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.

NIGERIA - Boko Haram's attacks in northern Nigeria have been well documented in the past year, but now its aim of forming an Islamic caliphate in the region is becoming a reality in the predominantly Christian Yobe and Borno States. But while the British and American forces support the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq, the Nigerian Army struggles to combat the surprisingly sophisticated militant group with limited international support. "The possible dangers for Nigeria and the region if this insurgency is not contained may have been underestimated, as has Boko Haram's military capacity," says Dr Khataza Gondwe, team leader for Africa and the Middle East at Christian Solidarity Worldwide. It is not known how large Boko Haram is, but it is clear that it has now spread from its original base in northern Nigeria and has begun recruiting in Cameroon, Niger and Chad. It is said to have killed 13,000 people since it became active in 2009.

RUSSIA - Russia's food ban could eventually cost Europe 6.7 billion euros ($8.9 billion) and result in 130,000 job losses, analysts at Dutch bank ING said Wednesday, the Prime news agency reported. Earlier this month Russia imposed a one-year embargo on meat products, fruit, vegetables and dairy products from the European Union, the US, Australia, Canada and Norway in response to Western sanctions against Moscow over its role in the Ukraine crisis. The food import ban will be particularly painful for Poland, which could lose about 23,000 jobs in agriculture, ING analysts said. The blow comes at a bad time for Europe, which is teetering on the brink of a recession, figures released by the EU earlier this month indicate.

EUROPE - An array of Nobel economists have launched a blistering attack on the eurozone's economic strategy, warning that contractionary policies risk years of depression and a fresh eruption of the debt crisis. "Historians are going to tar and feather Europe's central bankers," said Professor Peter Diamond, the world's leading expert on unemployment.

UK - Interest rate setters voted just 7-2 to hold policy at their August meeting, the first dissent among members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee since July 2011. Both Martin Weale and Ian McCafferty voted to increase interest rates from an all-time low of 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent, according to the minutes of the MPC meeting earlier this month. Despite the unexpected hawkishness from two members, Samuel Tombs, of Capital Economics, still expected to see that the MPC would not raise rates until next year. "Inflation still looks on track to ease much further than the MPC expects this year, and to remain weak in 2015", said Mr Tombs.

USA - In the last several years, Warren Buffett went out and bought the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad. He didn’t just buy some stock, he bought the whole thing, took it private... A railroad is nothing but hard assets. It’s right of way, mining rights adjacent to the right of way, rail, rolling stock, yards, switches, signals, buildings, it’s all hard assets.

USA - California has approved water rights agreements for a whopping five times as much water as it actually has, according to a study published Tuesday in Environmental Research Letters. In fact, the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), which manages the allocation of water rights to various agencies and districts, has been over-promising water rights for the last 100 years. In some cases, there is a tenfold difference between the amount of water allocated and the genuine water flow in the state.