USA - Emerging markets faced intense pressure on Thursday after the US Federal Reserve cut its stimulus further, with currencies in India, South Africa and Turkey failing to rally despite interest rate rises. Asian shares fell heavily and European stocks also retreated, extending a global rout driven by worries about emerging markets. Concerns were stoked when the US central bank further reduced its quantitative easing (QE) stimulus overnight.

USA - Despite great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death. The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

CHINA - China has forced another foreign correspondent to leave the country, the latest in a series of expulsions that have heightened tensions between western media companies and the Communist Party. The reporter, Austin Ramzy of The New York Times, left Beijing on Thursday for Taipei. Chinese officials had declined to issue new work documents to Ramzy, a longtime resident of China who has in the past renewed his credentials without incident. Ramzy will join a growing group of reporters that have been denied access to the mainland.

ARGENTINA - Argentina's president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her ministers blame foreign 'vultures' for an economic meltdown as power cuts hit Buenos Aires and goods vanish from supermarket shelves. The sudden dollar scarcity on Argentina's exchange market sent the peso's official value crashing to eight pesos to the dollar, while the "blue" illegal rate shot up to nearly 13 pesos. Retailers immediately marked up their prices to reflect the new reality. In some cases, items were pulled en masse from the shelves, as retailers pondered how much to mark up their goods.

UK - Will the emerging market rout be different this time? The fear is it won't. Defending a currency is a tricky business. Take Thailand in 1997, where massive overspending left it with a huge current account deficit and high interest rate, inflated to protect a currency pegged to the dollar. The dominos are lining up. Argentina gave up trying to support the peso last week, resulting in a double-digit fall against the dollar, while Russia has stormed into action, pledging “unlimited” intervention to prop up the rouble. Talk of capital controls is now increasing, especially in Turkey, which has no more aces up its sleeve.

CHINA - The growing problems in the Chinese banking system could spill over into a wider financial crisis, one of the most respected analysts of China’s lenders has warned. Charlene Chu, a former senior analyst at Fitch in Beijing and now the head of Asian research at Autonomous Research, said the rapid expansion of foreign-currency borrowing meant a crisis in China’s financial system was becoming a bigger risk for international banks. George Magnus, senior independent economist at UBS, said the Chinese banking system resembled that of Japan during the 1980s in the years leading up to the country’s financial crash.

IRAN - A top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards boasted Saturday that his forces have plans in place to attack the United States from within, should the US attack the Islamic Republic.

ISRAEL - On an ancient hill dotted with 1,000-year-old olive trees, Israelis are busy excavating in search of the first palace of King David in the heart of the West Bank. The Jewish settlers who started the dig with the help of Israel's Antiquities Authority say they want to turn it into an archaeological park to celebrate its historical significance.

UKRAINE - The ‘progressive’ Western political elites and the establishment journalists who act as PR agents for them would like us to think that they are unequivocally opposed to neo-Nazism, homophobia, racism and far-right political extremism.

UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, better known as UNRWA, was designed to provide aid and services to Arab refugees and their descendants from the time of Israel’s founding.

BERLIN, GERMANY - Just before the Munich Security Conference opened, Germany's Foreign and Defense Ministers have suggested the possibility of expanding EU military interventions. It is "rightfully expected that we will become involved" declared Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Military means must not "be banned from consideration." Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen had just declared, "Europe makes no progress in the global power play, without military means."

GERMANY/ISRAEL - German Chancellor Angela Merkel will travel to Israel for bilateral talks at the end of February, accompanied by a number of her ministers, a spokesman said on Friday, according to AFP. Germany and Israel have held regular government consultations since 2008, an arrangement where the two sides meet at regular intervals to discuss specific topics. This will be the fifth such meeting between Germany and Israel. The last one was held in Berlin in December 2012 and during that meeting, Merkel and Netanyahu “agreed to disagree” over Israeli construction in areas the Palestinian Authority (PA) claims for a future state.

USA/CHINA - This is a powerful anticipation from our team for 2014: we are living the last hours of the oil era and the trigger for this shift is the Chinese government’s decision to power its automobiles by electricity. We anticipate that within five years the trend will have become unstoppable and that in 10 years petrol/diesel vehicles will compare to electric vehicles as the Cuban Cadillacs currently compare to modern cars. A catastrophe for the Dollar of course, supported by this raw material since 1975.

GERMANY - Germany's finance minister said on Monday he was open to the creation of a separate European parliament for countries using the euro, a step that could deepen divisions within the European Union. Wolfgang Schaeuble's comments, made during a visit to Brussels, challenge the very foundations of the European Union where lawmaking for all 28 nations is by the bloc's current parliament. Splitting that body, critics believe, would represent a dismantling of one of Europe's biggest symbols of unity. But Schaeuble said a separate parliament for the 18 countries in the euro zone would allow the smaller group to integrate more closely.

ISRAEL - US Secretary of State John Kerry's draft framework agreement for Middle East peace talks will include support for establishing a Palestinian capital in Arab areas of East Jerusalem, senior New York Times analyst Thomas Friedman wrote in his column published Wednesday. Friedman, who is currently visiting Israel, said that Kerry's framework document would present the core concessions that Washington considers Israelis and Palestinians need to make for a fair, lasting deal. It will not include any right of return for Palestinian refugees into Israel proper.