“We shouldn’t be afraid to speak out, to say what we believe in. There are enough people who support us and they want to hear it from us. We shouldn’t be apologetic all the time. We should be strong and right, and that’s the message we’re sending from the Knesset.”

Art films and dance recitals no doubt do their bit to further cultural understanding, but a comic can, with one fell swoop and a calibrated punch-line, unite a contrastive crowd in laughter like nothing else can. The U.S. State Department has brought to India a stand-up act that will resolve any residual doubts about the south Asian immigrant experience.

For all its efforts to enhance the soft power, China has had a limited return on its investment. The development of soft power need not be a zero sum game. All countries can gain from finding attraction in one anothers’ cultures. But for China to succeed, it will need to unleash the talents of its civil society. Unfortunately, that does not seem about to happen soon.

Israel has changed its attitude toward the Diaspora and is more interested in a relationship of equals than it was before. Speaking at the Women’s International Zionist Organization’s Enlarged General Meeting, the Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister boasted that the government not only accepts donations from Jews living abroad but also invests in them.

The use of cultural diplomacy in addressing global risks remains largely underutilized. In many ways, the application of cultural diplomacy practices can complement the other, more traditional ways of increasing security (military measures or increased access to intelligence), by means of exposing and challenging destructive ideologies.

An online film festival titled "Weeks of Chinese Cinema" was launched in St Kliment Ohridski university on Monday. According to the Chinese Ambassador to Bulgaria, the goal of the project was to use cinema and the internet to open a window to Chinese culture and create a better understanding of contemporary China.

The new Washington operation will be a hub of CCTV's global news-gathering operations to compete with international broadcasters such as CNN, the BBC and al-Jazeera. To use news reporting and cultural programming, China aims to advance its “soft power,” or cultural influence, making it commensurate with the nation’s growing economic might.

Russian speakers/readers of the language might be struck by the number of negative comments to the Ambassador's YouTube performance, which suggests that Russian anti-Americanism is indeed a factor to consider in the two countries' relations -- and that, on a more mundane level, Russians use the Internet as a way of "letting off steam."