U.S. President Barack Obama has once again appealed directly to Iranian people over the BBC Persian service on Friday, in a rare showcase of technology surpassing the boundaries of official communication channels.

In a refreshing break with the daily dose of gloomy headlines about the current state of British-Iranian relations, there was, at last, something to cheer about last week as the “soft” power of art and culture trumped hard-nosed diplomacy.

Haystack, a company that has created software designed to circumvent Iranian government censors, has stopped testing its program amid criticism of faulty security. Haystack founder Austin Heap said in an interview Monday that concerns about how his much-touted software program works and whether it's secure were “valid.”

In early August, at the fourth trilateral summit between Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan held in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged the leaders of the other two countries to join in an alliance to counterbalance NATO's growing presence in Central Asia.

Japanese plenipotentiary in Iran Kazutoshi Aikawa and cultural attaché Yoko Takahashi visited the exhibit “A Manifestation of World Contemporary Art” currently underway at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) here on Wednesday.

US and Iran faced off at the World Basketball Championships here on Wednesday night, electrifying Iranian fans and offering a rare opportunity for people of the two arch-enemy nations to meet face to face. It was the latest instance of sports diplomacy first used by both sides in the late 1990s to ease US-Iran hostility.

Cheerleaders donned black leggings and white T-shirts for a world championship basketball match between Iran and the United States in Istanbul on Wednesday to respect cultural sensitivities...Patrick Baumann, secretary-general of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), said "special arrangements" had been made with the dancers' dress on Wednesday.

Google can be seen as an American political tool, argues cyber diplomacy analyst Evgeny Morozov in a new editorial pegged to the announcement of an Iranian national search engine. Furthermore, he indicts many Silicon Valley companies for collaborating with the State Department to turn business matters into political questions.