The Russian police force has offered to send France a puppy to replace the dog killed during an anti-terrorist operation in Paris. It's a symbolic gesture perhaps indicating a shift in how Russia wants to interact with Europe.

The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group's media emir, and the site of that day's shoot.His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.

The much-maligned U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry and his highly media-literate deputy, Richard Stengel (a former editor of Time magazine), is re-embracing public diplomacy as a major weapon in the West’s arsenal by dramatizing such issues, as in the Cold War. Europe would do well to follow suit.  For in the long run, ideas must do much of the work.

 It took over 15 years of both hard and soft power from the international community to eventually sort out the situation on the ground in Bosnia. [...] Unfortunately, solving the problems in Syria will take at least that long given the underlying Sunni-Shiite conflict overlaid by the atrocities of the past five years.

India has been placed as the globe's seventh most valued 'nation brand' in 2015, moving up one notch from eighth position in 2014. With an increase of 32 per cent in its brand value to USD 2.137 billion (from USD 1.621 in 2014), , according to Brand Finance, which brought out its annual report on the world's most valuable nation brands in October 2015.

Frédéric Ramel, a professor of international relations at Sciences Po in Paris, said Russia uses the Red Army Choir to engage in cultural diplomacy and to make foreigners appreciate its culture and its sense of nationalism.