Slovenia’s International Centre for Promotion of Enterprises and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s Finance Think have been appointed by their Governments to join the Virtual Institute’s global network of 82 academic institutions, expanding Virtual Institute think tank membership to 11 research centres from seven countries.

The Grand Opening festivities commenced with a greeting from Sweden’s Minister for Culture, Ms. Lena Adelsohn Liljerot: “Sweden has experience with migration in both directions. Between 1890 and 1920, 1.3 million Swedes immigrated to North America. Swedish landing in 1638 and the great transatlantic partnership between Sweden and the U.S. are among events to be celebrated throughout 2013 as a part of our Globalization theme.”

Once upon a time migrants left their old countries and severed ties with their homelands, but today with cheaper and more frequent travel and communication that facilitates and defines what we have come to know as globalisation, migrants maintain ties with the countries they came from.

A controversial exhibition of modern American art that was shut down by the U.S. government in the late 1940s has been reassembled for a new, two-year national tour. “Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy” opens Saturday at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.

As “The Gatekeepers” director Dror Moreh is fond of saying, the power of his Oscar-nominated documentary derives not only from what the subjects of the film have to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but from who is delivering those words.

You could, of course, sit back, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive Sri Lanka's foreign policy, public diplomacy and strategic communication are these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it; using professorial language or plain road-side rhetoric which doesn't make much of a difference.

Few Australians are aware that Indian contingents fought alongside the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli that is so central to the founding myth of Australian (and New Zealand) identity. As cricket legend Rahul Dravid noted in the 2011 Bradman Oration at the Australian War Memorial, appropriately enough, 1,300 Indian soldiers lost their lives at Gallipoli. Indians fought alongside Australians also in “El Alamein, North Africa, in the Syria-Lebanon campaign, in Burma, in the battle for Singapore” during the Second World War.

Is the United States finally — after fifty years of constant disappointment — on the verge of blasting open the Japanese market? The Washington Post seems to think so. Under the headline, “Japan’s economic turmoil may provide an opening for the U.S.,” the Post’s Tokyo correspondent Howard Schneider recently commented that Japan was being propelled toward free-trade negotiations with the United States.