Committee members heard from Vladimir Yushkin, Director of the Baltic Center for Russian Studies in Tallinn, communications consultant Raul Rebane and Security Police High Commissioner Martin Arpo. He said that the importance of media in this respect was declining and said that information could more effectively be delivered through cultural events, youth camps and other direct contact.

India and Pakistan are back to their familiar game of mutual hatred. The latest flash point has come over repeated violations of the cease-fire along the Line of Control. The two adversaries have accused each other of violating the cease-fire, which came into place in 2003. This has been the longest cease-fire in the history of India and Pakistan. Put in place during the tenure of Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf, this is among the few confidence-building measures to last so long despite repeated violations, minor or major.

Israel is likely to become on Tuesday afternoon the first country to boycott a United Nations Human Rights Council periodic review that all 193 member states participate in. It is the council which Israel objects to, not the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of its human rights record, which it underwent in 2008.

United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi offered the grimmest picture yet of Syria’s descent into chaos, leaving little doubt that diplomatic paths have been exhausted as the conflict drags on indefinitely. Syria is unraveling before the eyes of the world, Brahimi told the UN Security Council yesterday, according to an account provided by two UN officials who asked to not be named because the meeting was closed to the public.

The New York-based Clinton Curtis Band will tour Central and South America, and the Caribbean as part of the U.S. Department of State’s American Music Abroad Program, organized by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

"We also carry out online campaigns to boost sales of TVXQ albums here so that they can visit here and have a concert," said Nicole, a 20-year-old education student. She is not alone. Her group is only part of what she called OurGame, a Latin American network of the boy band's fan clubs stretching from Mexico to Peru to Argentina. In Chile alone, there are about 20,000 members of 200 clubs also for Big Bang, 2PM, CN Blue, SHINee, MBLAQ and other artists.

In honor of the New Year (both West and East), I would like to share a relatively new lens for viewing relations in public diplomacy. Many may have heard of the terms individualism, which privileges the individual, and collectivism, which favors the collective or group. What they may not have heard about yet is relationalism, which privileges personal relations. At the time of this writing, relationalism literally “isn’t in the dictionary” – at least the most prominent one in the English-language.

While referring to the recent border row between India and Pakistan, a panel at the Jaipur Literature Festival blamed the media for feeding people with "petty prejudices" instead of playing a positive role. The panelists, while holding discussion in the session 'Neighbours: Walls and Bridges', appealed to work on the "commonalities" present in the two countries.