The 43rd Annual Washington Conference on the Americas will be held at the US State Department in Washington, DC, on coming Wednesday, the 8th of May. The event will be co-hosted by the US Department of State and the Council of the Americas.

World-renowned Guitarist Roberto Limon from Mexico will perform at St. John’s College Great Hall 60 College Avenue Annapolis on May 24, 2013, at 7 PM. Mr. Limon is widely recognized as a concert performer throughout the world. He performs regularly as soloist with numerous orchestras in both his own country of Mexico but throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, including the Czech National Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic, and the National Symphony Orchestra.

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Acting Chairman Joan Shigekawa recently announced thatglobalFEST (globalfest.org) is one of 817 nonprofit organizations nationwide recommended to receive an NEA Art Works grant. This is the first NEA grant to globalFEST and will support 11th edition of the organization's annual flagship festival in New York City in January, 2014.

According to a recently released report, India is among the top-10 most powerful countries in the world. This is a first-of-its-kind study of "national power" by leading strategic experts and scholars from the Foundation for National Security Research (FSNR) in New Delhi.

Like her predecessors, Ms. Park has made the U.S. her first overseas destination after taking office in order to bolster an alliance that goes back to the 1950-53 Korean War, when the countries fought together against invasion from North Korea.

Leading candidates assert that they will be responsible stewards, unlike the firebrand Ahmadinejad, who cannot run again because he is limited to two terms. One criticized Ahmadinejad for "controversial but useless" statements. Others even say the country should have a less hostile relationship with the United States.

This renewed effort starts with Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to Moscow this coming week for talks with leaders in Russia, the Syrian government's most powerful international friend.

A U.S. rights group warned this week that media repression is casting a chill over free speech in South Sudan, where a writer who was critical iof the government in Juba was killed several months ago. Senior Government Fellow at Human Rights First, Sonni Efron, said attacks on journalists, such as the unsolved killing in December last year of political commentator Isaiah Diing Abraham Chan Awuol, who frequently criticized the South Sudanese government in his writing, have a "chilling effect" on citizens' access to information.