Thus far the proponents of military intervention have done a poor job of explaining how this course of action would secure these twin goals. For instance, the most popular option seems to be establishing a no-fly zone in northern Syria. However, the Assad regime still has formidable missile and ground forces and it’s unclear if grounding its aircraft would have a decisive military impact.

Sri Lanka’s eastern town of Pullumalai saw the opening of a new public market and a bus station recently, which has been built with the funding support of USAID. The US Embassy in Colombo said, the US$ 477,000 facility (Rs. 60 million) will help enhance transportation and livelihood opportunities for the people living in the Eastern province.

Culture Secretary Maria Miller today launched a tourism partnership strategy for Britain which calls for the travel industry and the government, together with key public and private sector bodies, to unite behind a long-term ambition for growth that would see Britain welcome 40 million overseas visitors by 2020, spending £31.5 billion and supporting an additional 200,000 jobs across the country.

China has committed $75bn (£48bn) on aid and development projects in Africa in the past decade, according to research which reveals the scale of what some have called Beijing's escalating soft power "charm offensive" to secure political and economic clout on the continent.

In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the Yale Russian Chorus came to Moscow to break the ice between the Soviet Union and the United States. Fast forward 50 years and Americans and Russians are once again using music to defrost the chill between their two countries.

A 1969 Logansport High School graduate has recently returned to her Blackford County home as the first non-Chinese artist to exhibit work in the prominent LiRen Gallery in Anshan, China. A retired elementary and middle school art teacher, Leslie Newton is currently the staff visual artist and curator of Arts Place in Portland. Throughout her career in the Jay School Corp., she was involved in the educational exchange program that sent herself, other teachers and students to China.

In an Annie Hall moment at Foreign Policy, the inventor of the term “soft power” explains the shortcomings of Chinese and Russian efforts to cultivate it. “China and Russia make the mistake of thinking that government is the main instrument of soft power. In today’s world, information is not scarce but attention is, and attention depends on credibility.”

The financial crisis altered the very nature of the international balance of power. Five years later, the presumption is that the crisis is in the rearview mirror -- and that the volatility that shook markets and felled governments is behind us too. But we've entered a new order that's vastly more uncertain than what preceded it.