Ken Taylor, the former Canadian ambassador for Iran and centre of the so-called Canadian caper in 1979, gave a speech to the school’s graduating class at the Jubilee Auditorium last week. Born in Calgary, Taylor graduated from Crescent Heights in the 1950s. He played basketball and football for the school (“I wasn’t drafted,” he jokes) but yearned to travel the world. He got his wish, embarking on a globe-trotting career in the foreign service.

Nepal’s beleaguered citizens are struggling to recover from the April 25 magnitude-7.8 earthquake that claimed more than 8,600 lives, caused countless injuries and left many thousands missing. But a United States Agency for International Development official said broader collaboration continues concurrently with U.S. Pacific Command on regional priorities including disaster preparedness, nontraditional regional threats, such as resource insecurity; climate change, pandemic issues and environmental considerations.

As the new government gets started, the main actors in the Mideast diplomatic drama are all pulling in very different directions. 

Following China’s economic rise, the world is keeping watch over its system of government, and how it has successfully adapted to the international capitalist environment from socialism. China’s political development is thought to have far-reaching consequences for Korea in diplomacy, trade and people exchanges, as bilateral relations are deepening. 

In the past decade, the United States has accused China of all sorts of aggressive actions in cyberspace against American companies and government agencies. Most often, they involve theft of intellectual properties in high-tech industries. But the revelations by US National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden about pervasive cybersurveillance and spying against both foreigners and American citizens completely knocked the wind out of Washington's diplomatic onslaught.

The Expo 2015 world's fair showed potential as a backdrop for serious diplomacy as it opened Friday for a six-month run, even as it also served as a lightning rod for anti-globalization protests.(...) Not all of the diplomatic signals around Expo have been positive. India, in a drawn-out dispute with Italy over its determination to put two Italian sailors on trial for the shooting deaths at sea of two fishermen, skipped the global event due to the tensions, Expo organizers said.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the brutal state-sanctioned killing of two Australian citizens, the shallowness of any trust between Jakarta and Canberra - between Australians and Indonesians - has been fully exposed.The expected recall of both ambassadors - theirs in direct retaliation to the unprecedented withdrawal of ours already announced - is as inevitable as it is regrettably, largely pointless. Ditto for other gestures of Australian unhappiness in the diplomatic sphere.