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This is the first time a reigning Saudi monarch has been to Russia. The two countries have announced a billion-dollar joint investment fund, the construction of a Russian petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia and a deal to buy Russian air defence system. We ask, is the US being side-lined?

Addiction to prescription painkillers kills an estimated 50,000 people in the United States each year. Now the Health Committee of the US Senate has been examining progress on tackling the problem scale of the problem. The overuse of opioids is taking a huge toll on the economy as well, as we hear from Dr Anupam Jena, a health economist at Harvard Medical School.

The campaign group Human Rights Watch is calling for intensified international sanctions against senior military figures in Myanmar. Their Asia Advocacy Director John Sifton has just returned from Myanmar. We ask him whether the displacement of Rohingya Muslims from Rakine State has stopped.

(Photo: Russian President Vladimir Putinmeets with Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the Kremlin in Moscow on October 5, 2017. Credit: ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP/Getty Images)

All this and more discussed with our two guests throughout the show. Anu Partanen, a Finnish journalist and author of The Nordic Theory of Everything, in New York. And Sushma Ramachandran, former Business Editor of The Hindu in Delhi.