Kuwait Embassy in Canada and the country's National Council of Culture, Art and Letters (NCCAL) have launched Kuwait Cultural Days in Ottawa, marking 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation with the aim of promoting cultural exchange.

An effort to inform potential asylum-seekers that crossing the border is no free ride to a new Canadian life appears to be working as their numbers continue to rapidly dwindle – but the start of the school year is also playing a role. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is monitoring the reception of asylum seekers at the most popular irregular crossing south of Montreal, says the number of processed claims has plunged to 10-50 on recent days from a peak of several hundred daily arrivals earlier in the summer.

Female panda Er Shun and her mate, Da Mao got a celebrity greeting from politicians and media at the Toronto airport upon their arrival in Canada. [...] Pandas, an endangered species native to China, are carefully meted out by Beijing to reward its foreign allies, and their arrival was hailed at the time as a sign of thawing relations between Beijing and Ottawa.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has returned to Ottawa after a much-hyped first stint at the World Economic Forum's annual summit in Davos, Switzerland, where he enjoyed a star-like reception. [...] We wanted to hear what you thought: What does all this buzz mean at home in Canada?

Ottawa is putting more money into a project aimed at communicating directly with Iranian citizens as it looks to apply a similar strategy in other countries including Russia and parts of Iraq and Syria.