FRANCE - Serge Ben Haim, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Paris, told IDF Radio Monday morning about the attack on a Paris synagogue by a pro-Palestinian mob on Sunday. Ben Haim told his interviewer that the event was a watershed occurrence. “What existed in the past can no longer continue. We could have had something like Kristallnacht,” he said, referring to the infamous “night of broken glass” in 1938, when Nazis swept through Jewish towns and neighborhoods throughout Germany and Austria, murdering some 500 Jews, burning homes and synagogues, and destroying shops.

UK - The world economy is just as vulnerable to a financial crisis as it was in 2007, with the added danger that debt ratios are now far higher and emerging markets have been drawn into the fire as well, the Bank for International Settlements has warned. Jaime Caruana, head of the Swiss-based financial watchdog, said investors were ignoring the risk of monetary tightening in their voracious hunt for yield.

RUSSIA - Snowdrifts piled up on the roads of Russia's Ural region on Saturday as an abnormal summer snowstorm hit the region, bringing the area into the spotlight once again after last year's meteorite fall. Siberia also witnessed a downpour of giant hailstones. Residents of the cities of Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk, located in Russia's eastern Ural region, were taken aback when it suddenly started snowing in the middle of summer on Saturday. Photos and videos quickly emerged on social networks showing snow-covered green grass in the middle of July. Local media reported snowdrifts along roads, adding that the temperature dropped from over 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) to almost zero on Saturday. Siberia is known for its freezing temperatures in winter, but in some parts of the vast eastern region – which stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and Arctic – the summer temperatures are similar to the Mediterranean.

AUSTRALIA - If you are lucky enough to be reading this from the comfort of your blankets, it might be best to stay there, as Brisbane has hit its coldest temperatures in 103 years. Not since July 28 1911 has Brisbane felt this cold, getting down to a brisk 2.6C at 6.41am. Matt Bass, meteorologist from BOM, said the region was well below our average temperatures.

VATICAN - Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that "about 2%" of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles. The Pope said that abuse of children was like "leprosy" infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper. He vowed to "confront it with the severity it demands". But a Vatican spokesman said the quotes in the newspaper did not correspond to Pope Francis's exact words.

GERMANY - A rather strange debate has been taking place in Germany for several months. Most strange, because it refers to a fiction, to a bizarre aspiration – of German troops waging war in different parts of the world, contrary to the role stipulated by the German constitution for the country’s army – an aspiration that hardly fits into the present reality or in the probable future.

GERMANY - Germany may be America's most important European ally, but the relationship between the two countries is on the rocks. On Thursday, Germany expelled a top CIA agent from Berlin, a highly unusual move for which the German government cited a "lack of cooperation" from the United States in clarifying recent spying cases. Those cases include revelation that the CIA tried to recruit a German secret service staffer to sell classified information, and the possibility that a German Defense Ministry employee had been working for US intelligence.

RUSSIA - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the so-called Brics) are to establish alternatives to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which they find too biased towards Europe and the US. The "New Development Bank" to rival the World Bank will be launched at a Brics summit in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza next week, with all agreed except where to put the main headquarters, Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov said Wednesday (9 July). The two options currently being considered are Shanghai or New Delhi, Siluanov said. Russia didn’t push to get the bank in Moscow, but will seek management posts instead, he said. The project will see each of the Brics contribute €1.4 billion to the bank’s funds over the next seven years, with the bank’s maximum capital set at €73 billion. The bank will fund mainly infrastructure projects.

EUROPE - Earlier this summer, IMF bureaucrats went to Sofia, Bulgaria to study the country’s economic progress. And roughly a month ago, they released an official report which stated, among other things, that Bulgarian banks are “stable and liquid.” Talk about epic timing. Because less than two weeks later, Bulgaria’s banking system was in the throes of a full-blown crisis. There was a run on two of the nation’s largest banks — several hundred million dollars had been withdrawn in a matter of hours. And the Bulgarian central bank had to step in and take over both of them or risk a collapse in the entire system.

PORTUGAL - A mounting crisis at one of Portugal’s biggest banks and signs of a deepening economic slowdown in Europe have sent tremors through financial markets, triggering a sharp fall on European bourses and a flight to safety across the world. Portugal’s regulator suspended trading of Banco Espirito Santo after its share price crashed 17 percent in Lisbon, reviving worries about the underlying health of Europe’s banks. The STOXX index of European lenders fell to its lowest this year following a bank run in Bulgaria and a profits shock from Austria's Erste Bank. The index is down 11 percent since early June.

ISRAEL - I would like to think that the horrific killings of Israeli and Palestinian children in recent days - and the ongoing escalation between Israel and Hamas over Gaza - will force a moment of truth, more rational thinking and real options to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I know better. There is still not enough pain and prospects of gain to warrant that. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Israelis and Palestinians have entered another yet violent cycle of reaction and counter-reaction. The peace process is like rock and roll. It will never die. And I'm certain that sometime before the end of the administration, Kerry will make another serious run. But unless there's a fundamental change in Israeli or Palestinian views, it's highly likely that Washington - and the parties too - will remain trapped between a two-state solution that's just too hard to implement and yet too important to abandon.

USA - At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'. William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance. On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

IRAQ - Yesterday the Iraqi government announced a startling new development: ISIS has managed to make off with 88 pounds of uranium from Mosul University. The Uranium that ISIS now possesses is not suitable for a nuclear bomb, but there are other ways to use radioactive material as a weapon. This isn't enriched uranium mind you, so it wouldn't be suitable for making a nuclear bomb, but it would do just fine for a dirty bomb (or bombs). A dirty bomb is a weapon which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives with the goal of irradiating an area. So now those rebels have uranium. No big deal.

UK - Organic food has more of the antioxidant compounds linked to better health than regular food, and lower levels of toxic metals and pesticides, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date. The international team behind the work suggests that switching to organic fruit and vegetables could give the same benefits as adding one or two portions of the recommended "five a day". The team, led by Professor Carlo Leifert at Newcastle University, concludes that there are "statistically significant, meaningful" differences, with a range of antioxidants being "substantially higher" – between 19% and 69% – in organic food. It is the first study to demonstrate clear and wide-ranging differences between organic and conventional fruits, vegetables and cereals.

USA - When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).