Russia and the United States agreed on Monday to look for a diplomatic end to the Syrian civil war but clashed over the central question of whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should retain power.

During a 90-minute meeting, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed that their armed forces should hold talks to avoid coming into conflict in Syria after a Russian military buildup there over the last several weeks.

The United States, France and allied countries are bombing Islamic State militants, who have exploited power vacuums to seize parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq as part of a stated goal of creating an Islamic caliphate.

The reinforcement of the Russian military presence in the country, including the addition of tanks and warplanes, has brought fears of inadvertent or accidental clashes among the forces as well as U.S. questions about Moscow's main goal.

Speaking after his meeting with Obama, Putin told reporters Russia was pondering what more it could do to support Syrian government and Kurdish forces against Islamic State militants.

"We are mulling over what we would really do extra in order to support those who are in the battlefield, resisting and fighting with terrorists, ISIS (Islamic State) first of all," Putin said, ruling out deploying Russian ground troops.

"There is (an) opportunity to work on joint problems together," Putin said of his talks with Obama, which a U.S. official described as "businesslike."

A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters after the meeting: "The Russians certainly understood the importance of there being a political resolution to the conflict in Syria, and there being a process that pursues a political resolution."

U.S.-Russian ties have been deeply strained by Moscow's March 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and its support of pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country.

Earlier in the day, relations between the two leaders appeared frosty - they clinked glasses at a lunch, but Obama had a piercing look as Putin smiled - and they laid out starkly differing positions toward Assad in their addresses before the annual United Nations General Assembly gathering of world leaders.

Obama said he was willing to cooperate with Russia and Iran to try to end the four-year civil war in Syria, in which at least 200,000 people have died and millions have been driven from their homes. But he described Assad as its chief culprit.

In contrast, Putin said there was no alternative to cooperating with Assad's military to fight Islamic State militants, and called for the creation of a broader international anti-terrorist coalition. This appeal may compete with the coalition that the United States has assembled to fight Islamic State.

"The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict," Obama, who spoke before Putin, told the world body. "But we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo."

Obama did not explicitly call for Assad's ouster, and he suggested there could be a "managed transition" away from the Syrian president's rule, the latest sign that despite U.S. animus toward Assad it was willing to see him stay for some period of time.

Obama dismissed the argument that authoritarianism was the only way to combat groups such as Islamic State, saying: "In accordance with this logic, we should support tyrants like Bashar al-Assad, who drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children, because the alternative is surely worse."

Putin differed, suggesting there was no option but to work with Assad, a longtime ally of Russia. "We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces who are valiantly fighting terrorism face-to-face," Putin said in his speech.

"We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and (Kurdish) militia are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria," he said.

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Here are five things to know about the Russian economy:

1. Economic misery

Russia's economy will shrink by 3.4% this year, and by a further 1% next year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Ordinary Russians are feeling the pain. Prices have shot up by nearly 16% in the year to August, official data show, and around 22 million Russians are now living in poverty.

Falling real wages and high interest rates have hit domestic demand.

"Credit conditions in Russia have tightened substantially over the past six months or so, with households and small businesses being particularly hard hit," Liza Ermolenko, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a recent research note. "We don't expect a significant turnaround anytime soon," she added.

2. Low oil prices

Oil is Russia's biggest earner. Around 70% of its exports are energy-related, and 50% of government revenue comes directly from the oil sector.

Oil has dropped from well above $100 per barrel last summer to around $45 per barrel.

Analysts estimate Russia loses $2 billion for every dollar fall in the global oil price.

The low oil prices are also dragging down the ruble, which has dropped by nearly 20% against the dollar since July.

3. Sanctions pain

Western countries have slapped Russia with tough economic sanctions over Moscow's role in the crisis in Ukraine. The embargo has left Russian companies unable to raise money in Europe, blocked arms trade, and restricted access to oil drilling technology.

Russia has introduced a retaliatory ban on imports of food and agricultural products from the West.

"It's a shock to the confidence of the population, and the confidence of foreign investors, and therefore the investment for the economy," said Ernesto Ramirez Rigo, IMF mission chief for Russia, earlier this month.

The value of imports to Russia dropped by 39% in the first eight months of the year, while exports are down 30%.

4. No new friends

Moscow turned to China last year after being hit with sanctions by the West. But the plan for a deeper economic relationship is not working out.

China's slowdown is making it harder for Beijing to deliver on promises it made to Moscow, and Chinese investors are spooked by Russia's deep economic crisis. Bilateral trade has dropped by a third in 2015, and Chinese investment into Russia is down 25%.

5. It's not just oil and sanctions

Low oil and sanctions are hitting Russia hard, but the country has many other economic problems.

