David Cameron's gastronomic diplomacy: 13 courses, from lobster terrine to mountains of cheese. As he fights for Britain's better deal in Europe, David Cameron enjoys some of the continent's finest cuisine in a 24-hour marathon of capitals

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

If you declare a nation that no other nation recognizes, is it still a nation? Such is the quandary of Vit Jedlicka, a Czech politician and founder of Liberland, a 3-square-mile speck of land between Croatia and Serbia that he plans to turn into a little dynamo of a country. If only the world will let him. 

The AIIB is an international financial institution whose founding was proposed in 2013 by the government of China. The general purpose of this multilateral development bank is to provide finance to infrastructure projects in the Asian region. Analysts of international affairs and finance in China, the United States, and Europe say that the unexpected success of the bank represents a major turning point in an undeclared contest for global influence between Washington and Beijing. 

The second area of Turkey’s ethos gap is in relation to the Kurdish question and the confrontations with Armenians and Alevis – longstanding conflicts inherited from the Ottoman Empire. These disputes influence Turkey’s global reputation and challenge the vision of its highly idealistic values-driven foreign policy discourse.

The increasing availability of data is pushing the boundaries of what was once imagined possible in public diplomacy. Data science has the potential to draw large data sets into the study and practice of diplomacy, and allow diplomats and scholars to become comfortable engaging with and analyzing increasingly large and often unstructured data. 

Amid the political volatility and ideological chaos, one country that has stood out as a beacon of of peace, stability and modernity is the low-profile nation of Morocco, wedged at the crosscurrents of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.