Psy, the K-pop sensation and king of YouTube views, achieved an uncommon level of success in the West. While he may be the best example of an Asian pop singer breaking through the so-called “bamboo ceiling,” Asian artists face an uphill struggle attracting support from English-speaking fans.

This Thursday (23.01), after meeting with the FIFA President Joseph Blatter, at the organisation’s headquarters in Zurich (Switzerland), President Dilma Rousseff stated that Brazil is ready to stage the “World Cup of World Cups”. During the meeting, interventions against racism and discrimination were discussed, as well as actions aimed at promoting peace and female football.

January 23, 2014

It wasn't a reassuring moment. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, compared recent tensions between China and Japan to the rivalry between the British and German empires at the start of the 20th century.

I first got a glimpse of Hawaiian public diplomacy a few years ago at the Taipei Flora Expo in 2011. Following a stint in Taiwan as a Visiting Fellow at a thinktank researching Taiwanese public diplomacy, I stopped in the Expo, which featured different countries exhibiting and showcasing their unique flora.

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.

A double suicide car bombing at the Bab al-Hawa border post between Syria and Turkey on Monday killed at least 16 people, including six rebels, a monitoring group said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, updating an earlier toll, said 20 people were wounded as one car detonated at a checkpoint just outside the crossing and another inside the post.

Under the guise of improving laws against trafficking, states around the country are pushing policies that raise penalties for patronizing prostitution. This January, Human Trafficking Awareness Month, it’s time we faced the facts that these efforts will ultimately fail to protect trafficking victims. First, let’s consider the complex definition of human trafficking. Human trafficking is a scheme where a perpetrator compels another to work against her will through force, fraud or coercion.

Protesters clashed with riot police in the Ukrainian capital on Sunday after tough anti-protest legislation, which the political opposition says paves the way for a police state, was rushed through parliament last week. A group of young masked demonstrators attacked a cordon of police with sticks and tried to overturn a bus blocking their way to the parliament building after opposition politicians called on people to disregard the new legislation.

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