Piracy, the scourge of Hollywood, may have become one of America's powerful diplomatic tools – is it the new propaganda? [...] "The last thing they think is that it [pirated movies] represents a tool of cultural diplomacy, involving a foreign culture or government, and that its illegality could even make this mainstream fare more alluring than originally planned.”

North Korea on Saturday rejected the idea of resuming talks to end its nuclear program, saying previous such attempts ended in failure, and reiterated its demand that the US come to the table to negotiate a peace treaty.

The stability of the world is directly linked to climate change and its impact on food security for billions of people, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday. 

The economic development agencies of Paris and New York City have launched a trans-Atlantic business exchange program intended to provide emerging companies in both cities with access to opportunities internationally. The NYC-Paris Business Exchange will help tech, clean tech, fashion and design, tourism, food and beverage, and arts companies overcome barriers that inhibit entry to foreign markets, with the goal of allowing these local companies to grow and Parisian companies to expand within New York City.

With migration tearing at the EU’s cohesion, politicians are linking foreign policy to strategic interests rather than democracy and human rights. Will 2015 be seen as the year that the European diplomacy got realpolitik? With migration tearing at the cohesion of the European Union, more politicians have started to see the bloc’s foreign policy as a way to secure Europe’s strategic interests, shifting away from the EU’s traditional focus on democracy and human rights.

Homeland […] has been subject to much criticism for its depictions of its Arab and Muslim characters. When, last summer, a group of Arab artists in Berlin were contacted by Homeland set designers to help make one of their sets […] look more authentic with Arabic anti-regime graffiti, they agree—but they splayed the walls with anti-Homeland graffiti instead, attempting, they said to “subvert” the show’s message.

The U.S. Peace Corps last year saw its applications reach a 40-year high in response to an initiative to revitalize the overseas service organization. About 23,000 Americans volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps in fiscal 2015, a 32 percent increase from the year before [...] With an annual budget of $379 million, the Peace Corps allows volunteers to serve two-year appointments overseas [...] 

Members of the Twitterati might be useful in spreading a new kind of American diplomacy abroad. "We need to use soft power in hard places," says one of America's top diplomats, and social media is just the way to apply it. [...] He's (Undersecretary Stengel) looking to the country's artists, musicians, athletes and citizens abroad to be the engines of discourse, amplified and distributed through the power of the Internet, mobile phones and social networks.