He also said that Taiwan was willing to increase the number of scholarships for outstanding students from allied nations hoping to complete their university education in Taiwan in either Mandarin Chinese or English. Meanwhile, President Ma Ying-jeou said Wednesday that soft power is the key to winning respect from other nations.

Foreign high school students are scheduled to arrive soon for academic semester and year home-stay programs, and the sponsoring organization needs a few more local host families. The students are anxiously awaiting news of their new families.

It’s not a freedom fighter atop a tank but a young bohemian woman in Benghazi reviving a carnival banned by Gaddafi and singing songs of protest. Ann Marlowe reports on an extraordinary utopian moment in the free city.

“Kampala carnival is intended to build stronger relations, through cultural tourism and public diplomacy, between Uganda and Trinidad and Tobago; Uganda and the East African region and eventually Uganda and the rest of the world,” reads a statement from the organisers.

In a small classroom at New York University Abu Dhabi, Paulo Lemos Horta was pushing his students to explore the difficulties of translation. In some ways, it might have been a class on any American campus — except that virtually everyone was fluent in a second language.

A group of high school students in New Jersey is working to make the redemption of captives a Pesach priority. They have created an organization, StudentsUnite4Israel.org, as a vehicle for Israel advocacy and have launched the Gilad Shalit-Fifth Son Project as their first major initiative.

Conductor and University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music professor Rodney Winther has been honored by the state of Táchira in Venezuela for his contributions to music there.

Led Zeppelin’s 1970s classic rock song “Kashmir,” with soaring violins and the ethereal voice of Robert Plant, evokes an exotic land. But for Kashmiris, the song never resonated: The lyrics are more about the deserts of Morocco, and rock music was never big here, anyway.