USA - Facebook recently rolled out a new feature that's leaving some users speechless and others running to sign a petition to have it removed, news.com.au reports. When enabled by users, the social network's new quirk allows its mobile app to turn on your smartphone's microphone, listen in on what's around you. Facebook identifies the music or TV shows it hears, and can tell the world you're currently "Listening to Iggy Azalea" if it hears you bumping "Fancy." The opt-in feature has many users creeped out. More than half a million have flocked to sign a sumofus.com petition to have the new gimmick axed from the app. "Tell Facebook not to release its creepy and dangerous new app feature that listens to users’ surroundings and conversations," the petition urges. "Facebook says it'll be responsible with this feature, but we know we can't trust it."

UK - Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond. The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday. At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people. The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a "nightmare scenario" that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.

RUSSIA - Gazprom Neft had signed additional agreements with consumers on a possible switch from dollars to euros for payments under contracts, the oil company's head Alexander Dyukov told a press conference. "Additional agreements of Gazprom Neft on the possibility to switch contracts from dollars to euros are signed. With Belarus, payments in roubles are agreed on," he said. Dyukov said nine of ten consumers had agreed to switch to euros. ITAR-TASS reported earlier that Gazprom Neft considered the possibility to make payments in roubles under contracts. Some contracting parties agree to switch from dollars to euros and Yuans.

UK - Britain may be forced to use “last resort” measures to avert blackouts in coming winters, Ed Davey, the energy secretary, will say on Tuesday. Factories will be paid to switch off at times of peak demand in order to keep households’ lights on, if Britain’s dwindling power plants are unable to provide enough electricity, under the backstop measures from National Grid. The Grid is expected to announce that it will begin recruiting businesses that will be paid tens of thousands of pounds each simply to agree to take part in its scheme. They will receive further payments if they are called upon to stop drawing power from the grid. It is also expected to press ahead with plans to pay mothballed gas power plants to ready themselves to be fired up when needed.

UK - Hundreds of thousands of school children will be taught British values in the wake of the Trojan horse scandal from September. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said that in the future all of England’s 20,000 primary and secondary schools will have to promote British values of tolerance and fairness. The recommendation was one of the chief findings in the wake of the scandal which found that schools in Birmingham had been taken over by Islamists. The review found that one of the schools had been funding a Madrassa from its own budget, while at another Muslim children had been taken on trips to Saudi Arabia. A third school regularly broadcast a call to Muslim prayer over the school’s loudspeaker in the playground while another school taught in biology that “evolution is not what we believe”.

VATICAN - Pope Francis told Israeli and Palestinian leaders they "must respond" to their people's yearning for peace "undaunted in dialogue" during an unprecedented prayer meeting among Jews, Christians and Muslims at the Vatican on Sunday. The pope made his vibrant appeal to Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas at the end of a two-hour evening service in the Vatican gardens, an encounter he hopes will relaunch the Middle East peace process.

ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strongest coalition partner threatened to bring down the government if it tries to annex West Bank settlements following the breakdown of Mideast peace talks. Finance Minister Yair Lapid, speaking at the annual Herzliya Conference on politics and security, also challenged Netanyahu to reveal a map showing how he would delineate the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state. Lapid’s Yesh Atid party holds the second-greatest number of parliamentary seats after the prime minister’s Likud-Yisrael Beitenu alliance.

RUSSIA - Russian companies are preparing to switch contracts to renminbi and other Asian currencies amid fears that western sanctions may freeze them out of the US dollar market, according to two top bankers. “Over the last few weeks there has been a significant interest in the market from large Russian corporations to start using various products in renminbi and other Asian currencies and to set up accounts in Asian locations,” Pavel Teplukhin, head of Deutsche Bank in Russia, told the Financial Times. Andrei Kostin, chief executive of state bank VTB, said that expanding the use of non-dollar currencies was one of the bank’s “main tasks”.

