Obama "seems to be a passive figure at a time when the world needs a leader." Obama and his advisers should pay heed to this quietly devastating observation. Even if they're right about where Obama is positioned politically, they have to worry whether all the concessions and maneuvering undercut a president's most important asset: an earned image of strength rooted in principle.

Even as ASEAN prepares to declare itself as a community in 2015...Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on ASEAN to look beyond 2015. A sense of ownership has been missing among the people that ASEAN represents. The Indonesian president encouraged more interactions so that people from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds are more connected.

Watching the wife of the US vice-president touring the world's biggest refugee camp for famine-hit Somalis was a scrum of television cameramen, international reporters and Washington staffers thumbing their BlackBerrys. US officials privately agreed that the main thrust of the visit was to get the story onto American television channels, which have been slower to report on the crisis than in other countries.

As the riots in London continued for a third night on Monday, Egyptian bloggers, watching events unfold on live television, debated the meaning of the violent confrontations between young people and the police, which reminded some of them of their own pitched battles on the streets of Cairo a few months ago.

Scores of Russian-speaking youth from Israel, North America and the former Soviet Union have gathered in Israel for a two-week international summer camp organized by the Jewish Agency and the Genesis Foundation. “Our primary objective, first and foremost, is to create a meeting point for Russian-speaking Jews from abroad with Russian-speaking youth in Israel,” said Rina Gerber.

It's the economy that will increasingly set the limits on commitments Western powers are willing to make abroad, whether in the form of military intervention or even of aid. And, on the flip side, it will be economic pain that will increasingly serve as the main driver of rebellion and political instability across the global spectrum.

Popular Japanese culture has often baffled the western world. But now local authorities are taking lessons from Japan on how to use popular culture, regional history and local produce to promote regions across the country. The Japan Local Government Centre, which boasts an office in central London, is working to share the lessons of Japanese local authority projects with their counterparts in the UK.

When Gabriela Shalev arrived at the United Nations in 2008 as Israel's first female ambassador, she was determined to launch a diplomatic offensive to improve her country's international standing. Now Shalev, who stepped down in October ...warns that Israel's image is about to take another hit with a Palestinian initiative to win statehood recognition from the U.N. next month.