Nordic Ministers of Culture and representatives of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Åland met with Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Tara Sonenshine on February 20 at the U.S. Department of State to mark the opening of the Nordic Cool 2013 festival.

The hazy heat of Jakarta is a far cry from the cool climate of Bandung, where ceramic artist Rifky Effendy was trained. But after 10 years of living in the concrete jungle, he is going out with a bang, curating Indonesia’s first exhibition at the prestigious Venice Biennale 2013 before his planned move back to the West Java capital.

The United States has two distinct approaches to human rights violations in the countries of the former Soviet Union. When it is in Washington's perceived strategic interest, the U.S. government normally remains quiet. When its strategic interests are not at stake, U.S. officials speak forcefully and work to expose human rights violations and corruption.

The United States is applying different standards in its public criticism of the human rights record of authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union (FSU), according to a new report released here Monday by the Open Society Institute (OSI). The key variable, according to “Human Rights and the Failings of U.S. Public Diplomacy in Eurasia”, appears to be the perceived strategic importance of the specific country.

In honor of the New Year (both West and East), I would like to share a relatively new lens for viewing relations in public diplomacy. Many may have heard of the terms individualism, which privileges the individual, and collectivism, which favors the collective or group. What they may not have heard about yet is relationalism, which privileges personal relations. At the time of this writing, relationalism literally “isn’t in the dictionary” – at least the most prominent one in the English-language.

When the Prime Minister bumped into Boris Johnson in Davos last week, the Mayor, resplendent in woolly hat, assured him that he had been acting as his unofficial envoy at the World Economic Forum. Yes, Boris had a few mischievous things to say about the “rhetoric of austerity” while he was in town. But – he reassured the PM – every time he met a senior European politician, he was praising his speech: “Bien joué, David Cameron, n’est-ce pas?”

Turkish Airlines has become the world's fastest growing airline company. Its CEO, Temel Kotil, explained toEuropolitics why Istanbul is Europe's natural hub for passengers heading to Asia and Africa. The tender for the construction of the city's huge third airport was published on 24 January in theOfficial Gazette of the Republic of Turkey .