USA - Like his predecessor, George W Bush, President Obama keeps repeating that America is not at war with Islam. Obama even added that ISIL “is not what Islam is about.” President Obama’s attempts to distinguish between ISIL and Islam were recently challenged by Brother Rachid, a Moroccan Muslim who spent 20 years studying Islam and eventually converted to Christianity.

USA - Around five football fields of tropical forest have been illegally cleared every minute between 2000 and 2012 according to a new report. The authors say that consumer demand in Europe and the US for beef, leather and timber is driving these losses. The vast majority of this illegal deforestation for commercial agriculture took place in Brazil and Indonesia. The authors say the practice is spreading rapidly in Asia and Africa. The research has been carried out by Forest Trends, a US based, non-governmental organisation that includes environmentalists, industry and the financial sector. This new study argues that in the first 12 years of this century, 49% of tropical deforestation was due to illegal conversion for commercial agriculture.

AUSTRALIA - Teenagers who start smoking cannabis daily before the age of 17 are seven times more likely to commit suicide, a study has found. According to the paper, published in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, youths who smoke marijuana on a daily basis are also 60% less likely to finish high school. Researchers led by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales analysed results of three large, long-running studies from Australia and New Zealand involving nearly 3,800 people. The findings showed a link between a considerable use of cannabis and a high risk of suicide as well as poor educational outcomes.

HAWAII - Businesses in a small Hawaii town are facing a slow-motion disaster as lava from Kilauea volcano oozes toward roads connecting them to the rest of the Big Island. Tiffany Edwards Hunt, who owns a surf shop with her husband, said the lava could hit buildings while smoke from fires sparked by the lava could damage merchandise. If lava crosses the highway leading into town, it could cut the town off. "There is the threat of this very historic, very quaint, eclectic village becoming a ghost town because of the isolation," Hunt said after a meeting between merchants and county civil defense authorities. Kilauea has been erupting continuously since 1983.

EUROPE - Mankind is undergoing a major evolutionary transition comparable to the shifts from prosimians to monkeys, monkeys to apes, and apes to humans, according to Cadell Last, an evolutionary anthropology PhD student and researcher at the Global Brain Institute. Human life expectancy has already increased from about 45 at the start of the 20th century to 80 today. Last predicts it will increase to 120 as soon as 2050 — a concept known as radical life extension — through a combination of new technology, behavior, and natural selection. In addition to longer lives, humans will demonstrate delayed sexual maturation and biological reproduction, according to Last. Taken together, these changes could signify a new type of human. Last makes his case in a paper from the most recent issue of Current Aging Science.

USA - It looks like a growing number of professional investors are preparing for a stock market crash, as hedge fund filings for the second quarter show a spike in defensive positions. In particular, legendary billionaire George Soros made a huge bet against the market. He increased his short position on the Standard & Poor’s 500 by a startling 605%. Soros also added significantly to several gold positions, a “safe haven” move that’s typically made when investors suspect a stock market crash is on the horizon.

CHINA - China began deploying 700 soldiers to a United Nations peacekeeping force in South Sudan to help guard the country's embattled oil fields and protect Chinese workers and installations, a spokesman for the African nation's president said Tuesday. The airlift of the Chinese infantry battalion to the South Sudanese states of Unity and Upper Nile, the site of the only operating oil fields still under control of the central government in Juba, was expected to take several days, spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said. While Beijing's troops will operate under UN command, their posting to South Sudan marks a sharp escalation of China's efforts to ensure the safety of its workers and assets in Africa, and guarantee a steady flow of energy for domestic consumption. The deployment marks the first time Beijing has contributed a battalion to a UN peacekeeping force, UN officials said.

MEXICO - Gaze across Lake Cajititlán here in western Mexico and normally you’ll see fisherman cutting their nets and tourist boats gliding over the blue-green water. But that picturesque scene turned grim last week when more than 4 million dead fish suddenly surfaced, turning the water a sinister shade of gray. It’s still unclear what killed the fish, but the incident was the worst in a spate of environmental disasters in Mexico this year. Early last month, a river in the northern state of Sonora took on a sickly brown-red color after workers from a nearby mine dumped thousands of gallons of sulfuric acid into the water. In Veracruz state, near the Gulf of Mexico, a gasoline spill contaminated almost 5 miles of a small river near the town of Tierra Blanca. What ties them together, critics say, are lax environmental standards, a complete lack of industry oversight and an inability to penalize people and companies that pollute.

