The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is embarking on agricultural projects in South Sudan. The Vice President of JICA in South Sudan, Mr. Watanabe Masato said this today while briefing the minister for Information and Broadcasting Hon Dr Barnaba Marial Benjamin on the expansion of their projects in the country.

By now, nearly everyone has heard of the BRICS. Less known are the CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey). These acronyms are the product of brilliant branding, but they tell us nothing about why these countries were chosen as the ones best built to last.

A group of eight Hollywood TV and film stars completed a week-long tour of Israel Sunday as guests of the Tourism Ministry and the Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Ministry. The group of actors was led by Rabbi Irwin Katsof, the director of America's Voices in Israel (AVI), which is part of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

In dealing with these areas of risk, and particularly Syria, Turkey has to take intelligent decisions, ones which reflect close knowledge of its own transformational power and capacity, without allowing itself to be taken in by the bluster. Although the Iraqi, Syrian and Kurdish problems have their divergences and particular features, they are interconnected and interlinked problems.

Where nations were once connected through emissaries and traders, they are now networked through millions of citizens by tools such as fibre optics... Information flows have become multidirectional with a multitude of media platforms that have mushroomed increasing direct communications, greater access to information, information sharing, and greater outreach.

Although all fall under the main theme of “The Living Ocean and Coast,” the international pavilions at the Expo 2012 Yeosu Korea are as diverse as the 104 participating countries themselves. Linked by a digital canopy displaying ocean scenes on a giant overhead LED screen, the international pavilions showcase nations’ oceans, coasts and the work they are doing to protect them.

SESAME actually stands for 'Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East' and will be the region's first major multi-country scientific research center. It's being developed under the auspices of UNESCO and is scheduled to open fully in Jordan in 2015.

If we do not highlight it often enough, cultural diplomacy promotes the creation of transnational social spaces of engagement and interaction. And, even as they are often identified with particular cultures or countries, cultural diplomatic interventions are also unavoidably cosmopolitan in nature, insofar as they move between, confront, and conjoin multiple social worlds. In this way and even when carried away by the worst excesses of national chauvinisms, cultural diplomacy is inherently a transnationalist project of sorts.