MIDDLE EAST - Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal admitted that Hamas members killed three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June, but claimed the leadership of the organization was not made aware of the details of the abduction plan in advance, in an interview published by Yahoo News on Friday. Interviewed by Michael Isikoff in Doha, the Qatari capital, Mashaal said that the leadership of Hamas learned of the details of the killings of the three teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, from the Israeli investigation into them. The search for the killers prompted an Israeli crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank, Hamas then escalated rocket fire at Israel from Gaza, triggering the current 47-day conflict.

USA - A long list of Hollywood heavyweights have put their names to a letter slamming Hamas over the “devastating loss of life endured by Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza.” The reported 187 signatories, who include Mayim Bialik, Minnie Driver, Kelsey Grammer, Seth Rogen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sarah Silverman, and Sylvester Stallone, condemn the “ideologies of hatred and genocide which are reflected in Hamas’ charter, Article 7 of which reads, ‘There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’” In their letter, set to be published on Sunday in Billboard, Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and also in leading US newspapers, they write that “Hamas cannot be allowed to rain rockets on Israeli cities, nor can it be allowed to hold its own people hostage. Hospitals are for healing, not for hiding weapons. Schools are for learning, not for launching missiles. Children are our hope, not our human shields.”

ISRAEL - The IDF has declassified a new special report detailing Hamas's "illegal use of civilian infrastructure" throughout the course of Operation Protective Edge, which began July 8. The report was released on Tuesday, the same day that Hamas breached a ceasefire, and presents an irrefutable case against the terror organization utilizing intelligence maps, photographic and video evidence.

GERMANY - Germany’s development aid minister, Gerd Mueller, has accused Qatar of financing the Islamic State terror group. “A story like this always has a history,” Mueller said in an interview with public broadcaster ZDF. “Who is financing these troops? Hint: Qatar.” German Vice-Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel has called for a “debate” about who has been financing the terror group, which has created an Islamic “Caliphate” which straddles the Iraq-Syrian border. The country is still to decide whether it should support Iraqi Kurds, fighting the jihadists, with lethal or non-lethal military aid, a controversial issue because of its historic involvement in two world wars. Qatar is also believed to be the primary financier of Hamas, the Islamist group battling Israel from the Gaza Strip. Former Israeli President Shimon Peres has said that the country is "the world's largest funder of terror".

USA - The sophistication, wealth and military might of Islamic State militants represent a major threat to the United States that may surpass that once posed by al Qaeda, US military leaders said on Thursday.

"They are an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it's in Iraq or anywhere else," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters at the Pentagon.

USA - Life in the American police state is an endless series of don’ts delivered at the end of a loaded gun: don’t talk back to police officers, don’t even think about defending yourself against a SWAT team raid (of which there are 80,000 every year), don’t run when a cop is nearby lest you be mistaken for a fleeing criminal, don’t carry a cane lest it be mistaken for a gun, don’t expect privacy in public, don’t let your kids walk to the playground alone, don’t engage in nonviolent protest near where a government official might pass, don’t try to grow vegetables in your front yard, don’t play music for tips in a metro station, don’t feed whales, and on and on.

USA - The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunni militants are working on the capability to wipe out a city inside the United States. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has long threatened to carry out a catastrophic attack on American soil, with a spokesman recently boasting that the militant group would fly its flag over the White House. Senator James Inhofe (Republican for Oklahoma) said ISIS members are “rapidly developing a method of blowing up a major US city and people just can’t believe that’s happening.” “Yes, it’s really significant what’s happening,” he added during a local television interview on Wednesday.

USA – According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine. But this account is wrong.

ISRAEL - Israel trumpeted a major success in its six-week military offensive in Gaza on Thursday after assassinating three Hamas commanders in a targeted strike in the southern city of Rafah. The deaths of Mohammed Abu Shammala, Raed al-Attar and Mohammed Barhoum marked the highest-ranking figures Israel has been able to kill in 45 days of warfare. The early morning strike on the house in which the three men had been tracked down came a day after the attempted assassination of Mohammed Deif, Hamas’ commander-in-chief, and appeared to mark a concerted Israeli effort to pick off key military figures.

TURKEY - Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who will be Turkey's next prime minister, is a loyal ally of incoming president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the chief architect of an assertive but increasingly controversial foreign policy. Davutoglu was named by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as its sole candidate to be new leader and prime minister to replace Erdogan. He will take office on August 28. Encouraged by Erdogan, who has always pushed for Turkey to become a world power, Davutoglu has sought a pivotal role for the country as a mediator in conflicts in the Middle East. This new policy was not always welcomed and sparked accusations that the Islamic-rooted government is promoting "neo-Ottomanism" and even "pan-Islamism" in seeking to restore Turkish influence throughout the former Ottoman Empire.

LIBERIA, WEST AFRICA - Liberia has imposed a night-time curfew and has quarantined a slum in the capital Monrovia in a bid to halt the deadly Ebola outbreak. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said the curfew would be from 21:00 local time to 06:00 (21:00-06:00 GMT). She said all movement would be blocked in and out of the West Point slum [West Point is home to around 75,000 people].

USA - Researchers from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the US Geological Survey estimated the groundwater loss from the start of 2013 to be 63 trillion gallons — the equivalent of flooding four inches of water across the United States west of the Rocky Mountains. Scientists came to this conclusion by studying data collected from hundreds of GPS sensors across the western United States, installed primarily to detect small changes in the ground due to earthquakes. But the GPS data can also be used to show very small changes in elevation. Groundwater is very heavy, and its weight depresses the Earth's upper crust. Remove the weight, and the crust springs upward — and GPS sensors can detect how much higher the land has risen as a result of loss of groundwater. The highest uplift of the Earth occurred in California’s mountains because there is so much water underneath them, Agnew said.

UK - More people are suffering from malnutrition as a result of worsening food poverty, experts have warned. The Faculty of Public Health said conditions like rickets were becoming more apparent because people could not afford quality food in their diet. It comes after health figures recently revealed a 19% increase in the number of people admitted to hospital with malnutrition over the past year. "It's getting worse because people can't afford good quality food. It's getting worse where malnutrition, rickets and other manifestations of extreme poor diet are becoming apparent," he said. The faculty recently claimed that UK food prices had risen by 12% since 2007. It also noted that in the same period, UK workers had suffered a 7.6% fall in wages.

MIDDLE EAST - It was no accident that Islamic State apparently chose a British jihadi to behead James Foley. Over the past six months, the group's leaders have been busily perfecting their own brand of murderous and macabre PR campaigning. The shocking video of James Foley's last moments was expertly staged; a terrified American, trussed up in orange overalls, kneeling on a hilltop against a rolling desert backdrop.

USA - The brutal murder of the brave American journalist James Foley is meant to directly terrorize the world’s media, the international community, and the United States. If all the actions of the Islamic State, or IS, to date weren’t sufficiently reprehensible, this act and the potential for other similar acts will snap American attention with laser-like focus onto the real danger IS poses to the existence of Iraq, the order of the region and to the homelands of Europe and America.