A U.S. rights group warned this week that media repression is casting a chill over free speech in South Sudan, where a writer who was critical iof the government in Juba was killed several months ago. Senior Government Fellow at Human Rights First, Sonni Efron, said attacks on journalists, such as the unsolved killing in December last year of political commentator Isaiah Diing Abraham Chan Awuol, who frequently criticized the South Sudanese government in his writing, have a "chilling effect" on citizens' access to information.

After helping coordinate the American civilian aid efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, Mark Ward arrived in Turkey last year to oversee the Obama administration's effort to provide non-lethal assistance to Syria's rebels. Unwilling to provide arms, Washington hoped to strengthen the Syrian Opposition Coalition. Led by moderates, the group was seen as a potential counterweight to jihadists.

Forget panda diplomacy. China has added a new weapon to its soft-power arsenal — home-grown luxury cars. On Friday, Beijing donated 20 Chinese-made Hongqi, or Red Flag, sedans worth around $2.3 million, to the Pacific nation of Fiji.

As the most prodigious in the world, the Indian film industry produces some 1,200 feature films annually, more than double the number produced by Hollywood. "We make such a number of films that it's impossible to keep all," says India's most respected archivist P. K. Nair.

China is a big country with a variety of well-developed regional cuisines that are generally considered delicious. And while we know there are many things China doesn't do well, soft power-wise, the one area where it could be said to have some soft power at its disposal is food. Chinese restaurants can more or less be found anywhere Chinese people can be found, which is many, many places.

A White House plan to modernize the major U.S. food aid program, by donating cash rather than American-grown food, is in trouble after fierce lobbying by farm groups, food processors, shippers and others who set out to sink the idea months before it was unveiled in President Barack Obama's fiscal 2014 budget...It would be the biggest change since the Food for Peace program was created in a mixture of Cold War "soft" diplomacy.

Accusing the US of trying to impose "cultural colonialism" by unleashing its soft power to undermine China's political system, a top Chinese General today sought to counter western "cultural infiltration". "Western cultural infiltration techniques are very clever in their deception and hidden nature. This 'cultural colonialism' is like 'slowly boiling a frog': the young generation can easily lose its will to resist without knowing."

China and Russia, two of the world's pre-eminent authoritarian states, just don't get soft power. That, at least, is what Joseph Nye claims in a new commentary in Foreign Policy... China also has successes. What other state, I ask, has turned Asian authoritarianism and state-run capitalism into political brands that appeal to non-democratic states and rulers the world over? You can argue it undermines democratic governance, but you can't say they have not been effective - and kind of soft.