For the next two weeks, organizers of the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon are hoping the event will keep plenty of people in the port city, if not draw them from the capital. Incheon, about 25 kilometers west of Seoul and home to three million people, is ready to step out of the shadow of its giant neighbor and make a name for itself by hosting Asia’s biggest sporting event starting Friday.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Ahmedabad on Wednesday, by his side will be his glamorous folk singer celebrity wife, Peng Liyuan.  For the Xis, this will be a first visit to India together. For an Indian audience, this will be a first experience of a new - and, some would say, softer - side to China's diplomacy.

China has global ambitions to export its technology, with the twin objectives of securing access to energy and other commodities in return for financial and technical support. The Indian ventures would be a stepping stone towards realizing ambitious proposals to build high-speed railway lines from China to Europe, North America and Southeast Asia, and across South America and Africa. 

The Barack Obama administration is focusing its public diplomacy efforts on persuading “swing voters” in the Muslim world that the group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) is a bigger threat to them than US policies, the State Department’s top communications official says.

Wrapping up an account of the Narendra Modi government’s foreign policy activism in its first hundred days in office, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj claimed last week that Indian diplomacy had moved into high gear with its “fast-track diplomacy”. The foreign ministry’s public diplomacy division has published a colorful booklet filled with photographic evidence of the government’s impressive global engagement in the past three months. 

“I’m here as an official representative of the state of Israel to say thank you to the Jewish National Fund for all the great work that they’ve done, and bring the message from Israel to the students,” Ido Aharoni said. Aharoni cultivated the concept of “nation branding” and founded the organization “Brand Israel,” a coalition of seven marketing and communication executives. The organizations aims to redirect the existing conversation about Israel.

Now a former US ambassador who has negotiated his way through some of the world’s most tense political moments says the current threat of the Islamic State is equally severe. “Today we are confronting some of the most difficult problems we’ve had in a long time. Some of them are amenable to some process of negotiation but unfortunately many are not,” Christopher Hill told news.com.au.

Turkey was the world’s third most generous country for the allocation of international aid in 2013, according to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report released on Sept. 11. The country provided $1.6 billion last year for international humanitarian assistance, while the U.S. spent $4.7 billion and Britain spent $1.8 billion. Japan spent $1.1 billion and Germany donated $949 million.