As the biennial Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit is to kick off here Thursday afternoon, closer Asia-Europe connectivity, practical cooperation and coordination on global issues are expected to garner world attention.

Over the next two days, Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to meet with an array of European leaders, including his Ukrainian counterpart, in the most intense period of diplomacy between the Kremlin and Western capitals in months. 

A Chinese drugmaker with close military ties is seeking fast-track approval for a drug that it says can cure Ebola, as China joins the race to help treat a deadly outbreak of a disease that has spread from Africa to the United States and Europe.

Finance and development ministers from around the world next week will warn of considerable downside risks to the global economy, and call for an effort to protect the world's poor, according to the draft of a communique they plan to issue after a meeting on Saturday.

Opinion polls conducted by the Israeli foreign ministry in France, Germany and Britain indicate that residents of these countries hold Israel and Hamas responsible in equal measure for the death toll in Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli website Ynet reported.

In the US, where rules on the disclosure are stricter, technology groups report far higher spending on lobbying. Google, for example, spent $8.85m in the first half of 2014 alone in the US – nearly four times what it said it spent lobbying the EU for the whole of 2013. Google declined to comment on this article. But its efforts in Europe are part of its “soft power” approach towards influencing policy makers.

According to the Kremlin, Putin has had 35 phone calls with German Chancellor Angela Merkel so far this year - more than three times the number of calls he has had with President Barack Obama, and six times the number of phone conversations he’s had with UK PM David Cameron. Both Putin’s close neighbours, Nazarbayev and Lukashenko, had more phone time with the Russian president than Cameron.