A group of Romanian high school students is set to arrive in Israel on Monday as part of broader exchange programs that have helped crystallize strong relations between the two countries in the fields of education and Holocaust remembrance.

Israeli parliamentarians must establish a Knesset caucus aimed at “reinforcing” relations between Israeli and Jewish communities abroad and “especially in Europe,” Israeli Jewish Congress CEO Michel Gourary said on Wednesday.

But when Western diplomats avoid making public statements in support of human rights and democracy in Azerbaijan, Azeri society loses confidence in Europe. Moreover, private diplomacy is failing to yield results; and year by year the restrictions on freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association increase.

Erdem Gunduz, the “Standing Man” performance artist who instigated a wave of peaceful protests throughout Turkey, participated in the Kennedy Center’s Cultural Exchange Visitors Program in 2007. The two-week arts education program, developed with the State Department, brought four modern dancers and two hip-hop dancers from Turkey to Washington and New York.

It’s been 15 years since the people of Ireland approved the Good Friday Agreement, and President Obama called the achievement -- and the progress that followed it -- extraordinary. “For years, few conflicts in the world seemed more intractable than the one here in Northern Ireland. And when peace was achieved here, it gave the entire world hope.”

Commission development aid should be used primarily for maintaining progress towards the MDGs, not for strategic or foreign policy reasons. The European External Action Service must be involved in development aid decisions, since aid is a powerful means of extending the EU’s ‘soft power’. But the decisions should continue to be taken by the Commission itself.

In 2010, C.C.A. Lagos introduced its International Art Program, which brought more than a dozen artists and curators from across Africa to Lagos for four weeks of lectures, seminars, workshops and projects. This year, the third edition of the program was held from May to June in Accra, Ghana, beginning what Ms. Silva called a “roaming campus” that she hopes could next stop in Senegal and Mozambique.

As a non-profit public institution, the Confucius Institute links up with worldwide universities, colleges and secondary schools providing teachers and materials for their Chinese education at different levels. The conference, held in the first higher-learning institute established in the Western world in 1088, gathered the heads of 72 Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms from all over Europe. The Old Continent can be considered "mature" for the institution's development, Xu said.