The Lo’Jo, a community of global citizens who play a special music of their own, will give performances in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi to mark 40 years of diplomatic ties between Vietnam and France.

Following the successful Joseph Calleja concert held last April, the Maltese Embassy in France will be organising 'Cine Malte: les possibilités d'une Ile' on 17 June. This event will be held at the beautiful 'Louxor - Palais de Cinéma', unique art déco hall, which has just recieved a major facelift by the City of Paris. This event will be among the very first to be organised at this location, which played an integral part in the Golden Age of Parisian cinema.

Abu Dhabi: Shaikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Foreign Minister, expressed his gratitude to France for supporting the UAE’s efforts to get exemption for UAE citizens from entry visas to Schengen nations.

So it's not that just by teaching in English you completely cut off French as a language. On the contrary, you get more people interested in France, more people interested in the ideas that French intellectuals have," he says. "They get passionate about the place. And so France carries on living in their imaginations when they've left France again." That, says Gumbel, is the very definition of soft power.

The French parliament is debating a new road map for French universities, which includes the proposal of allowing courses to be taught in English. For some, this amounts to a betrayal of the national language and, more specifically, of a particular way at looking at the world - for others it's just accepting the inevitable.

Battered by a French-led military campaign in Mali, al-Qaida's North African arm is trying something new to stay relevant: Twitter. The PR campaign by the terror network seeks to tap into social grievances and champion mainstream causes such as unemployment, all in a bid to reverse decline and win new followers.

The French and the Germans have a duty to shape a new European vision. Precisely because we are different, precisely because our histories and our cultures are sometimes so antagonistic, only we have the size and credibility to outline a new European compromise.

Around 160 events featuring French and Chinese cultural displays or performances will be staged across China during the near-three-month Sino-French cultural exchange festival, which opened here on Wednesday.