ISRAEL - Two years after Israel’s Masorti (Conservative) Movement approved the ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis, the nation’s first homosexual Masorti rabbi has taken his place at the pulpit. Rabbi Mikie Goldstein, a native of Liverpool, England, who has been living in Israel since 1989, was installed on Thursday evening as the leader of Adat Shalom Emanuel in Rehovot, the only non-Orthodox synagogue in the city. “My motto is to give Judaism back to the people,” says Goldstein, 49. “I feel that the Orthodox establishment in this country has hijacked Judaism and decided there is only one way to be Jewish… I realized that if someone is going to make a stand, it’s going to be me. So I got off my behind, and I went to study.”
USA - The US city of Phoenix, which has been experiencing a long drought, was hit by record rainfall for a single day leading to the deaths of two people. Floods turned freeways into rivers and rescue services had to pull drivers from their cars. A woman died after being swept away in her vehicle, and in a separate incident a 76-year-old woman drowned. The flooding came as Arizona was lashed by storms brought by the remnants of Hurricane Norbert in the Pacific. A total of 3.29 inches of rain was measured at Phoenix airport, easily surpassing the previous daily record of 2.91 inches set in 1939, the National Weather Service said. It was more rain than had fallen throughout the whole summer.
UK - Powerful investors across the world have woken up to the possibility that Scotland may vote to break up the United Kingdom, with some already preparing defensive action that risks a potentially dangerous flight from sterling and Britain’s bond market. Japan’s biggest bank, Nomura, has advised clients to slash financial exposure to the UK and brace for a possible collapse of the pound after polls showed the independence campaign running neck and neck, warning that the separation of England and Scotland after more than 300 years would be a “cataclysmic shock”. “The 'fast money’ funds started moving a week ago but now we are seeing 'real money’ clients acting,” said Jordan Rochester, the bank’s foreign exchange strategist. “The risks are suddenly seen as much greater for Japanese pension funds.”
USA - People have such short memories. Even though we are repeating so many of the same patterns that we witnessed in 2000-2001 and 2007-2008, most people do not think that another financial crash is coming. In fact, with the stock market setting record high after record high lately, I have been taking quite a bit of criticism for my relentless warnings about the coming financial storm. Of course these critics never offer any hard evidence that I have been wrong about anything. They just assume that since the stock market has soared to unprecedented heights that all of us "bears" must have been wrong.
UK - A sharp rise in the number of UK school leavers going on to university is failing to translate into higher levels of basic skills, according to a major international study. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show the majority of students are completing higher education courses without good levels of literacy. In a report, it was revealed that just a quarter of UK graduates had top-level reading and writing skills compared with at least a third of those in some other developed nations such as Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia.
NICARAGUA - A meteorite that landed "like a bomb", narrowly missing Nicaragua's main airport, has raised concerns over scientists' ability to track space objects on potential collision courses with Earth. Officials said they "thanked God" there were no injuries as the rock landed in Managua, a sprawling city of 1.2 million people, where it left a crater 40ft wide and 16ft deep. The object was believed to have been a small part of the asteroid 2014 RC, nicknamed "Pitbull", which astronomers had been monitoring as it passed the planet. Nasa currently tracks more than 11,000 asteroids that come relatively close to Earth but 2014 RC, which is the size of a large house, was only discovered on August 31.
UK - David Cameron is under growing pressure to ask the Queen to speak out in support of the Union as another opinion poll confirms a surge in support for Scottish independence. Senior MPs have suggested an intervention from Her Majesty could “make all the difference” as a TNS poll shows the Yes and No campaigns running neck and neck. The pound crashed to a 10-month low on Monday and £2.3 billion was wiped off the value of the six FTSE-100 companies based in Scotland on the first day of trading since a weekend poll put the Yes campaign ahead for the first time. The Prime Minister has been warned by his own MPs that his job may depend on the outcome of the Scottish referendum on September 18. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader — who would lose more than 40 MPs if Scotland votes for independence — would also come under pressure to resign if Scots vote to separate.
