DENMARK - Denmark's Parliament has approved a new law that forces the country's churches to conduct formal gay marriages rather than just short blessing ceremonies. Under the new law, priests maintain the right to refuse to officiate the ceremony but the local bishop must arrange a replacement for their church. Denmark has offered civil unions to gay couples since 1989 and legalized gay marriage in 2012. The first church-conducted gay marriages could take place as early as this weekend.

IRAQ - Sunni militants have seized the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, officials and residents say. Militants led by ISIS - the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant - captured key cities including Mosul and Tikrit last week, but some towns were retaken. UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said the "apparently systematic series of executions [of non-combatants] almost certainly amounted to war crimes". The US earlier announced it might use drone strikes to halt the ISIS advance. "They're not the whole answer, but they may well be one of the options that are important," said US Secretary of State John Kerry.

EUROPE - The appointment of an arch-federalist as the European Commission president risks creating a ‘dramatic’ backlash that will hasten Britain’s exit from the EU, one of the country’s most senior diplomats has warned. A leaked document said Ivan Rogers, the UK’s permanent representative to the EU, believes the ‘die is cast’ in favour of Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg.

IRAQ - The Islamist militants taking over large parts of Iraq have social media skills that have seen them run progaganda rings around their internationally backed but less sophisticated opponents. Social media is proving a highly effective weapon in the armory of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis), striking fear far beyond the immediate battleground of northern Iraq. In the five days since Isis took the world by surprise with the sudden overthrow of the Iraq army in Mosul, the former al-Qaeda affiliate has posted a series of bloodthirsty messages and videos on social media including Twitter and YouTube. Such is the trepidation with which the posts are received that the Iraqi government has sought to block the Internet, to prevent the spread of Isis’s electronic terror.

USA - A California wildfire that has already destroyed three structures and blackened some three square miles of forest land near Sequoia National Park was threatening 1,000 more homes on Monday, officials said. More than 1,100 firefighters were battling the so-called Shirley Fire, which erupted on Friday evening on the park's outskirts northeast of Bakersfield and prompted the evacuation of several foothill communities. The flames jumped containment lines on Saturday, fueled by high winds and dry brush, according to the US Forest Service, despite the efforts of water-dropping helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. California’s fire season has been particularly severe this year, with one of the worst droughts in the state's history playing a substantial role in the size and number of wildfires across the state.

RUSSIA - Russia cut off gas to Ukraine on Monday in a dispute over unpaid bills that could disrupt supplies to the rest of Europe and set back hopes for peace between the former Soviet neighbours. After the weekend loss of 49 troops when pro-Russian rebels shot down a military transport plane, Ukraine's new president ordered his forces to retake full control of their border with Russia - saying this could then pave the way for negotiations. Calling time on weeks of wrangling in talks over natural gas supplies, Russia said Kiev had missed a Monday morning deadline to repay $1.95 billion owed for previous purchases and announced Ukraine would now only get gas it has paid for in advance. All that sent Russian financial markets lower on Monday and helped oil and gas prices climb in Europe that were already firm on fears of supply disruption due to violence in Iraq.

USA - South Texas church groups are working around the clock to shuttle what appears to be hundreds of illegal immigrants to housing facilities, benefiting the Obama administration in its deliberate plan to flood America with illegal aliens for political purposes. Infowars reporters are on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley, the continental United States’ southernmost region, where children and parents from Central America are pouring by the thousands past the US-Mexico border with hopes the US will soon grant them amnesty, which the Obama administration has practically done through selective enforcement of immigration laws.

USA - A moderate earthquake shook northwest Alaska on Monday, the fifth temblor of the same magnitude since April in an area with otherwise little activity, seismologists said. The magnitude 5.7 quake struck at 4:01 am Monday northeast of the village of Noatak, the Alaska Earthquake Center reported. As with other temblors in the earthquake swarm, the quake was felt in Noatak, an Inupiat Eskimo community of 560 people.

Before the swarm that began April 18, the last known quake of similar size in the area was a magnitude 5.5 quake that occurred in 1981, earthquake center seismologist Natasha Ruppert said. The swarm of magnitude 5.7 quakes is connected to more than 300 smaller aftershocks, some with magnitudes in the high 3s, Ruppert said.

ISRAEL - Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beytenu) slammed MK Hanin Zoabi in a Facebook post Tuesday, after the Israeli Arab MK justified the kidnapping of three yeshiva students by Hamas terrorists. "Not only are the kidnappers terrorists; Hanin Zoabi is a terrorist," Liberman said. He called for harsh judgement to be meted upon the MK. "The fate of the kidnappers and the fate of Zoabi, an inciter, should be the same." Earlier Tuesday, Zoabi stated to a shocked interviewer on Radio Tel Aviv that the "kidnappers are not terrorists" and that the kidnapping is a "last resort" for Palestinian Arabs frustrated by their lives. "They are not terrorists, I do not agree with you!" Zoabi fired. "They have seen no other way to change their reality and they have to resort to these measures until Israel sobers up a bit and feels the suffering of others."

USA - America, its government, businesses, and people - are nearly $60 trillion in debt, according to the latest economic data from the St Louis Federal Reserve. And private debt - not government borrowing - is the biggest reason for the huge deficit. Total US debt at the end of the first quarter of 2014, on March 31 totalled almost $59.4 trillion - up nearly $500 billion from the end of the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the data. Total debt (the combination of government, business, mortgage, and consumer debt) was $2.2 trillion 40 years ago.

UK - Tony Blair has been criticised over his claim that the current generation of political leaders is to blame for the violence engulfing Iraq. He said that the refusal last year to intervene in Syria’s civil war had created the conditions for the al-Qaeda aligned ISIS movement to flourish in that country before advancing into Iraq’s major cities.

IRAQ - Having already cemented its status as the Middle East's most feared Islamist militant organisation, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) appear well-equipped to claim another distinction: the world's wealthiest terror group. With this week's capture of Mosul, the al-Qaeda splinter grouping is believed to have come into undreamed of new wealth after making off with 500 billion dinars - £256 million - from the northern Iraqi city's central bank. The radical group is also said to have made off with a large amount of gold bullion from the bank, which was left unguarded in the chaos accompanying the militants' takeover of the city, which is one of Iraq's main oil centres. Atheel al-Nujaifi, the governor of Nineveh province, said ISIS members had also seized many more millions from banks across the region. The newly-acquired booty has elevated it to the world's best-resourced terror organisation, according to the International Business Times.

UK - I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad. He wrote an essay on his website on Sunday (reproduced in the Telegraph) that struck me as unhinged in its refusal to face facts. In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

UK - The alleged Islamic extremism seen in the 'Trojan Horse' scandal in schools in Birmingham is the same as that practised by Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist network, Tony Blair has said. The Trojan Horse 'plot' to bring hardline practices into Birmingham classrooms is part of a global extremist movement stretching from Britain to Africa to the Far East, the former Prime Minister claimed.

USA - The Obama administration is urgently considering an air assault on Islamic extremists that officials told the Guardian could be directed at targets in Syria as well as Iraq. President Obama announced on Friday that in the "days ahead" he will decide on a package of military and diplomatic options to halt the rapid advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), as the jihadist army's march from Syria through Sunni Iraq has upended Obama's achievement of extricating the US military from the Iraq conflict. Obama has ruled out sending US soldiers and marines back to the Iraqi streets they patrolled from 2003 to 2011, but signalled a new, reluctant openness to returning the US to war in Iraq.