Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year's annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service...They were asked to rate 16 countries and the European Union on whether their influence in the world was "mainly positive" or "mainly negative".Germany came out top with 59% rating it positively. Iran was once again the most negatively viewed.

The Japanese government’s failure to provide tuition-wavers for students attending pro-North Korean schools inside Japan “constitutes discrimination,” a UN committee has said in a new report.

Nearly 40 European national associations have sent UEFA Pro license student coaches to the House of European Football in Nyon to take part in UEFA's coach education exchange programme and gain invaluable knowledge about what awaits them in future careers, UEFA official web page said.

The house has held exhibitions of work by the students of Prague's Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, as well as students of the Prague British School. The Václav Havel Library held a two-day international seminar on the grounds during which participants discussed philosophical issues connected with the concept of human rights in today's "post-European" world.

Prof. Wilfried Lulei, a German researcher of Vietnam Studies, highlighted the significance of the event, saying it will help strengthen the bilateral friendship and mutual understanding about the cultural traditions and customs of each country.

Food aid is a hot topic in the world of foreign policy these days. Though the U.S. Government’s Food for Peace program is housed in America’s international development agency, food aid is public diplomacy.

Looking back over 50 years of the Union, 'cultural diplomacy' has a greater chance of creating understanding between peoples than what I will call for the purposes of this article, 'conventional diplomacy'. As such, over the next 50 years, we should throw down the challenge to the AU to put cultural diplomacy at the top of its agenda.

The French parliament is debating a new road map for French universities, which includes the proposal of allowing courses to be taught in English. For some, this amounts to a betrayal of the national language and, more specifically, of a particular way at looking at the world - for others it's just accepting the inevitable.