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.

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.”