Earlier this month, a group of Japanese officials came to Glendale, Calif., with an unusual demand: They wanted the city to take down a public monument in the park next to its public library. The bronze statue of a girl in traditional South Korean dress seated next to an empty chair is a memorial to the 70,000 to 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Dutch “comfort women” — a euphemism for sex slaves — conscripted into Japanese military brothels during World War II.

A new Asian diplomatic row broke out on Monday after China unveiled a memorial to a Korean national hero who assassinated a Japanese official a century ago - with Tokyo condemning him as a “terrorist”. In 1909, Ahn Jung-geun shot and killed Hirobumi Ito, Japan’s first prime minister and its top official in Japanese-occupied Korea, at the railway station in the northeast Chinese city of Harbin.

De Gaulle and Free France’s use of public diplomacy to rally a down-yet-not-out France remains a stirring example of how a semi-official national movement can project legitimacy and rally support for its cause. Through leaflets, communiqués, and international broadcasting efforts, as well as by projecting the trappings of authority, Free France was able to use public diplomacy to rally support domestically and throughout the areas of the French territory worldwide still under contest, as well as to supporters in Britain and the United States.

“They were remarks made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. But since then we have welcomed in the 21st century. I want to make a declaration for the Abe Cabinet that is appropriate for the 21st century, one that is oriented toward the future.”

Thus did Prime Minister Shinzo Abe put forth his stance on 1995′s so-called Murayama Danwa (Murayama Remarks) — which he is evidently set on fundamentally altering — in an interview published in the conservative Sankei Shimbun daily newspaper on Dec. 31, 2012.

A recent journey to Auschwitz with some 200 leaders from across the Muslim and Arab world, with 10 of the camp’s survivors, was remarkable, making it clear that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not speaking in the name of all Muslims when he made perverse declared the Holocaust a “myth.”

I recently came across an article found in PDiN (Public Diplomacy in the News) with the headline “Public Diplomacy Done Right with School Meals” by writer William Lambers, author of Ending World Hunger: School Lunches for Kids Around the World. The article argues that the U.S. should look back to a successful era of U.S.

Donna Chmara was only 10 weeks old when German soldiers burned down her village in eastern Poland. Her family was deported to Germany like many other Polish families were, and after the end of World War II, they spent the next five years in refugee camps rather than return to a Soviet-controlled homeland.