The World Cup offers something of a free kick for soccer diplomacy, which some observers say U.S. President Barack Obama is failing to capitalize on.  While many nations, from Germany to Russia, are sending their leaders to Brazil to make a diplomatic appearance, Obama is staying home.

In today's times, China has adopted soft power in a different sense. It is concerned to couch its rise to global power in non-threatening tones. Not wanting, like Germany and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to threaten the existing world order and provoke a world war, it wishes to present its rise as harmonious.

China and Russia are fighting a heated war with the United States. It is an intense battle of words and ideas fought between state-sponsored broadcasters, on the airwaves and online. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said straightforwardly that the U.S. is “engaged in an information war.” She concluded her analysis to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by saying that in the fight against emerging international broadcasters, “we are losing that war.”

Foreign education is both a vital 'export' service that earns sizable revenue, and a powerful connector between countries and peoples. Then why are education facilities for foreign students treated as a neglected orphan in India? 

Joseph W. Westphal, ambassador of the United States to Saudi Arabia, met Higher Education Minister Khaled Al-Anqari on Thursday to discuss strengthening of educational relations between the US and Saudi Arabia.

Since March, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided training to 60 engineers from Jamshoro, Guddu and Muzaffargarh thermal power plants. The training enhanced the engineers’ technical skills and introduced them to industry best practices to improve the operation, maintenance, and management of power plants.

U.S. foreign policy is failing.  Russia is pushing into Ukraine and threatening Eastern Europe; China is bullying Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the East and South China seas; and terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa are displaced from one place, only to multiply and create more lethal threats in others.

Why is Japan so off-the-wall in insisting on waving the bloody shirt in front of the world public by slaughtering whales and dolphins in the most inhumane manner possible and then defending the bloodshed with bogus claims? Japan's outrageous actions in supporting the carnage are truly breath-taking.