John Cha Poong started giving children in Zambia disposable cameras three years ago to record their daily lives. The results they sent back were unexpected: their extreme poverty should have been depressing but the pictures that came back were so happy. The next year, the Korean Catholic priest did the same thing in Mongolia and Burundi. Then it was Laos in 2011 and Sri Lanka this year. It was the same story, the pictures were not the sort charities might use to raise money.

When the Taliban blasted the famous Bamiyan Buddhas with artillery and dynamite in March 2001, leaders of many faiths and countries denounced the destruction as an act of cultural terrorism. But today, with the encouragement of the American government, Chinese engineers are preparing a similar act of desecration in Afghanistan: the demolition of a vast complex of richly decorated ancient Buddhist monasteries.

Summits were more fun in those days. When Ferdinand III, the Habsburg monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived in Regensburg, the Brussels of its time, in late 1652, he brought 60 musicians and three dwarves. There were sleigh rides, fireworks and the first Italian opera ever performed in Germanic lands. Aside from that, the Reichstag (imperial diet) was much like today’s European Council, the gathering for leaders of the member states.

When Tom Schieffer was U.S. ambassador in Australia and then Japan, he found that a little-noticed program that placed American art in embassies was one of the best diplomatic investments he made.

A lot of goodwill flows between America and Canada, the Minnesota International Center's 2013 focus country. A lot of goods do, too, with most of them measurable in tons or barrels or other familiar metrics. It's harder, however, to gauge the exchange of culture."How do you describe the structure of quicksand? Culture is always moving and not easily described or captured in one glimpse."

Since the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area was launched in 2010, China has now become the organization's largest trading partner. Now to catch up with bilateral economic achievements, cultural exchange and cooperation are being emphasized.

Japanese is the most widely taught foreign language in Australia, and students choose to study it not only for future employment prospects but for the pop cultural intrigue as well.

The allocation of a piece of land to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) in Kuwait is part of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) launched in 2004, a senior Kuwaiti official has said. “The move consolidates Kuwait’s interest in international missions, especially that Kuwait was the first Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country to join the ICI,”