The day before returning to their respective homelands, Lara Tietz and Emma Gregersen came by The Tidewater News for a quick visit with their host, Welton Deshields of Franklin. [...] Lara, 17, lives in Kassel, Germany; Emma, 18, is from Thy, Denmark, and both said they’ve enjoyed their first visit to the United States of America. The Lions clubs in their localities helped in getting the two to travel stateside.

Student chefs from City of Glasgow College are preparing to defend their international cook-off title in a live head-to-head competition in America. [...] The college students triumphed over their American opponents in the inaugural Atlantic Cup cooking challenge, held during the launch of City of Glasgow College’s new £228m super college last year. The cook-off also saw the launch of an international student exchange programme.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is billed as the “first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste in design during the exhilarating years of the 1920s.” Rather than narrow the lens on this era of rapid cultural and technological change, this concentration on the post-World War I United States is a lively, international showcase of design.

Fourteen years ago, it was founded as a local coffee and bakery chain store in a Taiwanese night market. Today, a U.S. city mayor signed an official document creating a day in its honor. [...] Some local Taiwanese businesses saw this recognition as proof of how proactive the U.S. government had become in attracting investment." Others saw it as a more profound sign that a sector of Taiwan's soft power in the U.S. was on the rise.

The State Department is now quietly allowing dozens of young women and minority students to become full-fledged diplomats after threatening to rescind job offers that most of the students were given two years ago upon winning prestigious scholarships. The concession, issued without announcement on Thursday, came after an intense lobbying campaign by members of Congress and retired diplomats. They persuaded Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson to reverse his earlier decision to delay the students’ hiring into the Foreign Service indefinitely.

Anyone who has ever patched up a relationship with a bouquet knows the power of flowers. Without having to say "sorry," hurt feeling seem to float away like petals in a breeze. [...] In her handsome, 144-page hardcover book, Dowling explains how diplomatic messages can be conveyed through botanical metaphors.