Michelle Obama plans to promote her year-old global girls' education initiative during upcoming stops in Liberia, Morocco and Spain on what could be her final solo overseas excursion as first lady. The White House announced Wednesday that the three-country trip is booked for June 27-July 1. Her travelling companions are daughters Malia and Sasha, and her mother, Marian Robinson.

As the official response has struggled, the crisis has given birth to a global network of new humanitarians as Syrians on the ground and overseas have come together to find ways to get aid to their beleaguered country. Unorthodox but determined, inexperienced but with a deep knowledge of their country, they’ve created aid procurement and delivery systems handing everything from food aid to hospital management.

ASEAN-Korea Tourism Development Workshop, the venue gathered over 100 representatives from the government, private sector and academia to discuss recent trends and possibilities in the industry. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is promoting a form of tourism environmentally nondestructive, socially responsible and commercially sustainable. 

The logic of climate diplomacy is that the best way to encourage others to do more is to reduce emissions more rapidly yourself. But Singapore is limited in what it can offer in terms of cuts because its small land area restricts the availability of domestic renewable energy.

Sitting in class, studying for a bachelors’ degree in business at the University of Kansas, Heidi Rickels felt her heart beating faster every time the professors talked about developing economies or international issues. So, after graduation, she moved to Colorado and began working for a nonprofit based in Denver that collects donated medical supplies to send overseas. 

A center for children of African migrants and asylum seekers in south Tel Aviv, were all smiles this week as they received an unexpected surprise. The Diplomatic Spouses of Israel (DSI), a group of some 170 spouses of accredited diplomats from more than 50 countries, together with internationally renowned artists Max Levi Frieder and Joel Bergner of Artolution, joined the children to paint a symbolic mural and beautify the kindergarten.

The Chinese government has donated medical supplies worth 3 million U.S. dollars to South Sudan as part of humanitarian support to ease health services in the war-torn young nation. [...] "The items will be used to implement the 'Boma Health Initiative' which focuses on the urgent needs of medical services at the most primary level of the population," Ma told journalists in Juba.

Some conventional public diplomacy measures are not suitable for countering violent extremism (CVE) because they are mismatched against extremists’ more aggressive tactics. But this week, the U.S. State Department has taken a significant step forward by announcing that it will place greater emphasis on development aid in its CVE efforts. A joint strategy that will better coordinate State Department CVE projects with USAID should bring new substance to public diplomacy that has CVE potential.