Mike Tabor and Esther Siegel have had a tough time settling back into their lives in Fulton County after visiting rural villages in Tanzania.

"It was like visiting another planet," Tabor said. "I just feel bad for the people."

Tabor and Siegel aren't missionaries. The married couple operates an organic farm near Needmore and their customers live in the Washington, D.C., area.

They volunteered for a two-week visit to farm villages at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro as part of the Farmer to Farmer program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The news that Lyudmila Alekseyeva, head of the Russian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) the Moscow-Helsinki Group, will be returning to the Presidential Council for Human Rights, has been heralded by many in the liberal establishment in Russia as a victory for their cause.

DOHA, June 1 (Reuters) - "It will blow over" tends to be Qatar's unofficial response to criticism of its World Cup bid, but with a FIFA corruption scandal exploding onto the world's front pages, the Gulf state has glumly realised it may have a real fight on its hands. Super-rich Qatar would suffer no economic pain if it lost the right to host the world's top soccer event. At stake is influence, including its use of sport as a platform to operate on the global stage, opening doors to finance, media, diplomacy, property and tourism.

Should public servants consider cultural impact when developing policies? Julianne Schultz says cultural policy has been undervalued, but combating Australia’s cultural deficit has been stymied by equating culture with arts, and arts defined quite narrowly as the non-commercial sector. It’s time to think much more seriously about culture. For years we have bought the Clinton truism, “it’s the economy, stupid”, but this simple binary no longer provides sufficient guidance for the future.

Soccer is truly the world’s sport. It is played and watched by more people across the globe than any other sport.

Every four years, it is the center of global attention when the World Cup is held. It’s as if the World Series and Super Bowl were rolled into one mega-sporting event with viewership in the hundreds of millions.

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs will give $15m to programmes this fiscal year covering Japanese politics and foreign policy in the US, in an effort to enhance Japan’s ‘soft power’ in the country. Georgetown University, Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be among the institutions selected to receive the funding, which will be mainly aimed at programmes in the areas of modern and contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy.

On June 21, the world will observe International Day of Yoga for the first time ever. A United Nations resolution to this effect that India moved in the General Assembly last year was co-sponsored by an unprecedented 170 countries.