Educators Overseas (EO), one of North America's premier international teacher recruiting companies, is expanding its commitment to fostering international cultural exchanges and opportunities to interact with other civilizations.EO has partnered with the Shenzhen Institute of Continuing Education and China's Shenzhen Ministry of Education, to sponsor an exciting new cultural immersion program for U.S. high school students to study in China for just 4 weeks.

With Xi Jinping's election as the new president, China has equalled the United States in a crucial area of soft power. For the first time, China will deploy its first lady, who happens to be a famous folk singer, to charm the world and build bridges.

China is now the world’s second-largest economy and the only plausible challenger to the US as dominant global superpower. So it is hard to disagree when David Shambaugh asserts that the country’s rise is “the big story of our era”. And yet, oddly enough, Professor Shambaugh’s China Goes Global is dedicated to proving that the rise of China is not such a big story, after all.

The U.N.-backed Alliance of Civilizations will strengthen its role through mediation and fostering of cultural understanding through sports, arts and music, the head of the initiative, which gives priority to defusing tensions between Western and Islamic worlds. “The Alliance can become a major soft power tool to diffuse tensions and conflicts, especially those which are ethnically or identity based,” the High-Representative for the Alliance, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York on Thursday, while outlining his priorities for this year.

Looking for an alternative perspective on world news on your FM dial? If you live in Chicago or Washington, DC you can now tune in the Russian government’s Voice of Russia service, which began broadcasting English language programming at the beginning of March on the HD2 channel of WTOP-FM in DC, a news-talk station, and WILV-FM in Chicago, which airs the adult hits format.

The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) said on Friday it is closely monitoring interference to its radio signals into China. It follows a statement by the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) last week that worldwide broadcasts into China were being, quote, "deliberately interfered with by the jamming of a number of frequencies". This included programs from Australia’s ABC, the UK’s BBC World Service and Voice of America in the US.

President Xi, who has said achieving the "great revival of the Chinese nation" is the goal of his administration, is expected to pursue wealth- and military-building policies over his two five-year terms, aiming to transform China into a superpower on par with the United States. Backed by a strong military, China has been striving to become a "great maritime power." It is quite clear that the country will continue its hard-line stance against Japan, Vietnam, and other neighbors in the East and South China seas.

Coming less than a week before Mr. Obama departs for his first trip as president to Israel, the comments Thursday set the stage for an airing of the two timelines for any eventual military action against Iran’s nuclear installations that separate the White House from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.