“We are trying to bring two cultures together,” said Bruce Mitchell, associate provost and chair of the institute’s board. “It’s not just language but art, cooking and crafts.” When it opened in May, 2007, the local Confucius Institute was the second institute in Canada. The institute is a partnership between Waterloo and Nanjing University in China.

Residents of Mauritius, Benin, Cairo, Paris, Malta, Seoul, Berlin, Tokyo and Ulaanbaatar can engage Chinese culture and meet Chinese people in their homelands at these Chinese culture clubs. This impact could be seen at a recent demonstration by more than 100 tai chi students from the Mauritius Chinese Culture Center at Lady S. Ramgoolam State Secondary School in Mauritius' Port Louis.

The Qatar Foundation sponsors Barcelona football club, a reminder that in 10 years' time it will play host to the World Cup. Then there is the Doha-based al-Jazeera television, considered the most important Arab news TV channel, owned by Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation—which last week claimed that it had evidence that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium.

Peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis resumed this week, in an elaborate tent off a dirt road south of this hotly disputed city where Abraham, the patriarch of both peoples, is believed to have buried his wife.

2012 marks the 15th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. To celebrate the occasion, the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, Berlin hosted a reception on the opening night of the Hong Kong Film Festival in Berlin yesterday which pays tribute to the extraordinary story of this vibrant and energetic city through the eyes of its filmmakers.

More than 100 chiefs of protocol from 77 countries gathered in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Their summit is intended to prevent embarrassing gaffes by diplomats and heads of state. Has a breach of etiquette or diplomatic protocol ever caused an international crisis?

Hoi An City will host the annual Hoi An-Japan Cultural Exchange on August 24-26, the local culture and sport centre said yesterday. The event will mark the 39th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Viet Nam and Japan (1973-2012) and lead up to their Year of Friendship in 2013.

The large number of Colombian eyeballs glued to a new prime-time telenovela about the life and times of Pablo Escobar, highlighted by actor Andrés Parra's bravura performance, shows that the late drug narco still fascinates more than 18 years after he died on a Medellin rooftop in a shoot-out with police.