The IMF says Russia needs to get serious about deep economic reforms if it wants to return to growth. The country's aging population is starting to be unable to pay its welfare bills, and a large amount of bureaucratic red tape and corruption is hurting domestic investment and productivity, the IMF said.

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Separatists on Sunday won a clear majority of seats in Catalonia's parliament in an election that sets the region on a collision course with Spain's central government over independence.

"Catalans have voted yes to independence," acting regional government head Artur Mas told supporters, with secessionist parties securing 72 out of 135 seats in the powerful region of 7.5 million people that includes Barcelona.

The strong pro-independence showing dealt a blow to Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, three months before a national election. His center-right government, which has opposed attempts to hold a referendum on secession, has called the separatist plan "a nonsense" and vowed to block it in court.

Spain's constitution does not allow any region to break away, so the prospect remains highly hypothetical.

The main secessionist group "Junts pel Si" (Together for Yes) won 62 seats, while the smaller leftist CUP party got another 10, according to official results. They jointly obtained 47.8 percent of the vote in a record turnout of 78 percent, a big boost to an independence campaign that has been losing support over the last two years.

Both had said before the vote that such a result would allow them to unilaterally declare independence within 18 months, under a plan that would see the new Catalan authorities approving their own constitution and building institutions like an army, central bank and judicial system.

Addressing supporters of Junts pel Si in central Barcelona, Mas said a "democratic mandate" now existed to move forward with independence.

The vote in Catalonia, Spain's second-most populous region, is widely expected to influence the course of the Spanish general election in December.

Spain's two dominant parties - the ruling People's Party and the opposition Socialists - lost tens of thousands of votes compared with the last election in 2012, boding ill for their national ambitions, although the PP suffered a much deeper setback than its rival.

"Many have voted for Junts pel Si even if they don't favor secession because they saw the vote as a blank cartridge... and a way to gain a stronger position ahead of a negotiation," said Jose Pablo Ferrandiz from polling firm Metroscopia.

Opinion polls show a majority of Catalans would like to remain within Spain if the region were offered a more favorable tax regime and laws that better protect language and culture.

While investors do not see secession as an immediate material risk, financial markets may react negatively on Monday. The gap between Spanish five-year bond yields and the higher yields on the Catalan equivalents has been hovering near its widest point in two years in the run-up to the vote.

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German prosecutors launched an investigation on Monday into former Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) boss Martin Winterkorn over the rigging of vehicle emissions tests, as the carmaker suspended three top engineers in an attempt to tackle the crisis.

The investigation into Winterkorn, who quit on Wednesday after almost nine years at the helm of Europe's largest carmaker, is into "allegations of fraud in the sale of cars with manipulated emissions data," the prosecutor's office said.

Volkswagen, which has admitted to cheating diesel emissions tests in the United States, is under huge pressure to get to grips with the biggest business scandal in its 78-year history.

It named company veteran Matthias Mueller on Friday as chief executive and agreed to appoint a U.S. law firm to conduct a full investigation.

Sources familiar with the matter said on Monday it had also suspended the heads of research and development at its core VW brand, luxury division Audi and sports car maker Porsche.

But the crisis shows no sign of dying down.

Two German newspapers said on Sunday Volkswagen's own staff and one of its suppliers had warned years ago about the illegal use of so-called "defeat devices" to detect when a car was being tested and alter the running of its diesel engine to conceal their emissions of toxic nitrogen oxides.

Environmental campaign group Transport & Environment (T&E) published new data on Monday showing that some new Mercedes, BMW and Peugeot cars use 50 percent more fuel than laboratory tests show, saying this was evidence of a wider industry problem.

T&E, which works closely with the European Commission, said its data did not prove other firms were using defeat devices. But it said the gap between lab results and road performance had grown to such an extent for emissions of both carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides that further investigation was needed to discover what carmakers were doing to mask emissions.

"The Volkswagen scandal was just the tip of the iceberg," said Greg Archer, clean vehicles manager at T&E, adding the gap between lab tests and real-world performance cost a typical driver 450 euros ($504) per year.

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This weekend, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley. Google, Facebook, and Tesla were among those jostling for the Asian premier's attention, and a bevy of new announcements have followed — underscoring the growing importance of the Indian market to the American tech titans.

Of course, there have been efforts underway to tap into India's 1.25-billion-plus citizens (and other developing economies) by tech companies for years now. One of the most high-profile is Internet.org, a cross-company initiative led by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. It aims to bring cheap internet to emerging markets.

The reasoning behind this push is obvious: Every new internet user is a new potential customer. Connecting the unconnected is "not all altruism," Zuckerberg said over the weekend (in relation to project to bring internet to refugee camps). "We all benefit when we are more connected." 

Modi's visit to California this weekend comes hot on the heels of a trip by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. But relationships between American companies and China can be strained by the latter's authoritarian policies — Google does not current operate in mainland China.

