In a move that could boost South Florida’s reach in the international art world, the company that owns Art Basel Miami Beach announced Friday it is expanding into Asia. Soon, there will not only be Art Basel Switzerland and Art Basel Miami Beach, but also Art Basel Hong Kong — an addition that was welcomed warmly in Miami’s art scene.

Academy Award winning actor Julia Roberts will join the Alliance for Clean Cookstoves as “Global Ambassador,” and together with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will help to bring attention to the global issue that kills nearly 2 million people annually: toxic smoke from unsafe and inefficient cookstoves.

The Smithsonian has announced that in 2012 it will display the exhibition: The Art of Video Games. The exhibit will no doubt delve deep into the history of video games, their 40-year evolution, and use of new technologies to produce such detailed visual effects.

On the sidelines of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Ernest Wilson, dean of the innovative Annenberg School of Communications at USC, speaks... about the West Coast view of foreign policy, putting civil society at the center of public diplomacy, and how to properly teach and practice the art of communications internationally.

Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, led an orchestra of two dozen elite musicians — volunteers from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Staatskapelle, the Orchestra of La Scala in Milan, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris — into Gaza on Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, an array of University of Southern California student organizations hosted Genocide Awareness Week. While U.S. diplomacy with Sudan regarding the genocide in Darfur has stalled, the use of public diplomacy can create many opportunities for organizations to advocate for change.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi issued a joint statement calling on the European Commission to “examine the possibility of temporarily establishing internal border controls in the case of exceptional difficulties" in response to an influx of migrants from North Africa. This would be a fairly major adjustment to one of the EU's signature achievements, the Schengen Agreement, which grants free passage accross borders within the union.

In ancient Rome, even slaves, once freed, could rise to become senators. Not so in today’s United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), where hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are locked into a permanent underclass.