The UK and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) have signed a new Memorandum of Understanding to help boost business opportunities and create jobs for thousands of women across the Middle East and North Africa.

The BBC has warned the government that its global news presence will end up marginalised by overseas rivals such as Russia Today and al-Jazeera unless multimillion-pound cuts are reversed.

Muslims and Jews living in the same North London neighbourhood are making a stand together against hate crime amid concerns of an increased threat to both communities in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

SolarAid's parent company has teamed up with East African Solar to form Solarcentury in East Africa, a venture to design and build installations in the area.

A team of analysts at King’s College in London is building an exhaustive database of western Islamic State fighters – through Twitter and Facebook.

Shakespeare is booming in China. But translating the Bard’s greatest works isn’t as clear as a summer’s day.(...) Already a phenomenon in China, William Shakespeare — known locally as Shashibiya or even Old Man Sha — is about to get a major boost. In September, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced an initiative to translate the Complete Works, all 37 plays and 154 sonnets, from Elizabethan English into modern standard Mandarin, the world’s most-spoken mother tongue.

So much World Service discussion habitually worries about cuts to inherited structures, but here was a bracing counter-blast: never mind soft power; now let’s make all the hard choices that help us, not Whitehall.

Universities are now a "crucial" part of the UK's "soft power" in projecting international influence, says former foreign secretary William Hague.  Their recruitment of overseas students "enriches and strengthens our universities and our future economy and our influence in the world", he said.