RUSSIA - Russia has given up on the so called group of seven plus Russia, the G8. Vladimir Putin has decided that membership does not have its privileges. “Such a format does not exist for now,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a local radio station in Moscow on Thursday. Leaders of the G7 — meeting in Normandy to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day, when allied troops stormed the beach of northern France to launch a war against Germany and Italy — declared in March that they would boycott the G8 summit in Sochi this month. Instead, they took their silver spoons and shared tea and talk in Brussels for a two-day G7 summit.

USA - US Banks enjoyed more or less steadily climbing, or rather soaring, deposits by Russian institutions and individuals, having tripled in just two years to $21.6 billion by February, according to the US Treasury.

But in March, the Ukrainian debacle burst into the foreground with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which wasn’t very well received in the West. The US and European governments rallied to the cause, and after vociferously clamoring for a sanction spiral, they actually imposed some sanctions, ineffectual or not, that included blacklisting some Russian oligarchs and their money. So in March, without waiting for the sanction spiral to kick in, Russians yanked their moolah out of US banks. Deposits by Russians in US banks suddenly plunged from $21.6 billion to $8.4 billion. They yanked out 61% of their deposits in just one month! They'd learned their lesson in Cyprus the hard way: get your money out while you still can before it gets confiscated.

MIDDLE EAST - A former Hamas government spokesman revealed on Sunday that Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has said in private meetings he is lying in public statements to "trick the Americans." The spokesman, Ihab al-Ghussein, wrote on Facebook that "behind closed doors," Abbas had said "when I go out and say that the government is my government and it recognizes 'Israel' and so on, fine - these words are meant to trick the Americans." Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) translated the Facebook post. "Guys, let me (continue) saying what I say to the media. Those words are meant for the Americans and the occupation (ie Israel), not for you. What's important is what we agree on among ourselves… Don't harp on everything I tell the media, forget about the statements in the media," Abbas told Hamas, according to Ihab al-Ghussein.

GERMANY - Germany's foreign intelligence agency officially lifted the lid on some of its worst-kept secrets Friday, acknowledging that half a dozen facilities around the country are in fact spy stations — as anyone with Internet access could already figure out. The Federal Intelligence Service, known by its German acronym BND, maintained the facade for decades that it had nothing to do with sites bearing cryptic names such as "Ionosphere Institute." But amateur sleuths long suspected their true identities and posted them on websites such as Wikipedia. The subterfuge wasn't helped by the fact that some sites sport unmistakable signs of spy activity, like the giant golf ball-shaped radomes in Bad Aibling, near Munich — until now, the "Telecommunications Traffic Office of the German Armed Forces."

USA - Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) could pay more than $12 billion to settle probes by the US Justice Department and a number of states into the bank's alleged handling of shoddy mortgages, the Wall Street Journal said on Thursday, citing people familiar with the negotiations. At least $5 billion of that amount is expected to go toward consumer relief consisting of help for homeowners in reducing principal amounts and monthly payments, and paying for blight removal in struggling neighborhoods, the paper said, citing people with knowledge about the issue. The second-largest US bank faces multiple government probes over the underwriting, sale and securitization of residential mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.

USA - US authorities negotiating with BNP Paribas over alleged sanctions violations at one point suggested that France's biggest bank pay a penalty as high as $16 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. While the sources said that number was only proposed as a negotiating tactic in response to an offer from BNP of about $1 billion, the dollar figures being thrown around demonstrate what bankers and their allies say is an alarming trend of ever-increasing record penalties. A $16 billion settlement would have pushed BNP's penalty above the biggest ever for a bank - JPMorgan Chase & Co, which paid $13 billion last year to resolve a number of civil mortgage-related allegations.

USA - Amid all of the attention that the Libor rate-fixing scandal has received, the world is completely overlooking a far worse Libor “scandal” that has been occurring right under our noses this entire time. Though the Libor rate-fixing scandal is certainly no trivial matter, the losses caused by it amount to a few tens of billions of dollars, which is ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the global economy and financial system. In addition, as dramatic as the term “rate-fixing” sounds, the Libor manipulations only moved the Libor rate by a few basis points (basis points are .01 percentage points) for just a few brief moments at a time. The Libor manipulations did not move the rate by significant magnitudes such as from 5 percent to 2 percent, for example.