous, fashionable and one of her nation’s best-known singers, a startling contrast to her dour-looking predecessors. As she accompanies her husband, President Xi Jinping, on his first trip abroad as China’s leader, Peng appears ready to carve out a new role for herself.

After 25 years of almost no contact between Canada and Myanmar, Ottawa will launch an era of new and hopefully warmer ties this spring by opening an embassy in Rangoon and appointing a veteran Asia hand as the first ambassador there. Though Ottawa has yet to confirm the appointment of 50-year-old Mark McDowell, it was announced Saturday in the official New Light of Myanmar newspaper and independently confirmed by The Globe and Mail.

The arrival of two giant pandas from China today will likely generate a good deal of fanfare in Toronto, where the bears will be on display at the city zoo starting in mid-May. Excitement is a fairly common reaction to these odd and incredibly rare animals. But why do people seem so obsessed with pandas?

Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations Master of Arts student, Stephanie Parenti, recently published an op-ed in The Globalized World Post, an up-and-coming international relations blog, discussing alignment politics in the former Soviet Union. This accomplishment marks one of many milestones on her journey to the Foreign Service.

In an earlier post, I detailed the USC Annenberg MPD delegation’s meeting with PD officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Beijing. The outcome of that meeting raised interesting questions about MFA’s role in PD and about the domestic dimension of China’s PD, which we tried to learn more about through our meetings. In this piece, I will provide my own interpretation of what we learned here.

As the beautiful face of a nation, supermodel Bar Refaeli has few rivals. So Israel’s foreign ministry thought it was on to a winner this month when it picked the blond, blue-green-eyed, willowy, tall and curvy Refaeli to lead a public relations campaign highlighting Israel’s world-beating technologies. Instead, it sparked a bitter controversy about just who is a 'real' Israeli. The Israeli army attacked the proposal, saying that the 27-year-old Sports Illustrated cover girl was a draft dodger and a bad example to Israel’s youth.

Addressing a room of university students, Aya Kikuchi, a counselor, dished out tips for students bound for Canada. “One cultural thing to note is that there is a strong ‘ladies first’ orientation there,” she said at a meeting organized by Ryugaku Journal, an overseas study agency.

Georgia Department of Education officials are set to establish a cultural exchange program with South Korean leaders. Department of Education Spokesman Matt Cardoza says State Schools Superintendent John Barge will sign a memorandum of understanding Monday with South Korean Vice Minister of Education Ha Tae-Yun to establish the exchange program.