Netanyahu continued on to say, "We are partners with the Egyptians, and many other states in the Middle East and the world, in our battle against radical Islamic terrorism. This terrorism is directed by two different entities - Iran, and the radical Shiites, and ISIS and the radical Sunnis, as well as factions like Hamas."

In a meeting with Ambassadors at the foreign ministry Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his sympathies for those lost in attacks Wednesday. "We send our condolences to the Egyptian Government, the Egyptian people, and the families of those massacred by this gruesome terror," he said. Egyptian security and military officials said on Wednesday that Islamic militants staged simultaneous attacks, including a suicide car bombing, on army checkpoints in northern Sinai, killing at least 70 soldiers.

The video statement, issued from an Islamic State stronghold in Syria, was a rare public challenge to Hamas, which has been cracking down on jihadis in Gaza who oppose its truces with Israel and reconciliation with the US-backed rival Palestinian faction Fatah.

"We will uproot the state of the Jews (Israel) and you and Fatah, and all of the secularists are nothing and you will be over-run by our creeping multitudes," said a masked Islamic State member in the message addressed to the "tyrants of Hamas".

"The rule of sharia (Islamic law) will be implemented in Gaza, in spite of you. We swear that what is happening in the Levant today, and in particular the Yarmouk camp, will happen in Gaza," he said, referring to Islamic State advances in Syria, including in a Damascus district founded by Palestinian refugees.

The Vatican published the itinerary Tuesday for the eagerly awaited September 19-28 visit. Francis added the Cuba leg onto the start of his US trip after helping contribute to the historic thaw in US-Cuba relations. In Cuba, he'll celebrate Mass in Revolution Square in Havana - as both of his immediate predecessors did during their trips to the Caribbean island nation. He'll travel to Holguin and pray before the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, the patron of Cuba, and meet with Cuban families in the eastern city of Santiago.

Francis arrives in Washington DC, on September 22 and the next day will be welcomed at the White House by President Barack Obama. He will address Congress on September 24, and will meet with homeless people later in the day at a local parish, St Patrick's. On September 25, Francis will speak on sustainable development at the United Nations, where he'll have another opportunity to voice his concerns about the environment.

Republicans in the US Congress, and even some Republican US presidential candidates, have largely shrugged off Francis' denunciation of the current global economic system in which he says wealthy countries exploit the poor and pollute the Earth in the process. Nevertheless, US House Speaker John Boehner said lawmakers were welcoming the unprecedented papal address to Congress "with open ears and hearts."

Francis will host an interfaith gathering at Ground Zero in New York and meet with children and immigrant families in Harlem. Unlike his predecessors, Francis has no meeting planned with the Jewish community, though US church officials said Jewish representatives would participate in the interfaith event.

The trade ministers of Australia, Andrew Robb, and China, GAO Hucheng, signed the treaty in Canberra. Beijing has called it the most liberal it has negotiated. Robb emphasized that the agreement will open the Chinese market to Australian investment in primary sector products and services. The agreement will allow 85% of Australian exports to enter the Chinese market free of duties, a figure that will increase to 95% once it has been fully implemented. So far, Australian products pay import rates of up to 40%. Australia, meanwhile, removed the 5% duty on Chinese electronics and appliances.

“This landmark agreement will bolster our current business relationship with our largest partner, and will be a catalyst for future growth through goods, services and investment,” said Robb. Australian Prime Minister. Tony Abbott said that with this agreement, along with others recently signed with Japan and South Korea, 95 percent of Australian exports will soon be free of tariffs. “This is a single and historic day for our two countries. It changes our country for the better, our region will change for the better, our world will change for the better,” Abbott said after the signing.

He said initial conclusions indicate that human error was to blame, rather than a problem with the robot, which can be programmed to perform various tasks in the assembly process. He said it normally operates within a confined area at the plant, grabbing auto parts and manipulating them.

