Thanks to the 2013 Chinese Training Program for EU Employees, some 30 officials got the opportunity to know more about China. Launched by the Hanban (Confucius Institute Headquarters) and organized by Beijing Foreign Studies University, the program, which lasts from July 20-28, is the first such cultural exchange platform in China designed for European Union employees, said Jing Wei, deputy director-general of Hanban.

Between the continued bloodshed in Syria and the military takeover in Egypt, it might be easy to overlook recent events in Lebanon. But Middle East watchers need to keep a sharp eye on the current turmoil in Lebanon because spillover from Syria could cause the security situation to flame up quickly into a full-scale sectarian civil war. Several stabilizing factors have kept the situation in Lebanon from escalating out of control, one of these being Hezbollah's resistance to being drawn into conflict with other Lebanese.

On July 15th a triumvirate of politicians declared their support for Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU). Peter Mandelson, a former Labour Party minister, Ken Clarke, a Conservative Party minister and former chancellor, and Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, unveiled the manifesto of “British Influence”, a new campaign group. “Far from leaving Europe, Britain should be leading Europe,” it proclaimed.

Expansion is in the pipeline for Erasmus, the European Union’s higher education exchange programme. Since its launch in 1987, more than three million students have benefited from the system, which supports cooperation between 33 countries.

The EU's student exchange scheme, Erasmus, has reached its 3 millionth participant since the programme was set up in 1987, the European Commission said on Monday (8 July). The statistics also show that in the academic year 2011-2012, more than 250,000 students went to study abroad or take up a job training for six months.

For the United States and the European Union, TTIP represents a chance to tackle issues that continue to hinder the true potential of transatlantic trade. Unlocking that potential requires ambitious standards surrounding regulatory harmonization, intellectual property protection and enforcement, and market access.

It will be the 28th member state, the first since Bulgaria and Romania back in 2007, and will open the door for much-needed investment in a country facing its fifth year of recession, and 40 percent of youth unemployment. The problem is that the EU is not a model of stability itself these days, leading us to a question, who exactly is getting the better deal here?

Since the end of the cold war, the European bloc’s soft power, its ability to press for concessions, has been a powerful foreign policy tool and an alternative to American military might. In the case of Croatia, the incentive of joining the union pushed it to revamp a statist post-Communist economy, pass more than 350 laws and arrest more than a dozen Croatian and Bosnian-Croat war criminals.