The project is widely seen as part of a charm offensive launched by Azerbaijan in France that aims, in effect, to buy goodwill and counteract bad publicity arising from Baku s poor rights record. France, as a major European Union power, is a natural target for such a campaign; it ranks as Azerbaijan s fifth-largest investor, primarily in the energy sector. And with a large Armenian Diaspora population, the country has also been an important diplomatic booster of Baku s longtime antagonist, Armenia.

Neaplis from diverse backgrounds will be benefitting from the Seattle-based Spectrum Dance Theater which is scheduled to launch the worldwide Dance Motion USA cultural exchange program in Nepal as an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in Nepal.

Slovenia’s International Centre for Promotion of Enterprises and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s Finance Think have been appointed by their Governments to join the Virtual Institute’s global network of 82 academic institutions, expanding Virtual Institute think tank membership to 11 research centres from seven countries.

The Grand Opening festivities commenced with a greeting from Sweden’s Minister for Culture, Ms. Lena Adelsohn Liljerot: “Sweden has experience with migration in both directions. Between 1890 and 1920, 1.3 million Swedes immigrated to North America. Swedish landing in 1638 and the great transatlantic partnership between Sweden and the U.S. are among events to be celebrated throughout 2013 as a part of our Globalization theme.”

A controversial exhibition of modern American art that was shut down by the U.S. government in the late 1940s has been reassembled for a new, two-year national tour. “Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy” opens Saturday at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.

Few Australians are aware that Indian contingents fought alongside the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli that is so central to the founding myth of Australian (and New Zealand) identity. As cricket legend Rahul Dravid noted in the 2011 Bradman Oration at the Australian War Memorial, appropriately enough, 1,300 Indian soldiers lost their lives at Gallipoli. Indians fought alongside Australians also in “El Alamein, North Africa, in the Syria-Lebanon campaign, in Burma, in the battle for Singapore” during the Second World War.

Is the United States finally — after fifty years of constant disappointment — on the verge of blasting open the Japanese market? The Washington Post seems to think so. Under the headline, “Japan’s economic turmoil may provide an opening for the U.S.,” the Post’s Tokyo correspondent Howard Schneider recently commented that Japan was being propelled toward free-trade negotiations with the United States.

Conflicts are defined, in large part, by how they are fought and their technologies. The First World War we associate with gas and tanks and the earliest use of airpower; the Second World War with strategic bombing and the first use of nuclear weapons. Those technologies help define us as human beings, shape our experience and politics, mould our present fears. So what of the way our conflicts are being fought today?