The pontifical council for the promotion of the new evangelisation represents a significant benchmark to measure the Vatican's capability to regain some influence in what was once "its" Europe...It has to fight against what the Vatican perceives as "the supremacy of the fragments": a cultural approach which tends to isolate and disperse western societies, and by consequence also Catholics: a sort of "grassroots relativism".

APDS Blogger: Di Wu

Beijing invests a lot of diplomatic and public-relations effort in persuading the world that China's "peaceful rise" is nothing to fear. This is especially true in Africa...Libya's recent turmoil represents a missed opportunity for Beijing to have shown its readiness to shoulder the responsibilities of a great power.

About 750 foreign students from 73 countries received scholarships from the Indonesian government to study Indonesian culture, arts and language at universities across the country...the program, launched in 1974, was among Indonesia's cultural diplomacy programs aimed at promoting Indonesian cultures to the rest of the world.

Written long before the emergence of the Taliban, "The Wandering Falcon" moves far beyond the Western media's stereotypical depiction of the tribal areas and lays bare the nature of a place that is now a focal point of U.S. and European foreign policy.

The four-day tour...was dogged by controversy and protest. Demonstrations in central Berlin were a reminder that among Germany's 24.6 million-strong Catholic community a sense of shock and betrayal lingers from last year's revelation of hundreds of cases of sexual and physical abuse of children by German priests and church employees.

Alarmed by the sense of mistrust of Muslims she felt after the 9/11 attacks 10 years ago, Pakistani-American Samina Sundas started American Muslim Voice. The organization, which now has chapters across the United States, works to build bridges across religious and cultural divides, in meeting rooms and at dinner tables.

Paris plans to build a new Islamic center to address two issues, a dearth of mosques for the city's sizable Muslim community and a new law banning street prayers. In the interim, Muslims been invited to worship in an unusual venue - an old fire station at the edge of the city.