Another contractor was present when the incident occurred, but wasn’t harmed, Hillwig said. He declined to give any more details about the case, citing an ongoing investigation. German news agency dpa reported that prosecutors were considering whether to bring charges, and if so, against whom.

Greece’s decision to call a shock referendum on July 5 on the Eurogroup’s aid package, which could potentially decide its future in the single currency, prompted a sell-off across global markets. It came as ratings agency Standard & Poor’s last night lowered Greece’s long-term credit rating to 'CCC-’, saying the chances of Greece exiting the eurozone now stand at 50 percent. They believe the decision to hold a referendum serves to highlight Alexis Tspiras’ priorities of “domestic politics” rather than focusing his efforts on financial and economic stability, commercial debt payments and eurozone membership.

European bourses were equally bruised by the continued Greek saga yesterday, experiencing their biggest one-day fall since 2011. The German DAX slumped 3.6 percent, and in France the CAC joined the downward trajectory, edging 3.7 percent lower. Amid yesterday’s chaos, Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Commission president, said “egotism” on Greece’s part had resulted in their current situation. Alas, he remained insistent the eurozone would not become a broken family.

“I will never let the Greek people go down. Never. Greece is a member of the European family and I want this family to stand together,” Mr Juncker said. He also voiced his concern about how well informed the Greek people are about the proposed reforms, ahead of Sunday’s shock referendum. “It would be advisable for the Greek government to tell the truth to the Greek people instead of simplifying the message,” Mr Juncker added.

Before the circulation of the preliminary report of the Greek Parliament’s Truth Committee on Public Debt in June 2015, it was globally assumed that Greece’s debt was the result of lavish public expenditures and living ‘beyond one’s means’. The Committee dispelled this myth and demonstrated how the debt had really been accumulated. It was found that Greece’s public debt had remained more or less the same from 1993 to 2009. In fact, two-thirds of the debt’s rise is attributable to interest payments alone (simple and compound).

In June 2008, Greek public debt was about 252 billion Euros, which amounted to a debt to GDP ratio of 112 per cent, which is considered sustainable, especially for a developed economy in the eurozone. If this is coupled with a decent credit rating, particularly where a state pays its monthly debt arrears in time and is considered creditworthy, the interest charged for its borrowing will remain comparatively low.

However, what was less noticeable was that between 2000 and 2009 there was a sharp rise in private debt. This private debt-to-GDP ratio reached its peak at 129 per cent in 2009. Hence, Greek and European private banks found themselves exposed to almost 100 billion euros worth of private debt. Quite clearly, this was not a debt incurred by the state, for which it was liable. When private debts are not repaid there is a loss of capital for the lending institution. If the bank is not re-capitalised it is not only that its depositors risk losing their deposits, in addition to its own bankruptcy, but since banks lend among themselves, its other lenders are equally exposed to its losses.

It is at this point that the kleptocracy kicks in. As the Committee pointed out in its preliminary report, in their effort to avoid the bankruptcy of those private banks which managed to accumulate a private debt of 100 billion euros through irresponsible lending, the governments of France, Germany and Greece conspired to falsify the Greek budget of 2009 so that the country’s deficit can appear far larger than it really was. Why? Because in this manner Greece could be forced out of international lending markets and thus go under fiscal supervision by the IMF.

The sole intention belying the Greek so-called ‘bail-out’ program was to save several private banks in Europe. In this scheme, fundamental human rights, played no role whatsoever. It is not unsurprising, therefore, that under the weight of this evidence, the Truth Committee on the Public Debt found this part of Greece’s debt to be odious, illegal and illegitimate. It is telling that the representative of Greece to the IMF during 2010-12 under (public) questioning from the Committee stated that the IMF held training seminars for Greek journalists so that they could hide the truth and avoid anyone revealing the true extent of the fraud in favour of the banks!

The Committee emphasised that all private debt transformed into public, along with attendant interest was either odious or illegal. Moreover, all loans provided by multilateral and bilateral creditors from 2010 until early 2015 did not raise an obligation for repayment because they provided no benefit to the Greek state and its people (with 93 per cent going directly for debt repayment) and in fact despite these loans and the surplus in the country’s budget, Greece’s public debt continued to grow. As a result, Greece had not in any way become unjustifiably richer from these loans.

