IRAN - Iran on Saturday formally inaugurated what it said was mass production of a long-range anti-ship cruise missile. The ceremony for the Qadir cruise missile, a homegrown Iranian invention said to be capable of striking naval targets up to 300 kilometers (186 miles) away, was attended by high-ranking members of the defense establishment, including Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan, according to a report by Fars News, a semi-official Iranian news agency.
USA - Nato’s General Secretary has issued a thinly veiled challenge to David Cameron to continue spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence if re-elected. Jens Stoltenberg, who held talks with the Prime Minister on Friday, sent out a press statement saying Nato "counts on" Britain’s “leadership in the future”.
USA - Farmers who are using antibiotics to keep pests away from their crops are making children allergic to the fruits and vegetables they grow, research suggests. Several years ago, more than 150 scientists and 50 farmers came out in support of stricter limits on antibiotics used in animal agriculture as part of a broader effort to tackle the public health crisis caused by growing antibiotic resistance.
USA - American scientists have attempted to modify the DNA of human egg cells using a new gene-editing technique that could eliminate inherited diseases from subsequent generations of affected families, The Independent can reveal. The research was carried out on ovary cells taken from a woman with inherited ovarian cancer to investigate the possibility of eventually using gene-editing to produce IVF embryos free of the familial disease. The results are yet to be published.
UK- A major inquiry into child abuse will reveal that sexual exploitation runs through every level of British society like a “stick of Blackpool rock”, Theresa May warns today. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the Home Secretary says that people across Britain do not yet “appreciate the true scale” of the abuse and that once the inquiry is done, “we will never look at society in the same way again”.
ISRAEL - An extreme right-wing Jewish hate preacher has issued a ruling which urges Jews to hold their prayers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque. Rabbi Dov Lior is one of the most influential of the hard-line national-religious rabbis. He served as chief rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron, home to mass-murderer Baruch Golstein, who massacred 29 Muslims while they were praying in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994.
UK - Nigel Farage was today condemned as an attention seeker for calling for race discrimination laws to be scrapped and claiming some Muslims in Britain 'hate us and want to kill us'. The Ukip leader claimed he wanted UK firms to be able to favour British-born job applicants, and it was not a 'white v black thing'. He claimed public concern was fuelled by migrant groups who want to 'change who we are and what we are'.
EUROPE - Both sides trade insults as Yanis Varoufakis chastises ECB and Germany accuses Leftist government of "squandering trust". Relations between Greece and its creditors reached breaking point on Thursday as the country's finance minister accused the European Central Bank of "asphyxiating" the cash-strapped economy.
EUROPE - European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker, taking up an old German demand, calls for the creation of an EU Army. Having its own armed forces would give the EU greater influence in global politics, according to Juncker, and it would particularly help the EU demonstrate more determination in its relationship to Moscow. The German chancellor had called for an EU Army already years ago.
USA - Americans' confidence in all three branches of government is at or near record lows, according to a major survey that has measured attitudes on the subject for 40 years. The 2014 General Social Survey finds only 23 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the Supreme Court, 11 percent in the executive branch and 5 percent in Congress. By contrast, half have a great deal of confidence in the military.
UK - Britain's Nigel Farage launched a stinging attack on the idea of an EU army to counter Russia. The UKIP leader also placed some of the blame for the Ukraine crisis on EU expansion. The notion of building up an EU army to counter Russia was the brainchild of European Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker. Farage quickly noted that the idea is already happening, despite many European leaders being against it.
CHINA - Every day, two quality-control supervisors monitor four robots tirelessly assembling remote-control devices for home appliances at a Midea Group factory in Foshan, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. The robots recently replaced 14 workers on the plant’s assembly line for remote controls. And soon, according to Midea’s home-air-conditioner division deputy general manager Wu Shoubao, more robots will arrive to replace the quality-control supervisors.
USA - In 1534, Abbot Paul Bachmann published a virulent anti-Protestant booklet entitled “A Punch in the Mouth for the Lutheran Lying Wide-Gaping Throats.” Not to be outdone, the Protestant court chaplain, Jerome Rauscher, responded with a treatise of his own, titled “One Hundred Select, Great, Shameless, Fat, Well-Swilled, Stinking, Papistical Lies.” Such was the tenor of theological discourse among many of the formative shapers of classical Protestantism and resurgent Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth century.
EUROPE - The threat of Greek exit from the euro still looms over the continent. But what's the true cost of a breakup of the union? A failure to renew Greece's bail-out in June would "shatter the illusion that membership of the euro was irrevocable" forcing markets to charge a corresponding risk premium on assets denominated in the single currency, warn James Nixon and Ben May at Oxford Economics.
ISRAEL - Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to detect a “worldwide effort” to remove him from power on Tuesday as polls suggested that he faces defeat in Israel’s election. After three terms totalling nine years in office, Mr Netanyahu has become the longest-serving Israeli prime minister since David Ben Gurion. But a poll for Channel 2 News suggested that his Likud party would win 21 seats in the Knesset, or parliament, in next Tuesday's election, compared with 25 for the Zionist Union, an opposition alliance.