ISRAEL - A former head of Mossad said he doesn’t envision any joint effort between US and Iran in dealing with the Islamic State group, despite their mutual interest in halting the jihadist group’s advances across Iraq and Syria. Israel, he said, must also be on the alert, not so much because of the IS forces battling the Syrian army for control of areas right along Israel’s border in the Golan, but rather due to supporters of the group within its borders. “There are indications of sympathy for IS among Israeli citizens,” he said. “When there is a background of sympathy, there are usually also individuals who go on to broader activities.” Last week, Israel’s Channel 10 broadcast what it said was footage from a recent “Islamic State gathering” on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The report said the gathering underlined that the Islamic State intends to focus on Israel in the future.
USA - Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc and 10 other banks were accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark used to set rates for interest rate derivatives and other financial instruments. The Alaska Electrical Pension Fund sued yesterday in Manhattan federal court, claiming the banks colluded to set ISDAfix at artificial levels that allowed them to manipulate payments to investors in the derivatives. The banks’ actions affected trillions of dollars of financial instruments tied to the benchmark, the pension fund said. The banks communicated using electronic chat rooms and other means of private communication, typically submitting identical rate quotes beginning at least in 2009, the Alaska fund said.
INDIA/PAKISTAN - Rescue teams are battling to retrieve hundreds of thousands of people stranded by damaging floods in India and Pakistan. The province of Punjab, where rivers are bursting their banks, is the worst-hit area in Pakistan. In Indian-administered Kashmir, the capital Srinagar is submerged with many residents waiting for rescue on rooftops. One week of flooding has left at least 280 people dead in both countries. Army and air force troops worked overnight to rescue marooned residents, officials in Indian-administered Kashmir said. There are fears that heavy rains and flooding could spread south to Pakistan's Sindh province over the next week.
UK - The Scots are on the verge of an act of self-mutilation that will trash our global identity. Right: it’s time to speak for Britain. If these polls are right, then we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country. In just 10 days’ time we could all be walking around like zombies – on both sides of the Scottish border.
UK - The first Scottish referendum poll to see a Yes vote take the lead since the start of 2014 has unnerved traders, seeing sterling tumble. Growing momentum for the pro-independence campaign has alarmed investors, who until now had not believed there was more than an outside chance of a Yes win. “Until recently the polls showed a done deal”, said Michael Saunders, head of European economics at Citi. Valentin Marinov of Citi said that there is a “clear risk of further downside correction”, as sterling could drop further still. Confidence in the pound has been knocked, as a Yes vote "could easily derail the UK economic recovery", said Deutsche Bank analysts.
EUROPE - Despite unveiling a package of interest rate cuts and a new stimulus scheme, the ECB has failed to prevent a "collapse" in euro area investor confidence. A key gauge of euro area confidence saw a "collapse" this month, as efforts to revive the currency bloc failed to excite investors. Falling to its lowest level in over a year, both components of the Sentix Investor Confidence index - assessing the current situation and investors’ six-month expectations - were both in negative territory. The headline reading dropped to 2.7 to -9.8 in September, while analysts had expected to see just a slip in confidence, to 2.0. Sebastian Wanke, senior analyst at Sentix, said that “this constellation signals a renewed recession for the eurozone”. Eurozone growth ground to a halt in the second quarter, statiscians confirmed on Friday.
EUROPE - A new controversy over Germany's austerity dictate has flared up on the eve of the Wales NATO summit. At the occasion of a high-ranking meeting last week, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) Mario Draghi, characterized Berlin's austerity policy as fatal. However, the German chancellor immediately rejected his call for a change. The French minister of the economy was forced to resign, because of his public criticism of the austerity dictates, which, since the beginning of the year have aggravated the crisis in France.
MIDDLE EAST - Violent turmoil in the Middle East could indirectly lead to millions of people starving from food shortages, research suggests. Scientists have found that the highest concentration of wild crop plants needed to produce new food varieties lie in an area known as the Fertile Crescent. However, this area is also at the centre of a number of civil wars that are placing valuable crop species at risk of extinction. The Fertile Crescent is an ancient area of fertile soil arcing around the Arabian desert from Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and ending in Iraq and Iran. It has the largest diversity of 'crop wild relatives' (CWRs) - species closely related to our crops which are needed to create future 'super crop' varieties. These wild relatives of crops grow naturally outside mainstream agriculture and possess a number of useful traits including drought tolerance, yield improvement, and resilience to pests and diseases.