Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets EU leaders Monday but they will find it hard to bridge gaps on the migrant crisis and the Syrian war that has produced so many of the refugees they must both deal with, analysts say.

Russian air strikes in Syria have upped the ante in a conflict which has destabilized a region in which Ankara plays a pivotal role, with Turkey taking around two million refugees from Syria.

Since America's latest school carnage the debate on gun control has flared anew, as every time a mass shooting rocks the nation. The arguments are well-rehearsed, the rival positions seemingly irreconcilable.

President Barack Obama has led renewed calls for a comprehensive reform in the wake of the community college shooting in Oregon, but gun control advocates doubt the status quo will shift an inch.

A snapshot of developments since Russia's first air strikes on Syria, an intervention the West says is directed more at regime opponents than Islamic State group jihadists.

The Russian defense ministry says Moscow has sent more than 50 military aircraft as well as marines, paratroopers and special forces to Syria.

Moscow is revving up its publicity machine to sell the Kremlin's dramatic entry into the Syrian war to wary Russians who still harbor painful memories of the Soviet Union's disastrous venture into Afghanistan.

Russia on Wednesday waded into the hugely convoluted multi-front conflict in the Middle East, launching air strikes against what Moscow says are Islamic State militants in its Soviet-era ally Syria.

On paper, the war is over in South Sudan, after rivals signed a peace deal to end 21-months of violence that left tens of thousands killed.

But here in the swamps of Koch in the northern battleground state of Unity, the political deal means little in lands where fighting, rape and the burning of homes has not stopped, worsening hunger levels already bordering on famine.

Addressing an anti-austerity meeting on the fringes of the British Labor conference this week, a rabble-rousing MP led boisterous comrades in a chant of "the workers, united, will never be defeated".

In the past, this would have been an anachronistic curiosity, but the tub-thumping politician was John McDonnell, Britain's new shadow finance minister and darling of the hard-left.

Syria has already been shattered by more than four years of civil war, and with no solution in sight, some players on the ground and observers outside have concluded its fate will be to break up along sectarian or regional lines — in a best-case scenario, tenuously held together by a less centralized state.

A true partition would risk yet more mayhem, including ethnic or sectarian cleansing and battle over every bend in the border. But so spectacular is Syria's disaster that many wonder whether its disparate groups can share a unifying national sentiment again.

Syrian opposition forces say they will never accept President Bashar Assad's rule, after signs that Western powers may be willing to work with the embattled leader to end the war.

In recent weeks, long-time backers of Syria's uprising have suggested that Assad has a role to play in ending the four-year conflict, and could even stay on during a transitional period.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stolen the spotlight at the United Nations with a swaggering push on the Syria crisis as he tried to shake off Western isolation over Ukraine.

In his first speech to the UN General Assembly in a decade, Putin on Monday called for a broad UN-backed coalition to fight Islamic State (IS) jihadists before sitting down to talks he called "constructive, business-like and surprisingly open" with his U.S. rival Barack Obama.

President Bashar Assad has gone from pariah to potential partner, bolstered by his allies Russia and Iran in Syria's four-year war and Western concern about the jihadist threat, experts say.

In power for 15 years, Assad is virtually the sole survivor of the Arab uprisings that have unseated rulers across the Middle East and North Africa.