Taiwan must strengthen its soft power if it wants to stand on the world stage, President Ma Ying-jeou said Monday in a speech to business leaders from Chinese societies around the world.

The long-running cartoon series explores issues such as family, community, education and religion in a way that few other popular television programmes can match, according to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily broadsheet.

Although one year has passed since Turkey and Armenia took a major step and signed protocols in Zurich to improve relations, they have both failed to approve them. Despite the official stalemate, civil society contacts and projects have been active on both sides of the closed border between the two countries.

If two countries can respect each other's culture, the possibility of conflict will be vastly reduced, James Leach, chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), commented in an interview with Xinhua.

Over the years, France, a member of the European Union (EU), has used cultural diplomacy to win over countries and spread her influence around the world. In French-speaking Africa, the European economic powerhouse has sustained her ties, through cultural programmes, whether in cinema theatre, music or fashion.

Berlin DJs Daniel Best and Kalle Kuts are reviving the spirit of 1980s West Germany with their compilation of "the Cold War's hottest music."The project hopes to shed light on the almost forgotten but massively influential GI clubs where US soldiers went to get a taste of life back home.

The Clinton Global Initiative and Qatar Foundation International (QFI) have a unique idea for bridging the American-Arabic cultural gap: An online project aimed at bringing American and Qatari teenagers together through crowdsourced translation exercises.