USA - The price of beef and bacon hit its all-time high in the United States in June, according to data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In January 1980, when BLS started tracking the price of these commodities, ground chuck cost $1.82 per pound and bacon cost $1.45 per pound. By this June 2014, ground chuck cost $3.91 per pound and bacon cost $6.11 per pound. A decade ago, in June 2004, a pound of ground chuck cost $2.49, which means that the commodity has increased by 57 percent since then. Bacon has increased by 78.7 percent from the $3.42 it cost in June 2004 to the $6.11 it costs now.

USA - Asian jumping lice and a bacteria called C. liberibacter which the lice carry have been devastating Florida’s Orange crops since 2005, but scientists have found a solution! But do we really want to consume orange juice that contains genetically modified DNA, via pig genes? That’s an actual question consumers will need to ask themselves in light of a recent article in the New York Times piece, “A Race to Save the Orange by Altering its DNA”.

USA - The groundwater level in the San Bernardino Basin area is at its lowest point in recorded history, officials say. Measured in volume, the groundwater level for the basin is now about 500,000 acre-feet below full, according to Douglas Headrick, general manager for the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District. That would put it below the previous low recorded in 1964, a period that followed a 20-year drought, officials said. “This isn’t just an issue for San Bernardino, but many other cities depend on this basin for much of their water supply, including Redlands, Highland, Loma Linda, Rialto, Colton and Riverside,” the district's water resource manager, Bob Tincher, said.

MIDDLE EAST - Every year, al-Quds rallies are held worldwide on the last Friday of Ramadan. They are important because they remind the Muslims as well as non-Muslims that the first qibla of Muslims remains under alien occupation. Its liberation is the responsibility of every Muslim. The annual Quds Day rallies have become a global phenomenon. Since the last Friday of Ramadan was first declared by Imam Khomeini in 1979 as the Day of Quds, millions of people — Muslims and non-Muslims — have participated in such rallies each year to draw attention to the continued occupation of Masjid al-Aqsa, the first qibla of Muslims, as well as the Zionist oppression of Palestinians [Al-Quds is the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem].

SWITZERLAND - The Swiss National Bank and the People's Bank of China reached a currency swap agreement on Monday, allowing the two central banks to buy and sell their currencies up to a limit of 150 billion renminbi, or 21 billion Swiss francs ($23.4 billion). The deal will also allow the Swiss central bank to invest some of its huge accumulation of foreign exchange reserves in the Chinese bond market, the SNB said in a statement Monday.

USA - Another horrific stock market crash is coming, and the next bust will be “unlike any other” we have seen. That’s the message from Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO, a Boston-based firm with $117 billion in assets under management. Grantham pulls no punches when assigning responsibility for the coming financial carnage. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he calls Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen “ignorant” and says the Federal Reserve all but killed the economic recovery.

USA - In general, over the last several decades the world has experienced an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. The opening up of relations with China and the "end of the Cold War" resulted in an extended period of cooperation between east and west that was truly unique in the annals of history. But now things are shifting.

JAPAN - For decades Japan has been the world’s playground for design innovation. But now it may become ground zero for the future of something far more hostile: military drones. The country has positioned itself as one of the unlikely players in the escalating global race for military drones, a move that’s controversial both at home and abroad. A veteran Japanese politician even warned that the country’s re-armament looked like “a kind of pre-war revival.”

PORTUGAL - The president of Portugal has warned that the financial crisis gripping the Espirito Santo family could affect the country's economy. President Anibal Cavaco Silva voiced his concerns over the business empire just days after the family’s holding company, which owns a stake in Portugal’s second-largest bank, filed for creditor protection, saying it can’t meet its obligations. "If some citizens, some investors suffer significant losses (from the Espirito Santo group) they may delay investment decisions, or some of them may find themselves in very big difficulties," Mr Cavaco Silva said. "We cannot ignore that there will be some impact on the real economy."

GERMANY - Germany’s current account surplus is the largest ever recorded in proportional terms and far above the threshold for EU sanctions, posing a major political test for the incoming commission of Jean-Claude Juncker. The International Monetary Fund said the country’s surplus has reached 8.25 percent of GDP when adjusted for the economic cycle and has become economically destructive, making it ever harder for eurozone crisis states to claw their way out of trouble.

USA - Here's a surprising effect of the latest US sanctions against Russia: a run on AK-47s. Among the companies sanctioned this week was Kalashnikov Concern, the maker of the automatic weapon. "We sell some of the Kalashnikov Concern stuff and that has been selling fast," said Robert Keller, manager of K-Var Corp, a Las Vegas-based online gun distributor. Keller said his company has been sold out of the guns since the sanctions went into effect. On K-Var's web site, AK-47s are listed as "out of stock." AK-47 stands for Avtomat Kalashnikov-47, a reference to the full automatic action of the military models, the name of inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov, and the year of its unveiling, 1947, according to "The Gun," a book by C L Chivers.

USA - US and European airlines suspended flights to Israel's Ben Gurion airport after a rocket landed one mile (1.6km) away. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered three US carriers that fly to Israel - Delta, United and US Airways - to halt flights for 24 hours. Europe's aviation regulator is also urging airlines not to fly to Tel Aviv. The suspension prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ask the US to renew flights to Israel. Mr Netanyahu asked US Secretary of State John Kerry for help lifting the FAA ban, which comes amidst heightened scrutiny over flights near conflict zones. Earlier in the day, Israel's transportation ministry said: "Ben Gurion Airport is safe and completely guarded and there is no reason whatsoever that American companies would stop their flights and hand terror a prize."

USA - Unnamed US officials are telling Associated Press that their intelligence suggests the Malaysia plane was shot down by anti-Kiev militia, with no link to Russia found. Officials believe that the passenger aircraft was intercepted by an SA-11 surface-to-air missile, which was fired by Ukrainian militia members. One official said the likeliest explanation was the aircraft was shot down in error, an assertion that seems to be bolstered by the previous downing of 12 Ukrainian military aircraft by militants in the region. Intelligence suggests that, although the US maintains that Russia "created the conditions" that led to the incident, officials were not aware of the presence of any Russians during the missile launch, and would not confirm that the missile crew was trained in Russia.

USA - The US media’s Ukraine bias has been obvious, siding with the Kiev regime and bashing ethnic Russian rebels and Russia’s President Putin. But now – with the scramble to blame Putin for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down – the shoddy journalism has grown truly dangerous, says Robert Parry.

USA - The criminalization of homelessness has been on the rise since early 2009 in a number of cities across the country. A recent study by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty examines the state of citywide bans targeting the homeless population in 187 cities across the country. These bans cover a number of public behaviors limiting the homeless’s capacity for daily survival. Citywide behavioral bans prohibit sleeping in public, begging in public, loitering, sitting or lying down in public spaces, food sharing, and sleeping in vehicles, among other behaviors. “Many cities have chosen to criminally punish people living on the street for doing what any human being must do to survive,” the report states.