CHINA - In its continued push to make the yuan a global currency, China’s central bank said Sunday it plans to designate clearing banks for its currency in Paris and Luxembourg, as the two financial centers battle with London to become the leading European offshore yuan-trading city. The People’s Bank of China announced the move in two separate statements Sunday. It didn’t say when it would designate the clearing banks. The French and Luxembourg central banks said Sunday they had signed agreements with PBOC allowing for greater cooperation in the oversight of their domestic yuan market. The weekend moves are the latest salvos in the race to win a major share of business in cross-border transactions in the Chinese currency.

UK - One of the Grand Narratives of our era is the substitution of debt for income: as earned income and disposable income have stagnated for 40 years, the gap between the rising cost of living and stagnant household income has been filled by borrowed money.

USA - The US government is militarizing social media through a combination of technology and social sciences, and Facebook is helping them. There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.

USA - A controversial scientist who carried out provocative research on making influenza viruses more infectious has completed his most dangerous experiment to date by deliberately creating a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system’s neutralising antibodies, effectively making the human population defenceless against its reemergence. There are many examples of other infectious agents escaping from labs. Smallpox virus escaped from Birmingham Medical School in 1978 and killed a medical photographer, Janet Parker, the last person to die of smallpox. Foot and mouth virus escaped in 2007 from a veterinary lab in Surrey and in 2004 the SARS virus escaped from a high-containment lab in Beijing, infecting nine people before it was stopped.

USA - Virtually all of the food imported into the United States reaches consumers without being inspected by the federal government, putting the nation at risk of exposure to food-borne illnesses. An investigation by FairWarning and Investigative News Network (INN) found that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors allow nearly all food imports to enter the country without undergoing visual examination. “The FDA has been outgunned and overmatched for years as a rising tide of imported food has found a place at the US dinner table,” FairWarning’s Rick Schmitt wrote. “Because of budget constraints ordinarily only 1 percent to 2 percent of food imports are physically inspected by the agency at the border each year.”

EUROPE - In a grotesque parody of a ceremony of a nation state, yesterday the European Parliament opened the new session of the assembly with a flag-raising carried out by soldiers of the Eurocorps – sometimes known as the Eurokorps – a 1,000-strong embryo EU army. Eight soldiers marched carrying a giant EU flag, which was raised to a military salute. A military band played what the EU elite want people to believe is “Europe’s national anthem,” but which in fact has no legal standing as an anthem and is merely a theme tune borrowed from Beethoven’s 9th symphony. Once it was raised, the EU flag stood at the front of and dwarfed the smaller flags of the 28 member states.

MIDDLE EAST - Muslims have been called to flock to the 'Islamic State' to gather for a battle against non-believers throughout the world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the 'Islamic State' stretching across Iraq and Syria, has vowed to lead the conquest of Rome as he called on Muslims to immigrate to his new land to fight under its banner around the globe.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - Israel is the most contested piece of real estate in the world. And the most contested piece of real estate within Israel is the Temple Mount in the old city of Jerusalem. Nearly every Jew believes that the Muslim Dome of the Rock, which dominates that thirty-six acre site, sits on the spot of all previous Jewish Temples, including the last one destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Many Jews and Christians believe that the temple must be and will be rebuilt on that spot. Therein lies the problem. Can you think of a faster way to start World War III?

UK - A British jihadist fighting in Syria has signalled that the UK should be afraid of the terror skills he has learnt after posting a photo of apparently homemade bombs. A Twitter account believed to belong to Nasser Muthana, 20, shows an image of a stack of improvised explosive devices in a garage. Alongside it is the stark warning: "So the UK is afraid I come back with the skills I've gained." Muthana, from Cardiff, appeared in a recruitment video for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis), last month. He describes himself as a "soldier of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham" on his Twitter profile and explains his beliefs as based on "a book that guides and a sword that supports it".

ARGENTINA - Argentina is poised to miss a bond payment today, putting the country on the brink of its second default in 13 years, after a US court blocked the cash from being distributed until the government settles with creditors from the previous debt debacle. The nation has a 30-day grace period after missing the $539 million debt payment to seek an accord with a group of defaulted bondholders led by billionaire Paul Singer’s NML Capital Ltd and prevent a default on its $28.7 billion of performing global dollar bonds. While both Argentina and NML have said that they’re open to talks, public comments signal little progress has been made so far.

USA - A menacing cloud of dust swirling above a parched field in Oklahoma is a disturbing reminder of the power of drought. All too often here, when the land is baked dry, the winds can strip away an inch of precious topsoil in as little as 24 hours, soil that has taken centuries to form. In the course of the most arid years, each acre of farmland can lose up to 70 tons of soil and then, wherever the dust is dumped, it can smother the crops it lands on. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, the most remote area of the state, recent rainfall has been so meagre that fears have been kindled of a return to the apocalyptic "Dust Bowl" scenes of the 1930s. Back then, agriculture collapsed and thousands of people left. Across many parts of the state, the drought is acknowledged to have started three-and-a-half years ago with between 30-50 inches less rainfall than on average over that time. "This has had a big economic impact on our economy - if you look at agriculture in 2011-12 alone there were $2 billion losses from crops and cattle."

USA - Throughout California's desperately dry Central Valley, those with water to spare are cashing in. As a third parched summer forces farmers to fallow fields and lay off workers, two water districts and a pair of landowners in the heart of the state's farmland are making millions of dollars by auctioning off their private caches. Nearly 40 others also are seeking to sell their surplus water this year, according to state and federal records. Economists say it's been decades since the water market has been this hot. In the last five years alone, the price has grown tenfold to as much as $2,200 an acre-foot — enough to cover a football field with a foot of water. Unlike the previous drought in 2009, the state has been hands-off, letting the market set the price even though severe shortages prompted a statewide drought emergency declaration this year.

USA - A recent article in the Daily Beast, “Pennsylvania. Oregon. Is Gay Marriage Unstoppable?” began with the observation that “The cascade of same-sex marriage rulings is now a torrent, each more quotable and image-ready than the last.” The piece ended with this conclusion:

“It’s no coincidence that the Oregon and Pennsylvania opinions both began with the stirring stories of the plaintiffs, long term gay couples denied the right to marry. On the surface, those stories are extraneous detail. But on close inspection, they are why the marriage tide won’t be turned.”

The author points out that it is images and stories that have driven recent pro-same-sex marriage rulings by state judiciaries — not the Supreme Court’s 2013 Windsor decision. The real story is this: it’s all about marketing and the cultivation of perceptions, coupled with intimidating tactics.

EUROPE - With Jean-Claude Juncker, Germany will have a politician as President of the EU Commission, who has always been a close ally. Juncker says that "since his earliest youth," he has "always felt particularly close" to Germany, an affinity that "grew even stronger" in later years. The former prime minister of Luxemburg is seen as former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's protégé and as the "mediator" in Germany's interests, wherein he had also won France over to accept Germany's standpoint on an economic and monetary union.

UK - In today’s Telegraph, David Cameron says that he opposed Jean-Claude Juncker as European Commission President because the appointment involved an effective transfer of power: national governments collectively surrendered their veto over who runs the European Commission to the European Parliament (in a process known as Spitzenkandidaten). This, Cameron argues, changes the constitutional and political balance in the EU in a way that the EU treaties didn't envision.