Using music and culture as diplomatic tools to bring people together and foster mutual understanding, The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad is the premier 21st Century showcase of traditional American musical forms. To date, 155 musicians from 40 ensembles have toured with The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad program visiting more than 100 countries on five continents.

The Consulate General of the Netherlands in conjunction with the City of Los Angeles and the L.A. County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) are hosting ThinkBike Los Angeles, "a unique, bi-national bicycle promotion and design workshop." Teams of L.A. designers and community stakeholders will collaborate with the foreign experts on project proposals to meet L.A.'s needs as a growing bicycle-friendly city.

Chinese regulators have shut down 6,600 websites in their efforts to clamp down on “illegal public relations deals” that employ similar tactics for commercial gain. Telecommunications authorities shut the websites down as part of a campaign against bad public relations practices launched in April by the State Internet Information Office and several other government agencies.

The government should have used the white paper to hone "smart power", the term coined by Joseph Nye Jnr. in his book, The Future of Power. Nye says that countries using smart power have "the ability to combine hard and soft power resources into effective strategies". South Africa's foreign policy should be calculated to produce desired outcomes and benefits for the country, especially on the continent.

With the twin crises of the American budget deficit and the European public borrowing emergency, China has ample worries. China is nonetheless active in bilateral relations with EU member states, and this involves commercial diplomacy, high-level visits and public diplomacy. The last increasingly revolves around the notion of “helping friends,” whether these are nations in need of investment or simply cash.

Staff members in Israeli missions worldwide are learning how to bolster their messages on the internet and social networks in preparation for September's UN vote on the Palestinian statehood bid...some 60 staff members of embassies in Europe and representatives of Jewish organizations are taking part in a seminar in Brussels which trains them on the combination between public diplomacy and online media.

Taiwan has been a relatively quiet player in the tense dispute about territorial claims in the South China Sea. That could change with an unusual initiative that Taipei says is a peaceful approach to asserting its sovereignty in a body of water where China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also have claims. The plan involves tourists, rare turtles and a remote atoll.

THE mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Apparently even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”