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.

With liberalization of economies and privatisation in the Middle East, business consultancy agencies had a major role to play in bridging the East Vs West business cultural etiquette & practice conundrum. In the Middle East, there is a great variation in business culture not only from nation to nation but also within countries too. Partnerships are based on mutual trust and principles.

Conflicts are defined, in large part, by how they are fought and their technologies. The First World War we associate with gas and tanks and the earliest use of airpower; the Second World War with strategic bombing and the first use of nuclear weapons. Those technologies help define us as human beings, shape our experience and politics, mould our present fears. So what of the way our conflicts are being fought today?

The young man looked strange. In fact, as he climbed by mistake onto the Chinese table-tennis team’s bus at the world championships in Japan, in April 1971, he was one of the oddest creatures Zhuang Zedong had ever seen. His pinkish Western skin was framed by brown hair that curled to his shoulders. His goofy grin seemed fixed, naively and nervously, to his face. And when he turned round—for there were no seats, and he was standing facing a bus of crop-haired, staring Chinese—the letters on the back of his training suit read, large as life, “USA”.

If the games are successful – which they probably will be, despite Brazil’s reputation for having a very relaxed attitude to planning – they will help seal the country’s image globally as one of the world’s emerging powers. Not a military power, but the first big “soft” power, a kind of Canada writ large but with Carnival thrown in. It is a Brazil, however, whose project is only half-finished and one in which self-congratulation would be premature.