In contrast, the New York Times reported, Modi "was on a charm offensive during his own American tour." At a town hall event held with Facebook, the Prime Minister teared up as he discussed his mother. Zuckerberg also shared details of his own spiritual journey to India at the urging of Steve Jobs.

While in Silicon Valley, he also visited the offices of Google and attended a dinner with the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and 350 other business leaders. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, visited Modi at his hotel, Reuters reports.

We're now seeing a bevy of announcements from tech companies attempting to capitalize of this visit. Google, for example, says it will install Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across the country. More ambitiously, Microsoft plans to bring cheap broadband internet to 500,000 villages across the country.

There are still hurdles to overcome, however — Along with basic connectivity, the language barrier being a key one.

Only one in six Indians knows enough English to surf the web in the language. But there are few web pages in Hindi or India’s 21 other official languages. “There are more web pages in Estonian than in Hindi,” Mr. Menon said.

Still, India has vast potential — an untapped well of hundreds of millions of new internet users. American tech companies are taking note.

"(India) has moved on from scriptures to satellites," Modi said this weekend, according to Reuters. "The world has started to believe that the twenty-first century belongs to India."

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Pope Francis goes to the United Nations on Friday to address global leaders on the need to help refugees fleeing wars and plea for greater attention to the world's poor and downtrodden.

The pope arrived in New York on Thursday night from Washington after urging Congress to help heal many of the nation's divisive wounds such as the current heated political battle over immigration.

A brass band from a Catholic high school greeted his plane with the classic tune "New York, New York," and the pope accepted flowers from the crowd of about 200 at the airport.

Apart from addressing the General Assembly, he will also lead an inter-religious prayer service at the site where al Qaeda militants brought down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.

He will also visit a Catholic elementary school in Harlem whose students are mostly immigrants or refugees, parade through Central Park, and say Mass in New York's famed Madison Square Garden.

Two years into his papacy, Francis has won the admiration of many in the United States, with liberals captivated by his focus on meeting the needs of the poor and addressing the excesses of capitalism, while some conservatives have expressed dismay that he has given less emphasis to the Roman Catholic Church's longstanding opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

The 78-year-old leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics offered a hint of the issues he would address at the UN's 70th anniversary in a wide-ranging speech to Congress on Thursday.

"Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion," Francis said. "Our world is facing a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Second World War. This presents us with great challenges and many hard decisions."

Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing years of fighting in the Middle East have attempted to cross into Europe this year, raising tensions within the European Union as member states argue about their obligations to harbor newcomers.

The pope early this month called on every European parish to take in a refugee family, a move that could provide shelter for tens of thousands of families.

The pope's arrival in New York on Thursday resulted in a heavier security presence throughout midtown Manhattan at a time when police are normally out in force for the United Nations General Assembly, which brings dozens of world leaders to the city.

The New York Police Department warned that it expected to set up some 37 miles (60 km) of barriers along roadways during Francis' visit. He is the third pope to visit New York City in the last 20 years.

The city's transit agency urged commuters not to drive into Manhattan on Friday and one company advertised $95 cross-town helicopter rides for people hoping to escape the resulting gridlock.

Juanita Jara, a 58-year-old nanny, said she would be among the crowd at the Madison Square Garden Mass and that she hoped Francis would continue his message of support for immigrants a day after he urged Congress to avoid an attitude of "hostility" to newcomers.

"I am a citizen, but a lot of people suffer separation from the family. I, for a long time, suffered that," said Jara, who emigrated from Paraguay a quarter-century ago. "I hope he pushes that."

The pope is also expected to repeat his plea for governments to take action to stem climate change, a call he made most prominently in "Laudato Si" the first papal encyclical dedicated to the environment, which was published in July.

That document has proven controversial in U.S. politics. Republicans, who in recent decades have embraced popes for their public opposition to abortion and gay marriage, criticizing the paper.

The pope will conclude his U.S. visit on Sunday with an open-air Mass in Philadelphia for 1.5 million people.

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Can Volkswagen survive the diesel emissions cheating scandal? Probably. Will its stock ever get back to where it was before? That's another story.

Shares of Volkswagen have plunged nearly 30% since the news of the automaker's Clean Air Act violations first surfaced last Friday. The stock is now more than 50% below the 52-week high that it hit in March.

The departure of CEO Martin Winterkorn on Wednesday is helping VW in the short-term. The stock has rebounded from the 52-week low it hit Tuesday. But one brand reputation expert said that VW has to act quickly to find new leadership.

"This is a mess. The CEO's resignation makes it more of a mess because it's a rudderless ship," said Richard Torrenzano, CEO of the Torrenzano Group, a firm specializing in crisis management for corporations.

It's important to remember that Volkswagen was already in trouble before the term "defeat device" started trending on Google and social media.

There was tension brewing between former VW chairman Ferdinand Piech and Winterkorn ealier this year. (Piech resigned in April.)

