ISRAEL - On Friday, as throngs marched through the streets of Jerusalem neighborhood Shuafat for the funeral of murdered Arab teen Mohammad Abu Khdair, ISIS style black flags were aloft, Jerusalem Post editor Seth Frantzman reported on Twitter, posting an accompanying picture of the scene. The bloodthirsty terror group has gained prominence in recent months for capturing large swaths of western Iraq after three years of fighting in the ongoing Syrian civil war. ISIS has developed a reputation for particular brutality including beheadings, mass murder and crucifixions. Last week, its flags were seen aloft at the Gaza funeral of an Islamist militant targeted by Israel in an airstrike for his involvement in launching rockets at the Jewish state.

RUSSIA - The current global events clearly demonstrate that the unipolar model of the world has failed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday. “There can hardly be doubts that the unipolar world model failed. Louder and louder, peoples and countries express their determination to choose their destiny on their own, to preserve their civilizational and cultural identity, which contradicts the West’s attempts to keep dominating in the military sphere, politics, finance and economy, ideology,” Putin said at a meeting with Russian ambassadors and permanent envoys. Putin drew on the fact that Russia’s Western partners have spent the past two decades trying to convince Moscow of their good intentions and readiness to jointly build a strategic partnership, when, in fact, they have expanded NATO and pushed the military-political space they control closer to Russian borders.

CHINA - China designated a clearing bank in Seoul for yuan transactions in South Korea on Friday, coinciding with a visit by President Xi Jinping, as Beijing promotes greater use of its currency overseas, AFP reports. China's central bank has authorised the Bank of Communications, the country's fifth largest lender, to undertake yuan clearing business in the South Korean capital, the People's Bank of China (PBoC) said in a statement. The announcement came as Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up a state visit to South Korea on Friday. China is seeking to make the yuan - also known as the renminbi - used more internationally in keeping with the country's status as the world's second biggest economy behind the United States.

VATICAN - Pope Francis says abandoning the traditionally Christian practice of not working on Sundays isn't such a good change. Francis on Saturday traveled to Molise, an agricultural region in the heart of southern Italy where unemployment is chronically high. While he said poor people need employment to have dignity, he disagreed with opening stores and other businesses on Sundays as a way to create jobs. Francis said the priority should be "not economic but human," adding "maybe it's time to ask ourselves if working on Sundays is true freedom." He also said that spending Sundays with family and friends is an "ethical choice" for faithful and non-faithful alike.

GERMANY - The CDU and Green party-affiliated foundations have been holding conferences with prominent experts to continue Germany's campaign by elite circles to promote a more aggressive German global policy. Ultimately, a "public discussion of the security policy's soft and hard factors" must take place, insisted the head of the Policy Department of the German Defense Ministry, Monday at a conference held by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

GERMANY - With some experts warning that the “golden decade” of rapid growth in German-Chinese trade and dealings may be ending, Chancellor Angela Merkel embarks this weekend on her seventh visit to China, accompanied by top people from German business who, surveys indicate, are still markedly more optimistic about China than are their European counterparts. Like many people raised in Communist East Germany, where travel abroad was tightly restricted, Ms Merkel is an avid traveler. As a trained scientist, she is also keenly interested in innovation, and in China she always travels to Beijing and at least one other province for a firsthand look at joint ventures and new Chinese research and enterprises.

GERMANY - An employee of Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the United States, two politicians with knowledge of the affair told Reuters on Friday. The German Federal Prosecutor's office said in a statement that a 31-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of being a foreign spy, but it gave no further details. Investigations were continuing, it said. The case risks further straining ties with Washington which were damaged by revelations last year of mass surveillance of German citizens by the US National Security Agency, including the monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. The man, who is German, has admitted passing to an American contact details about a special German parliamentary committee set up to investigate the spying revelations made by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the politicians said.

MIDDLE EAST - A group of jihadists claiming to be part of ISIS have vowed to invade Spain along with all other “occupied lands” in a video posted on the web. The men say Spain is the land of their forefathers and that they are prepared to die for their nascent Islamic State. The video of two men claiming to be militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has taken the Spanish media by storm. The minute-long footage shows them speaking in Spanish, and saying that ISIS will take over Spain. “I tell you, Spain is the land of our forefathers, and, Allah willing, we are going to liberate it, with the might of Allah,” says one of the men. He adds that the group won’t stop at Spain and intends to spread its Islamic Caliphate across the world.

USA - The American city of Phoenix, Arizona, was hit by a massive dust storm on Thursday evening, ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations. The blinding winds left thousands of homes without power and grounded numerous flights at the city's international airport.

GERMANY - Hessy Taft's image appeared on a Nazi family magazine in 1935 and on postcards used throughout the Third Reich. It turns out the Nazis' "perfect Aryan" baby isn't actually, well, Aryan. Hessy Taft, the winner of a 1935 contest commissioned by the Nazis in Germany to find the most beautiful Aryan baby, recently revealed that she is Jewish.

MIDDLE EAST - Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction has launched a full campaign calling for a violent "revolution" against Israel, following the abduction and murder of a young Arab resident of Jerusalem on Wednesday. The murder of Mohammed Abu-Khder (16) has been jumped upon by many claiming it was Jewish "revenge" for the murder of the three Israeli teens, with Arab mobs attacking police and destroying parts of Jerusalem's light rail, causing substantial damage which could take months to fix, and leaving several Jerusalem suburbs without little or no public transport.

UK - The world could be "cast back into the dark ages of medicine" where people die from treatable infections because deadly bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, David Cameron has warned. The Prime Minister has called for governments and drug companies around the world to work together to "accelerate" the discovery of a new generation of antibiotics. His intervention comes amid fears in the medical profession that manageable illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis could kill huge numbers of people like they did early in the twentieth century. About 25,000 people die annually across Europe because of infections that are resistant to antibiotic drugs, Mr Cameron said.

ISRAEL - Palestinian sources cited by Walla reported that Israel has delivered an ultimatum to Hamas to stop rocket fire from Gaza within 48 hours. Otherwise, Israel warned, it intends to launch an attack on Gaza. The sources said that the threat was delivered by Egyptian Intelligence to the head of Hamas's political bureau, Musa Abu Marzuk, who is in Cairo. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at a Fourth of July reception at the US Ambassador's residence that Israel is preparing for two possibilities. “One – that the fire will stop and then our operations will also stop; and the second, that the fire will continue and then our forces will act forcefully.”

GERMANY - The Bundestag has marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. One hundred delegates from neighboring and partnering countries, most prominently from France, were in attendance. On Thursday morning, members of the German parliament gathered in commemoration of World War One. The president of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, opened the service. "What does the First World War have to do with us?" Lammert asked numerous times during his speech. World War One, also known by such names as "The Great War" or "The War to End all Wars," was not so easy to define for Germans, Lammert said, pointing to the catastrophic consequences that the "last conventional and first modern war" had on the country.

UK - UK airports on alert over 'different and disturbing plots to bring down jets' amid fears terrorists are working on an undetectable bomb which could be surgically implanted in the body. Britain's airports are on terror alert amid fears Islamist groups are working on an undetectable 'stealth bomb' which could be implanted inside an extremist's body to bring down an airliner. Heightened precautions were brought in at terminals around the UK this morning after reports that two terror networks are trying to produce a new explosive, which may have already been tested by militants in Syria. It is feared the groups may be putting together a 'non-metallic' device, which could potentially be surgically-implanted inside a terrorist's body and would be almost invisible to current security checks. ABC News quoted a US defence insider as saying the new threat is 'different and more disturbing' than attempted attacks in the past.