USA - Washington has spent nearly $3 million (£1.82 million) studying lesbian obesity to find out why they are among the hardest hit. The study being carried out by the National Institute of Health, now in its fourth year, has another two to run. It comes after official data released earlier this year showed 69 per cent of American adults over 20 are classified as overweight or obese. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, nearly three quarters of America’s lesbian population falls into one or other of these categories – compared with half of the heterosexual female population.

MEXICO - Mired in the drought that has dried up so much of the Southwest, Texas is losing patience with Mexico, which owes the state millions of gallons of water. Under the terms of a 1945 agreement, Mexico and Texas are supposed to send each other a certain amount of water. Texas’ share comes from the Colorado River, while Mexico’s originates along the Rio Grande.

EUROPE - European Union judges have ruled that parody is not acceptable when it goes beyond "an expression of humour or mockery" and contains a "discriminatory message". EU courts, not known for a sense of humour, have made a judgement under European copyright law after a far-Right Belgian party used a parody of cult comic characters to make a political point about immigration. "If a parody conveys a discriminatory message, a person holding rights in the parodied work may demand that that work should not be associated with that message," said the European Court of Justice. Paul Nuttall, the deputy leader of Ukip, accused the EU judges of self-parody. "Can they not see in this judgement , great material for a parody themselves? Judges don't normally make good comedians but some of the judgements out of the ECJ actually do make people laugh," he said.

UK - Alex Salmond’s biggest lie, that an independent Scotland could float onward and upward on the strength its oil and gas resources, has finally been nailed. The greatest authority on Scottish oil, Sir Ian Wood – together with the bosses of BP and Shell – has exposed it as pure fantasy. Wood, founder of Scotland’s world-leading oil services firm Wood Group, has accused the Scottish Nationalists of misleading voters with ‘highly inaccurate forecasts, false promises and misleading information’. His intervention, along with that of Bob Dudley of BP and Ben van Beurden of Shell, delivers a devastating blow to claims being made by Salmond and his acolytes that North Sea oil, augmented by unexploited opportunities using relatively new ‘fracking’ techniques, could turn Scotland into the next Norway.

UK - Hundreds of thousands of Scottish home owners could see their mortgage repayments increasing far beyond their wages if an independent Scotland is forced to adopt a foreign currency. Mortgage experts have warned that lenders may refuse to switch current loans to a new currency and will instead keep them in sterling. This would leave Scotland's 800,000 home owners at the mercy of currency fluctuations that could lead to higher repayments and even negative equity on their homes. Ray Boulger, a mortgage expert at the mortgage adviser John Charcol, said that lenders did not have clauses in their terms and conditions that would allow them to change the currency of existing loans. If the pound strengthened against the new Scottish currency, borrowers' wages would not stretch as far, sending their repayments shooting up and increasing the mortgage relative to the property's value.

UK - Standard Life, the pensions and insurance giant, has said it is planning to shift large parts of its business to England in the event of a "Yes" vote in this week's Scottish referendum. The Edinburgh-based FTSE 100 company said that "if there was a need to do so", it would make drastic changes to its business structure to cope with Scotland seceding. "This transfer of our business could potentially include pensions, investments and other long-term savings," the company said. The statement is the biggest confirmation yet that major Scottish companies are preparing for a shift south if Scotland votes to secede. Standard Life was the first FTSE 100 company based north of the border to warn of the risks of independence back in February.

UK - Some of the UK's biggest banks will have once-in-a-lifetime decisions to make about their future if Scotland votes in favour of independence this week. One of the key issues worrying the corporate world is the effect of Scottish independence on the banking sector. Share prices in banks most exposed to Scotland have taken a major hit as a "Yes" vote becomes a real possibility, with a clear divide between Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and TSB, and Barclays and HSBC. While Barclays and HSBC are barely exposed to Scotland, the three others are either based north of the border or do a great deal of business there.