Australia will launch a new initiative to attract more visitors from China, as tourists from the U.S. and Japan stay put in the face of uncertain economies and the strong Aussie dollar. The campaign will focus on collecting research on China's emerging middle class and its main cities.

U.S. companies' game of catch-up shows the perils of waking up late to the next big frontier market, Africa. The continent's economy is forecast to grow to $2.6 trillion in 2020. While most U.S. companies focused on Asia and Latin America, China was leapfrogging America in Africa.

Economic resources can produce soft-power behavior as well as hard military power. A successful economic model not only finances the military resources needed for the exercise of hard power, but it can also attract others to emulate its example.

There are an estimated 6000 languages in active use across the world. However, half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that half of all languages spoken today will go extinct within the next 50 to 150 years. Approximately 60 to 80 per cent of all languages are endangered.

France and the United States have long been engaged in a friendly war for global prestige and pre-eminence -- especially in the technological and cultural spheres. It is not entirely irrelevant to situate this latest French obstacle to American technological and cultural influence within the longstanding animosity between France and the U.S. in these spheres.

Agreement was extended for the next 5 years to continue Voice of America’s (VoA) programs to be broadcasted via the channel of the Radio Television of Afghanistan (RTA) at a function attended by Afghan minister of information and culture, Dr. Sayed Makhdoom

While media attention typically focuses on the hard power role of the US military in the Pacific, the US Navy also invests significant time and energy in the soft power potential of humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in the region