While Iran's weapons and financial aid to the Taliban often make headlines, Tehran's soft power efforts in Afghanistan at the expense of U.S. interests are largely overlooked. According to Davood Moradian, former senior policy advisor at Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry, Iran spends $100 million a year in Afghanistan on funding media, religious and cultural organizations.

Telling them Australia is jolly friendly to Asia, close to it, wants to be a part of it, has a nice safe lifestyle -- that's not enough. We should be hard-nosed about the career advantages to be gained from our courses: they all get that. But as for the soft power stuff, we should try harder to stay with the big players in that league.

Courtesy of Bruce Gregory, here is the latest update on resources that may be of general interest for teachers, students, and practitioners of public diplomacy and related courses and activities. Suggestions for future updates are welcome.

The University Student Arts and Cultural Exchange Performance will include vocal, instrumental and dance performances from a number of different minority cultural traditions in China...A tap dance will highlight the American dance tradition.

Scientific and technical knowledge is important in water negotiations, but not in the ways it has often been used. It is counterproductive to use scientific information to justify arbitrary (political) decisions...There is a difference between knowledge of water as an innate object and knowledge of water as a multifaceted resource.

“New media enriches the style of diplomatic language, enhances innovation in discourse and displays a close-to-the-people diplomatic manner. It is a manifestation of people-oriented diplomacy”, the micro blog’s operations director, Gong Yufeng, said at the Media Salon conference organized by Renmin.com last month.

Australia and the US have previously expressed concern at China resorting to chequebook diplomacy but Carr appeared to soften Canberra's stance in an interview with the Australian Financial Review. He urged the region to learn to live with Beijing "developing all the accoutrements of a major power".

And now that she’s plugging a new program co-sponsored by our nation’s travel and tourism industry and the U.S. government, I’ll just go ahead and say it right out: “I love the way Rosanne Carter sings “Land of Dreams,” both for the pure joy she conveys in her music and the power of the message contained in the song.