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 There was a run on two of the nation’s largest banks — several hundred million dollars had been withdrawn in a matter of hours.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).

MIDDLE EAST - The latest mini-war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas began with the Gaza-based militants eager to strike a blow, but the escalation that followed has left them physically and diplomatically exposed, with no ready way out. Hamas has sent its rockets streaking into Israel after a month of army raids in the occupied West Bank - in search of three missing Israeli teenagers - that landed more than 900 Palestinians in jail, many of them Hamas members.

ISRAEL - Despite the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant's (ISIS) statements that it will not join the attack on Israel for now, a new video by the Sunni Jihadist group claims to show its terrorists are in fact firing rockets on Israel. In the video, which was uploaded to YouTube, alleged members of ISIS's "Bayt el-Maqdis" (Jerusalem) unit in Gaza can be seen firing rockets towards Israeli civilian centers. A total of eight rockets are seen being fired by the group in the video, a drop in the ocean to the hundreds fired by Gaza terrorist groups in recent days. At the very end of the clip, the rocket launchers are seen being attacked by the IAF shortly after launching. Apparently an Israeli fighter drone patrolling the area located the launchers and opened fire on them.

USA/ISRAEL - The US is prepared to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, President Barack Obama has said. His comments came in a phone call with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr Netanyahu earlier said Israel's operation was progressing as planned with "more stages expected". The air strikes on Gaza, and militant rocket fire into Israel, continued overnight.

USA - It was 1971 when President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one in the United States.” With those words, Nixon ushered in the “war on drugs,” the attempt to use law enforcement to jail drug users and halt the flow of illegal substances like marijuana and cocaine. Thirty years later, another president, George W Bush, declared war on another word: terrorism. But the war on drugs hadn’t ended yet. Instead of one failed war replacing another soon-to-be-failed war, both drugs and terrorism remain targets for law enforcement and military action that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and have cost billions of dollars.

AUSTRALIA - A judge in Australia has been criticised after saying incest may no longer be a taboo and that the community may now accept consensual sex between adult siblings. Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and "unnatural" but is now widely accepted. He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.

Dr Cathy Kezelman, an advocate for preventing child sex abuse, said incest was horrific, regardless of the ages of those involved. "The relational betrayal of the horrors of incest between a brother and sister of any age is abhorrently criminal," she told The Sydney Morning Herald.

GERMANY - Germany today asked the CIA's station chief in Berlin to leave the country in a dramatic rebuke to Washington after its security services uncovered two cases of alleged American spying in a week. The American intelligence official was told he was no longer welcome in a public signal of Angela Merkel's fury over US spying on Germany. It is highly unusual for a European ally to oust a CIA station chief and the move is the most dramatic response from Germany since it was disclosed last year that the NSA was monitoring Mrs Merkel's phone. "The representative of the US intelligence services at the United States embassy has been asked to leave Germany," a German government spokesman said. "The request occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors as well as the questions that were posed months ago about the activities of US intelligence agencies in Germany."