Should public servants consider cultural impact when developing policies? Julianne Schultz says cultural policy has been undervalued, but combating Australia’s cultural deficit has been stymied by equating culture with arts, and arts defined quite narrowly as the non-commercial sector. It’s time to think much more seriously about culture. For years we have bought the Clinton truism, “it’s the economy, stupid”, but this simple binary no longer provides sufficient guidance for the future.

Egypt needs reforms to reassure Russian investors, success of Cairo-Moscow negotiations requires seriousness to establish new era of relations, experts say. Egyptian economic experts and investors expect the pace of Russian investments in Egypt to increase in the next period, coinciding with deepening communications and trade relations between the two parties.

Remember the pivot to Asia? The big signature move of first-term Obama foreign policy? Some called it a “strategic rebalancing.” We were going to reset our priorities, put the conflicts of the Middle East behind us, and devote big efforts to creating and implementing a strategy to deal with the vital strategic moves America needed to make to account for the rise of the world’s fastest-growing region.

In December 2014, workers broke ground on the Nicaragua Grand Canal, a planned 175-mile-long canal through Nicaragua. Three times the  length of the Panama Canal, engineers say Nicaragua’s canal could eventually serve 5 percent of the world’s cargo traffic. Proponents of the canal argue that it will bring much-needed jobs and commerce to the country. However, critics charge that few details of the deal have been made public and say that the environmental and social costs of constructing the canal could be catastrophic.

France has gone so far in the debate over .wine and .vin as to demand an overhaul of how ICANN is structured and run. TheFinancial Times reported over the weekend that Paris planned to call for an international "general assembly" to oversee ICANN with a "one country, one vote" policy at a meeting on Monday. The French have also said that proceeding with the domain names could "imperil" talks on a transatlantic trade deal between the EU and the U.S.