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.

IRAQ - Using its own version of "soft" and "hard" power, the Islamic State is crushing resistance across northern Iraq so successfully that its promise to march on Baghdad may no longer be unrealistic bravado. While conventional states try to win hearts and minds abroad before necessarily resorting to military force, the jihadist group is also achieving its aims by psychological means - backed up by a reputation for extreme violence.

UK - Britain, as the rest of the world, is facing a water crisis, leading some experts to predict that by the end of the decade H2O will be traded on financial markets like other finite commodities such as crude oil, or iron ore. Although the Environment Agency says the past six months have been the wettest on record, summer hosepipe bans remain a possibility, partly because of historic inconsistencies in infrastructure investment. However, changing weather patterns and rising demand for water resources spell a potentially more nightmarish scenario within the next 20 years.

UK - The Serious Fraud Office is poised to launch the first criminal investigation into alleged rigging of the £3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange markets at leading City banks. The financial watchdog is expected to announce the move as early as this week, according to reports, raising the spectre of further multimillion-pound fines for Britain’s biggest banks over their behaviour during and after the financial crisis. Investigators are expected to examine whether individual traders personally benefited by manipulating benchmark forex prices. It is claimed that traders colluded via online chatrooms in groups with names such as the Bandits’ Club, the Dream Team and the Cartel. The UK’s so-called Big Four banks – Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC and RBS – are also under pressure from the Competition and Markets Authority, which is expected to fire the starting gun on a full-blown competition inquiry into the banking sector on Friday.

UK - It is well-documented that governments use information to blackmail and control people. The Express reported last month: British security services infiltrated and funded the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange in a covert operation to identify and possibly blackmail establishment figures, a Home Office whistleblower alleges.

ISRAEL - The Israeli military has tweeted a doctored picture of the Houses of Parliament under assault from a barrage of rockets and asking: “What if they were attacking your home?” The photo-shopped image, which was published today on the official Twitter feed of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), showed four rockets flying north over the Thames and about to crash into the Palace of Westminster.