UK - Anti-aircraft missiles plundered during the Libyan revolution have become an unprecedented menace to aviation, experts fear. British military personnel are training foreign governments on how to prevent terrorists shooting down airliners with shoulder-launched missiles looted from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s stockpiles.
UK - Answer: ask the Department for International Development (Dfid), which has turned sensible spending plans on their head. How do you spend £3.7 billion in just eight weeks? In a Government supposedly wracked by austerity, this was the unusual problem faced by officials at the Department for International Development in 2013.
UK - Our aid should be tied to real progress on the ground towards economic and social freedom. Even Bono, the High Priest of the International Aid movement, agrees. It’s a depressingly familiar story, but no less shocking for its seeming inevitability. New analysis by the TaxPayers’ Alliance has demonstrated, yet again, that the term ‘foreign aid’ covers all manner of sins. This time, it’s the European Development Fund exposed as inefficient, wasteful, and opaque. The Fund is managed by the notoriously spendthrift EuropeAid and has – it is fair to say – not covered itself in glory.
FRANCE - Francois Hollande’s French administration has struggled to cope with a sluggish economy and uncertainty in the eurozone. During the recent shenanigans about Greece, it slipped out that the German government is increasingly worried about France’s public debt. With regards to the French who, according to George W Bush, are held back by their lack of a word for entrepreneur, we British are inclined to feel something that can only be described by a German word, namely schadenfreude.
GERMANY - Berlin is rushing to renew economic ties with Iran and to engage in reshaping the Middle East by dispatching its minister of the economy to Tehran. The nuclear agreement, signed last Tuesday with Tehran, offers German companies the opportunity to normalize their trade with Iran, which was once among the most lucrative in the Middle East, but had sharply declined due to sanctions.
EUROPE - In several western and southern European countries, the agreement on Greece reached in Brussels signals a looming collapse of the continental post-war order and Germany's revival as an ostentatious dictatorial power.
ISRAEL - The Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the rights of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site in all of Judaism and the third most holy site in Islam. Though the issue is a difficult one due to the controversial nature of the site, complete freedom of worship is guaranteed by the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the Israeli Knesset’s Basic Laws.
UK - As [Buckingham] Palace considers legal action over 'Hitler salute' photos, Channel 4 documentary is set to reopen a painful chapter of Duke's family history. Buckingham Palace was last night braced for new embarrassment as turmoil continued over leaked footage showing the Queen performing a Nazi salute as a child.
USA - Bill Federer recounts Winston Churchill's warnings about terror of Islam. Churchill returned to Britain and penned a two-volume work, “The (Nile) River War,” in which he wrote: “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! … The fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog … Insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live … A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.”
PARAGUAY - The latest call for a youth uprising against global capitalism came not from grassroots groups, but from the leader of the Catholic Church, who on Sunday gave a rousing speech during which he told a crowd of young people in Paraguay that it is their time to "make a mess."
USA - The FBI failed to stop another terror attack, this time in Chattanooga, and the pressure building on the bureau from President Obama’s reckless immigration policies may be reaching a boiling point, say security experts. And the problem goes far beyond a loose border, where some 400,000 illegal aliens enter each year. It’s also the ease with which someone from a hostile Middle Eastern country can get a visa.
USA - New York’s Empire State Building was lit in green late Friday to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. The green light will shine until the famous skyscraper closes to the public at 2:00 am (0600 GMT), when the building traditionally turns out its lights.
EUROPE - Anders Borg, Sweden's former finance minister, says eurozone crisis has created a climate where forcing countries to cede sovereignty could trigger a right-wing backlash across Europe.
USA - Retired US Army General and the former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for NATO Wesley Clark advocates rounding up “radicalized” and “disloyal” Americans and putting them in internment camps for the “duration” of the war on terror. “In World War II if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war,” Clark told MSNBC.
USA - Earlier this week, the Center for Medical Progress has released a video of Planned Parenthood’s top doctor, Deborah Nucatola, discussing their negotiations with a business called Stem Express that purchases aborted babies’ body parts for experimentation.