The U.S. Department of State announced today that Haitian troubadours Ti-Coca & Wanga-Nègès will travel to communities across America as part of a groundbreaking cultural diplomacy initiative, Center StageSM, from September 18-October 14, 2012.

“At a time when the United States seems very much in need of public diplomacy in the Middle East, in cases such as these, scholars, the host countries and the American public are all losers,” said Maurice Pomerantz, a Fulbright scholar who’d planned to spend the year teaching comparative literature in Lebanon but was relocated to Jordan because of the State Department’s security concerns.

Students from Confucius Institute in South Korea put the adapted version of traditional love story Legend of Chun Hyang on China's stage in Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) on Sept. 15, 2012, as people of China and South Korea just celebrated the 20th anniversary of their friendship in August.

Last week, before the world caught on fire over a film clip, I wrote about the paradox of value promotion in public diplomacy. No matter how appealing promoting one’s values may be, trying to do so in a global arena is fraught with difficulty. Yet, because values are integral to a nation’s communication, public diplomacy will inevitably reflect those values. What’s happening between the U.S.

The murder of U.S. diplomats in Libya as an alleged reaction to a YouTube posting brings into focus serious differences in culture and values with many societies in the Muslim world. Acknowledging this fact is an essential step in tackling the gaps in the value of human life and religious symbols.

Did India act in haste in endorsing a relaxed visa policy with Pakistan? Should not it have audited the real outcome of the earlier Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) in context of continued support to anti-India activities latest being the cyber war launched from across the border? Or, did India just do the right thing by putting history behind it, to seek a cordial future with its neighbour? The verdict on the vexed debate persists even as hope floats that somehow or the other the warring nations find love together.

It has been reported that Sri Lanka is expected to lobby the support of friendly US congressmen to defeat a resolution tabled in the House of Representatives on September 07 by seven congressmen demanding an international inquiry into alleged violations of the international humanitarian law during the military battle against the separatist/terrorist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

At the end of the Olympic Games she also found success in the diplomatic realm when she was elected to be a member of the Athletes’ Commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – an achievement that the Slovak Olympic Committee President František Chmelár said was equal to winning “four or five gold medals”.