On the contrary, the measures imposed against the Greek people were wholly antiethical to fundamental human rights as these stem from customary international law, multilateral treaties and the Greek constitution. Consequently, these ‘loans’ were held to be odious, illegal or illegitimate. The recommendation of the Committee was that Greece was not only entitled but obliged to unilaterally repudiate such illegal, odious and illegitimate debts on account of its international human rights obligations and economic self-determination.

He remarks about the situation with the automotive industry were more critical than a pre-retirement unemployment supplement known as AER, which he also thought wouldn't have had a severe impact on elections (while senator Bourquin thought would have driven voters to right-wing National Front).

Moscovici's conclusion was that "the situation is dire" although the finance minister ignored warnings that without a "pre-retirement unemployment supplement known as the AER... the ruling Socialist Party will have a rough time in the industrial basin of the country, with voters turning to the rightwing National Front." Moscovici disagreed. Fast forward 3 years, and not only did French unemployment just hit an all time high confirming that the economic situation has indeed never been more dire...

...but the frontrunner for the next French president is none other than National Front's Marine Le Pen, who will no doubt seize this memo as further proof of the terrible economic state of the country and leverage it even more to her benefit, and add even more fuel to the Frexit fire. As a reminder, Le Pen now prefers to be called Madame Frexit because as she warned last week, when she becomes president, unless the Eurozone yields to her demands, France will be the next country out of the monetary project effectively ending the Eurozone.

Details of the secret negotiations were revealed in a report by the International Crisis Group in Brussels, which concluded that reopening the sites to non-Muslims could help keep peace on the Temple Mount. But an agreement could be harder to reach with Israel’s new government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party.

Some Israeli leaders have said opening the site to paying visits would give the Jordanian-influenced Waqf, an Islamic trust that oversees the daily religious affairs in and around the mosque, an incentive to maintain peace on the contested holy site. However, an official in Netanyahu’s office said, “There are no negotiations and no change in the status quo at the Temple Mount,” Haaretz reported.

We were fighting the Germans in the second world war and a number of them were members of the Nazi party. The concentration camps that killed six million Jews had staff that were members of the Nazi party of German nationality but also a large number of people who were simply German nationals.

Your report on the Queen’s visit to Bergen-Belsen (27 June) contained the sentence: “This was the Queen’s fifth visit to Germany but her first to a former Nazi concentration camp.” The headline was “Queen visits Belsen, where the world awoke to Nazi evil”. The idea of separating Germany from the Nazis is an extremely worrying development and everybody who cares about the holocaust, and historical accuracy, ought to be objecting to this interpretation.

Matthew Evans, House of Lords

“This is something we all need to understand, the two sides of early detection. It does help people, but it’s almost guaranteed to harm others,” said H Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine, public policy, and business administration at Dartmouth College, and author of the book Should I Be Tested for Cancer? (He reveals his answer in the book’s subtitle: “Maybe not.”)

The more you look for disease, the more you find it. And in the case of cancer, it’s hard for doctors to know if what they find is dangerous and needs to be addressed, or if it’s just a small tumor that won’t grow and poses no threat. “We can’t be sure which is which, so we treat everybody,” Welch explained at the Aspen Ideas Festival’s Spotlight Health session. “That means we’re treating people who will never experience problems from their disease.”

"Now such a meeting is getting closer every day but it must be well prepared," Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church's foreign relations department, said in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper.

He said the meeting between the head of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church and the head of Russian Orthodox Church - which counts some 165 million of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians - would take place in a "neutral" country, not in Moscow or the Vatican. Austria or Hungary were possibilities, he said. Hilarion, one of the most influential people in world Orthodoxy, said he could not say if the meeting could take place as early as this year, but there was currently "a good dynamic" between the two Churches.