Qatar-based Al Jazeera has not gained distribution on any major cable or satellite systems in the United States. On Monday, the channel will be carried in New York City for the first time, though only by subletting space from a channel owner...it is finding out that cable and satellite distributors wield an enormous amount of control over the channels that viewers in the United States can and cannot see.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is part think tank, part open-air forum, part community center. New York will be the first stop for the lab on a worldwide tour that will also include Berlin and Mumbai. In each city curators will invite leaders in fields including architecture, art, design, technology, education and science to participate in programs: lectures, workshops, games, performances and film screenings.

...Singapore is also investing in the soft power of maritime supremacy as much as the hard power of metal boxes. The city is becoming a centre of maritime architecture and green maritime technology to complement its lead in terms of the legal and financial aspects of maritime technology.

The term "soft power" refers to using warships for humanitarian purposes, such disaster relief, which had not been a Chinese capability . Now it has recently built a... hospital ship and... Landing Platform Dock helicopter landing ship — both of which deployed to Middle East nations in 2010.

The East-West Center is a Hawaii-based, federally supported institution, long a key part of U.S. outreach to the countries of the Asia and the Pacific and a fixture in Honolulu.

Tal Dror, the conference’s coordinator, said that though Israel’s public diplomacy is mostly directed at the media, the “real battle” takes place in the arena of international law. For this reason, Dror said, it is essential to educate international law students about the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For the past seven years, Canadian street artist Kaid Ashton has been traveling to some of the world's most dangerous slums documenting the people he meets with his camera. He then posts his work on walls around the cities he visits. Ashton's street art is not political. It is about crossing cultures and getting to know people in the process.

More recently, whilst in office from 2003 to 2010, former President Lula da Silva presided over an era of unprecedented political and economic engagement between Brazil and Africa. In that time Brazil has doubled its number of embassies on the continent to 34, tripled its exports to over $9.5bn in 2010 and quadrupled trade with Africa.