Soft power, a concept conceived by Havard University Professor Joseph Nye, is the ability to attract, convince and include others through persuasion rather than force or other means. Football has a special place in South Africa as the sport of the everyman. While cricket and rugby are two sports still dominated by the country's white community, football was the game that took deep root within the black majority.

The oldest Chinatown in the world is not in New York or San Francisco or even Yokohama. It is in Manila, a fact that comes up often when Beijing talks about its longstanding connection to the islands that lie about 600 miles to the southeast. Similarly, China boasts of its three Confucius Institutes in the Philippines where Filipinos can learn Mandarin and appreciate the many facets of Chinese culture.

China’s Communist Party has branched out into the development of online games in a bid to inculcate its ideology upon the nation’s young people.

ndia Brand Equity Foundation (http://www.ibef.org), whose immediate focus is the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos with its India Adda - akin to a cafe, is responsible for promoting the Made in India label both domestically and overseas. Working closely with the Ministry of Commerce, IBEF lends branding and marketing support for creating greater awareness of the number of success stories germinating and blooming in India.

The decision to declassify documents with access to the Malvinas veterans was agreed following a request from the Argentine embassy in Montevideo on petition from Cesar Gonzalez Trejo who was president of the Malvinas Veterans Federation.The embassy in Montevideo said in a release that the Malvinas veteran had requested ‘support’ to have access to the Falklands/Malvinas war documents in Montevideo for which he also asked for a scanner and a lap top.

It may be that the process is so unruffled that many people won't notice, but the woman who has presided over a major shift in United States foreign policy — Hillary Clinton — has left her job. Not only has she left her position as US secretary of state, she has also left with a stunning personal approval rating of 69%.

The White House-appointed board overseeing government-funded broadcasts to 100 countries is a dysfunctional mess beset by “acute internal dissension” revolving around a longtime friend of former President George W. Bush, according to a new inspector general’s report obtained by the Daily News.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's trip to Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia underscores that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) remains the cornerstone of Japan's Asian diplomacy. Before cutting his trip short to deal with the kidnapping of Japanese nationals in Algeria, Abe commented, "Open seas are public assets and Japan will do utmost to protect them by cooperating with ASEAN. China's economic rise is definitely a plus for Japan but it is important for China to act responsibly as part of international society."