Strapped for cash, the US State Department is increasingly reaching out to private companies to help fund programs that bring Middle Eastern visitors to the US, seek to counter negative impressions of the US and promote economic development in the region.

Apart from the comments by U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland on the third consecutive day Wednesday, 16 January responding to Sri Lanka's removal of her chief justice, the State Department official web portal on its lead page gave an unusual highlight to Sri Lanka which it never gave before: 'US Aid to Sri Lanka'.

The program, a public-private partnership established by John F. Kennedy in 1963, has been sending artists and their works to U.S. missions across the globe as part of an initiative to foster U.S. public diplomacy through art.

The government is set to approve plans for a "soft power" campaign ordered by President Vladimir Putin last July to improve Russia's image abroad, a news report said Wednesday. The official plan for the project covers 2013-2015 and involves a range of cultural initiatives and events for humanitarian cooperation, Kommersant reported, citing a copy of the plan.

In our hyper-connected world, the world has become a geospatial pinball machine, ringing and pinging with security, economic and cultural connections and implications for all of us; and that ball never stops coming around. So it is very much in our interests to engage fully, energetically, and creatively. There is no more urgent region for such U.S. engagement than the Middle East and North Africa.

Vice President Hamid Ansari has announced here that India plans to open a cultural centre in the Vietnamese capital this year to promote interchange of ideas and greater interaction between the people of the two nations. “We wish to bring together the exchange of ideas and culture, with a contemporary face, to our ancient bonds of friendship. To facilitate these ties and promote people-to people contacts, we plan to open the Indian cultural centre in Hanoi this year.”

Students of the Excelsior High School in Kingston yesterday engaged their peers from the Samuel W Shaw School in Calgary, Canada, in a friendly debate on ethical food... The debate took place via a live videoconferencing link connecting students of both schools. The schools are part of an exciting cultural exchange programme with students in Canada as a result of an International School Twinning Initiative (ISTI) spearheaded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Bringing students together from across the globe, the 12th edition of International Children's Festival of Performing Arts (ICFPC) was initiated at Ryan International School, Ludhiana, on Tuesday. As a part of the Russian cultural exchange programme, around 18 students from Russia came to India under the theme "One World of Children" and participated in a month-long festival.