Excitement about VW's China business has also quickly turned into apprehension. VW car sales in China helped it surpass Toyota (TM) to become the biggest automaker in terms of global auto sales in the first half of the year.

But China is now the financial equivalent of one of George Carlin's dirty words. China's stock market mess and economic slowdown started to take its toll on the stock over the summer.

So what now? It's hard to imagine how VW can quickly recover. On Wednesday, credit ratings agency Fitch warned that it may downgrade Volkwsagen's debt due to the scandal.

Fitch said its biggest concerns were the "reputational damage" to the VW brand, a likely hit to the company's profits and that the company's corporate governance is weaker than its main rivals.

It's also unclear just how much the emissions scandal will cost VW. The potential of 11 million vehicles worldwide will be ridiculously expensive. And the lawsuits against VW are predictably starting to pile up.

JPMorgan analyst Jose Asumendi downgraded VW's stock to neutral on Tuesday. He warned in his report that it's possible VW's liabilities associated with the scandal could be as high as 40 billion euro ($45 billion) -- although he noted that's the most pessimistic forecast.

Still, a quick look at some other companies that have had to deal with big scandals (including two other major automakers) in the past few years shows that it's possible to rebound. It will just take some time.

GM's (GM) stock is still below the level it was trading at last February before it issued its first recall tied to faulty ignition switches -- although shares have been highly volatile in the past few months along with the broader market.

The stock peaked at $39 this March -- which is actually 20% above where it was trading before GM's recall problems began. So you could argue that GM has recovered from the worst of that scandal already.

Toyota's stock tumbled shortly after it started recalling cars in November 2009 due to a problem with unintended acceleration from sticky gas pedals. But shares were back at pre-November 2009 levels by early 2011 .

And it's worth noting that people actually died because of the problems in GM and Toyota vehicles. VW's scandal essentially amounts to trying to get one over on regulators. There are no safety concerns as of yet with its diesel engines.

Other scandal stocks outside of the auto industry have bounced back too. There were a lot of people who thought BP (BP) would never recover after the Deepwater explosion in the Gulf Of Mexico that killed 11 workers and led to a massive oil spill.

But BP eventually climbed back to its pre-Deepwater levels by June 2014. Of course, oil prices have since collapsed. And so has BP's stock again.

Finally, Goldman Sachs (GS) only needed a few months to recover from the hit its stock took in April 2010 after the SEC accused it of fraud for how it sold and marketed supbrime mortgage securities.

So VW is not necessarily doomed. But it needs to act swiftly and decisively. GM CEO Mary Barra, for example, has won praise for taking responsibility early on in last year's recall crisis. VW needs a new leader to do the same.

"How can VW polish themselves off and move on? It's not a simple matter," Torrenzano said. "They need a strategy to move through this carefully. It's a matter of credibility. Cheating is a terrible sin."

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this happens once in a... maybe never - Facebook is down 

It's on — again.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said Wednesday he won’t be appearing on Fox News Channel any more because the “fair and balanced” network isn’t fair and balanced with him.

“@FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future,” Trump tweeted.

The bombastic billionaire, who for weeks blasted the network for its treatment of him during the first GOP debate in August before agreeing to a truce, has in recent days escalated the feud.

On Tuesday evening, Trump again took aim at Megyn Kelly, the Fox anchor who moderated the first GOP debate and questioned him about his treatment of women.

“Do you ever notice that lightweight @megynkelly constantly goes after me but when I hit back it is totally sexist. She is highly overrated!” he tweeted.

Fox and Trump have been on shaky ground since the Aug. 6 debate, when Kelly asked the mogul pointed questions about his personal insults against women.

Afterward, Trump said Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever,” during the debate, a meanspirited barb that many assumed was a reference to her menstrual cycle.

Later Wednesday, Trump, who has been blasted for his disparaging remarks about minorities, touted his popularity among black voters.

Speaking at a black business conference in South Carolina, Trump cited a poll from SurveyUSA that showed him getting 25% of the black vote against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

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IBM is adding new smarts to its Watson artificial intelligence system, including the ability to scour photos on social networks to see what you've been up to.

Watson began life as a hardware system built to win the TV quiz show Jeopardy, but it’s evolved into more than a dozen cloud services that developers can use to add cognitive capabilities to applications.

IBM says there are now more than 100 commercial applications making use of Watson, and at an event in San Francisco Thursday it's showing off new computing services to encourage more developers to get on board.

The services are offered in the form of APIs (application programming interfaces) that are accessed via IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform. Companies that use them in commercial applications pay IBM a share of revenue, while businesses that use them internally pay by the number of API calls they make.

The new services include Visual Insights, which analyzes images and videos posted to services like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, then looks for patterns and trends in what people have been posting.

The stock might fluctuate a lot today due to the news.

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