Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe will today kick off his three-day state visit to Turkey with the aim of strengthening economic and commercial relations with that country. The South African delegation will engage their Turkish counterparts during a business forum to be held on Tuesday, where Motlanthe will also use this opportunity to invite Turkish companies to invest in South Africa.

Beijing China and the US agreed to expand their students exchange programme to facilitate one lakh American students to study in this country and increase the number of Chinese doing research in the US over the next four years.

President Obama took some time Monday out of his busy schedule to shoot some hoops with 22 Russian kids who are in town to fulfill the cultural part of his "reset" in U.S.-Russia relations. The Russian youth spending 11 days in Washington as part of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission's Education, Culture, Sports, and Media Working Group, one of the many such working groups set up by the two sides last year.

The most wide-ranging dialogue in the history of modern U.S.-China relations ended with some accord on contentious issues of currency and trade, but underlined a fundamental shift in the relationship between Washington and a newly assertive Beijing.

People in both Israel and Azerbaijan are far from understanding how our peoples live - they are unaware of the culture, political views and history of our countries. And this is despite the fact that large numbers of immigrants arrived in Israel from Azerbaijan. In this situation, the mutual exchange of delegations, media workers and promoters of culture, of course, can play an important role in improving relations between our peoples.

India and Turkmenistan today agreed to cooperate with each other in dealing with the scourge of global terrorism and called for the early conclusion of the Compehensive Convention on International Framework within the United Nations framework.

Has the long insipid Malaysia-Singapore relations already reached the tipping point? Or is the stage already set for the two neighbouring countries to take their relationships to greater heights, establishing better ties, greater economic cooperation, and renewing business collaboration?