What do American comedy shows, such as South Park, an animated cartoon sitcom, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a parody of news broadcasts, have to do with public diplomacy? Well, more than you think.

Then there are quite different voices in the Muslim community — in Britain, and elsewhere. One example is Inspire, a women’s organization that before the Norwegian horror declared what it called a “jihad against violence.” The group aims to support and empower Muslim women...particularly to educate them so they can counter the arguments of children radicalized by reading on the Internet.

Today the significant opportunity in brand building is to maximize one idea across the globe, to create an inspirational rallying cry for a global consumer movement. It isn’t easy to communicate across different cultures and countries while having one overall brand that really makes an impact.The digital revolution is about getting people to love your brand, no matter where they are in the world.

Every day, in rural areas across Africa, millions of women and girls walk for hours to fetch water. An American woman is also walking for the same reason. Amy Russell hopes her 12,000-kilometer, two-year long trek across Africa will raise money for and awareness of the need for clean water.

Hein Min Aung is a former Burmese child soldier, a young man brave enough to fly halfway around the world at the invitation of Human Rights Action Center to speak in Congress about his experience in the government army of the country of Burma. He hopes that his testimony will raise awareness about the plight of the nearly 70,000 other child soldiers still fighting in Burma today.

A year after controversy engulfed plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan, the project’s developers are quietly moving ahead: In recent months they have hired a paid staff, started fund-raising drives and continued holding prayers and cultural events in their existing building two blocks from ground zero.

Kabul may be short of many things, but it has lots of concrete blast walls. And that is inspiring a group of nascent graffiti artists to give voice, however fearfully, to a biting critique of graft, economic inequality and the second-class status of women in their country. Protest graffiti is a new and still-tentative mode of expression in a society with little tradition of social dissent.

In an unusual project, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio, a photographer and writer, traveled the world collecting photos and stories about what people eat in a day. The photos...have been selected for an unusual exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. The result is an anthropological exploration of the culture of eating that is by turns mouthwatering, repulsive and surprising.