ISRAEL - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has "no choice" but to step up its air strikes on Gaza, after an Egyptian truce initiative failed to halt militant rocket attacks on Israel. "When there is no ceasefire, our answer is fire," Mr Netanyahu said. Hamas, which controls Gaza, has not responded officially to the initiative. Its military wing has rejected it. Israel launched its Operation Protective Edge eight days ago to try to halt the rocket attacks. It took six hours for the first attempt to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to founder. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that if the rocket fire continued, Israel would hit back hard - and now it has.

ISRAEL - IAF to stop striking Gaza at 9:00 am - despite Hamas's refusal to adhere to the terms and conditions. The Security Cabinet has agreed to Egypt's proposal for a cease-fire with Hamas, beginning at 9:00 am IST - despite the fact that Hamas categorically rejected the offer on Monday night. "The cabinet has decided to accept the Egyptian initiative for a ceasefire starting 9 am today," Ofir Gendelman, spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Twitter. The decision came as a surprise to both ministers and political analysts, after Hamas categorically rejected the notion of a ceasefire just hours before. "A ceasefire without reaching an agreement is rejected. In times of war, you don't cease fire and then negotiate," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told AFP.

ISRAEL - The Hamas ‘Surprise’ Israel Knocked Out of the Sky – but Its Potential as a Weapon Is Frightening. An aerial drone launched by Hamas was knocked out of Israeli airspace Monday by an Israel Defense Forces Patriot missile battery, marking the first reported use by Hamas of an unmanned aerial vehicle as a weapon and a frightening development for Israel. “It was shot to smithereens,” IDF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner told the New York Times. Hamas’ military wing the Al Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility for sending a “number of drones” into Israel and described the innovation as one of the “surprises” it has been preparing for Israel, the New York Times reported. “The Hamas group claimed its engineers had manufactured three types of unmanned aircraft, including those that could be armed or used as a guided missile, a kind of suicide drone. The claims of armed drones or overflights of Israeli military installations could not be confirmed,” the Post reported.

LIBYA - Libya is considering a deployment of international force to re-establish security amid a flare-up of violence in Tripoli which saw dozens of rockets destroy most of the civilian aircraft fleet at its international airport. “The government is looking into the possibility of making an appeal for international forces on the ground to re-establish security and help the government impose its authority,” a government spokesman, Ahmed Lamine said in a statement. The statement comes after deadly clashes led to the closing of the main international airport in Tripoli on Sunday, which came under a renewed rocket attack on Monday. According to the country’s government at least seven people have been killed at the airport since Sunday, and around 90 percent of aircraft parked at the hub were destroyed or made inoperable. The control tower was damaged as well as several Grad rockets struck the transit hub.

USA - On June 28, 1914, a chauffeur panicked after a failed bomb attack on his boss, took a wrong turn and came to a complete stop in front of a café in Sarajevo where Gavrilo Princip was sitting. Princip, discouraged at the apparent failure of the planned murder, seized the unexpected opportunity and fired the shots that began the First World War, a cataclysm which claimed over nine million lives, ended four empires and set in motion events from the Communist Revolution in Russia to the rise of Nazi Germany.

EUROPE - What we now call the European Union began rather modestly in 1952 with the European Coal and Steel Community, at the time called “the first step towards a more united Europe.” Five years later, five European nations signed the Treaty of Rome and a true European Economic Community was born. Today it’s called the EU, and it has 28 member states, a European Parliament and a (somewhat) common currency. But it’s still not a kind of United States of Europe. Bit by bit, though, integration is happening, and the latest involves electricity.

GERMANY - The German government has instructed its intelligence agencies to limit their cooperation with their American counterparts “to the bare essentials” until further notice, according to media reports. The move follows news that Berlin requested on Thursday the immediate removal from Germany of the United States Central Intelligence Agency chief of station — essentially the top American official in the country. The request came after two German citizens, one working for the BND, Germany’s main external intelligence organization, and one working for the country’s Federal Ministry of Defense, were allegedly found to have been secretly spying for the US.

MIDDLE EAST - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas is to ask the United Nations to put the state of Palestine under "international protection" in light of the worsening violence in the Gaza Strip, the PLO said Sunday. "President Abbas will present a letter to the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Robert Serry, addressed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to officially put the State of Palestine under the UN international protection system and to form a legal committee for immediate follow-up," it said in a statement.

FRANCE - Clashes erupted in Paris on Sunday as thousands of people protested against Israel and in support of residents in the Gaza Strip, where a six-day conflict has left 168 Palestinians dead. Several thousand demonstrators walked calmly through the streets of Paris behind a large banner that read "Total Support for the Struggle of the Palestinian People". But clashes erupted at the end of the march in Bastille Square, with people throwing projectiles onto a cordon of police who responded with tear gas. A small group tried to break into two synagogues in central Paris, a police source told AFP. Prime Minister Manuel Valls condemned the attempted synagogue stormings "in the strongest possible terms". "Such acts targeting places of worship are unacceptable," he said in a statement.

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.