Canada and the United Kingdom have agreed to work together on 10 areas when it comes to sharing diplomatic missions abroad, according to a copy of the controversial memorandum of understanding signed by the two countries and obtained by Postmedia News on Monday.

It was an unprecedented opportunity to talk about the role of culture internationally, what cultural organisations have in common and what sets them apart. It was a chance to ask questions, share experience and find solutions.

Cultural diplomacy is not about whose army wins any more, said professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University to Will Gompertz on the Today programme this morning; it's whose story wins. He calls it "soft power" – the influence of information technology is now a powerful weapon of mass empathy.

The first weekend in August proved to be one huge celebration for the Caribbean country of Jamaica. While the success of Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce at the 2012 Olympic Games might have garnered most of the attention, the country was already firmly in the process of celebrating a rather more important milestone: fifty years of Jamaican independence.

Gastrodiplomacy is becoming a defined field of international communications and engagement in its own right, and my friend Paul Rockower has written a lot about this on his own blog (the links are on the left hand side of this page). Exploring China is not only a contribution to China's gastrodiplomacy, but also demonstrates Chinese soft power in action.

On August 15, at President Pranab Mukherjee's first official 'At Home' in Rashtrapati Bhavan's Mughal Gardens, the menu will remain drearily unchanged: samosas, idlis, sandwiches and tea-coffee. Contrast that with the White House, where food is an important tool of US public diplomacy, with everything from its executive chef to its kitchen garden and banquet menus carefully selected and promoted.

...the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games is estimated to have been watched live by more than 1 billion people. Therefore, for a few hours on the night of July 27th, Britain enjoyed a complete monopoly of television sets across the globe. Through its narrative in the opening ceremony it was able to highlight specific features of Britain and either introduce or remind the world of these.