On Friday, June 20, Serap Pollard, the first Turkish designer in London, displayed her AW14 collection at the Embassy of Turkey in Ulaanbaatar in a runway show as part of a week of cultural events to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Mongolia and Turkey. Pollard’s collection, displayed in front of the crowd of roughly 100, comprised of the international business and fashion community, also embraced a polycentric philosophy.

U.S. secretary of commerce Penny Pritzker will travel to Vietnam, the Philippines, and Myanmar with American chief executive officers in early June. Her visit is important because for Asia the heart of sustained engagement and indeed the very concept of security is economics.

For the first time in decades, business people from the United States are visiting Iran in significant numbers, exploring the possibility of future partnerships as Iranian and American entrepreneurs begin to envision a reopening of long-closed commercial channels. Although sanctions blocking most types of trade between the two countries remain in place, there are no bans on travel to Iran. For U.S.

Malaysian government intends to encourage local companies to increase investments in Russia, Malaysian Minister of International Trade and Industry Mustapa Mohamed said after a bilateral meeting with Russian Minister of Economic Development Aleksey Ulyukayev in this Chinese city on Sunday. “We had a good meeting. We have made major progress and intend to sign a memorandum on setting up a joint committee to develop Russian-Malaysian co-operation,” Mohamed said.

The United States fear that the potential European trade deals with Sub-Saharan African nations (the Economic Partnership Agreements or EPAs currently under negotiations) might affect the benefits to its own companies, as reviews its own preferential trade initiative with the continent, Voice of America informs.

This month TPR sat down with Stephen Cheung, the Mayor of Los Angeles’ first Director of International Trade, to discuss the purview and capacity of the new position, which coordinates between the Port of Los Angeles, LAX, and City Hall. With trade being a central component of the LA regional economy, and with the infrastructure of trade constantly evolving, Cheung works for goods movement, logistics, storage, and transportation to operate as smoothly as possible to retain customers doing business in and through LA.

The Organization of American States (OAS), together with the Haitian Foreign Ministry and Haiti’s Center for Investment Facilitation (CFI), this week launched a new training course on business diplomacy in Port-au-Prince. The course aims to strengthen the institutional capacity of the Haitian public and private sectors in the area of investment and international trade, and to foster inter-institutional cooperation on business diplomacy.

Thanking trade counselors for their devoted efforts that have contributed to the growing of the Turkish economy, Erdoğan said these efforts were helping Turkey emerge as a soft power. “Soft power is now ahead of hard power. A country’s influence is no longer measured with its military power but with its economic and diplomatic power.”