UK - UK interest rates will start to rise this year and peak at 5 per cent, far higher than the Bank of England expects, according to Gerard Lyons, Chief Economic Advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson. Speaking after last night’s warning from Mark Carney, in which the Bank of England Governor indicated rates could go up “sooner than the markets expect”, Mr Lyons’ words will further fuel speculation the first rate increase since July 2007 will happen later this year.

UK - Genetically modified crops could be planted in the UK as soon as next year after the Government backed an EU ruling allowing their introduction to English farming. Two strains of maize resistant to weedkiller were given the go ahead after the EU decided individual member states should be given the power to opt out of using the GM crop. A vote by agricultural ministers in Luxembourg gave de facto approval to the mutated crops but delayed giving the green light to all commercial GM growing for 10 years as it needed all member states to agree.

USA – The Department of Defense has disbursed some funds to universities so that scientists might study the dynamics of civil unrest — and how the US military might best respond. It’s called the “Minerva Research Initiative,” and it’s a program that was kicked off in 2008 to “improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US,” The Guardian reported.

UK - How dull our lives would be without Richard Dawkins! Like grit in an oyster, the author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion and Britain’s foremost militant atheist keeps producing one pearler after another. After writing, haranguing, and tweeting for years against the villainy of God and religion, he is now taking the battle to the last bastion of “supernaturalism”: fairy tales. Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival in England last week, Dawkins said, “Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are?”

USA - Every second of every stupid day in this brain-dead nation, the insipid overlords of America’s inane corporate news media puts out the same message: extremism is extremely bad. 9/11? Carried out by Muslim extremists. The couple who murdered two police officers in Las Vegas this week? Right-wing, anti-government extremists. Washington gridlock? A Republican Party taken over by intransigent extremists (the Tea Party).

IRAQ - Islamist militants in Iraq have seized two new towns, widening their control after threatening to move on Baghdad. The Sunni-led Islamists advanced into Saadiya and Jalawla in Diyala province and surrounding areas as security forces abandoned their posts. The US says it is looking at "all options", including military action, to help Iraq fight the insurgency. The pledge came after the cities of Mosul and Tikrit fell to the militants, but the advance has slowed down. Led by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the insurgents have threatened to push to the capital, Baghdad and regions further south dominated by Iraq's Shia Muslim majority, whom they regard as "infidels".

IRAQ - The internal strife and civil war spurred by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is escalating rapidly. The Sunni militia that has staked a claim to areas on both sides of the Iraq/Syria border is expanding its military campaign against the Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as it moved southward on Wednesday following a decisive victory in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday. Known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the powerful military force has proven capable of overwhelming the Iraqi Army as it has gained ground in numerous provinces in the west and north-central regions. Iraq's parliament declared a national state of emergency at the request of al-Maliki on Tuesday. Government officials in the country are now calling for a large-scale and immediate military response to the ISIL threat.

IRAQ - Iraq has privately signaled to the Obama administration that it would allow the US to conduct airstrikes with drones or manned aircraft against al Qaeda militant targets on Iraqi territory, senior US officials said Wednesday. Iraq has long asked the US to provide it with drones that could be used in such strikes, but Washington has balked at supplying them, officials said. And just like the war in Iraq, "Bush's war" according to so many, this is about to come back with a vengeance - this time under a Nobel peace prize winning president, and what makes it most grotesque is that this time the US will be waging combat against a military force that it is itself training and arming in neighboring Syria. Which of course is good news for the military-industrial complex and US Q3 GDP, if not so good for millions of innocent civilians soon to be known as "collateral damage."

EUROPE - Leaders of the main political groups in the European Parliament on Thursday (12 June) told EU council chief Herman Van Rompuy to nominate Jean-Claude Juncker as the next EU commission president or face an "institutional crisis". Van Rompuy received the group leaders separately in his EU council office throughout the day. All groups, except for the British Conservative-dominated ECR said EU leaders should nominate Juncker or the EP will veto any other candidate. "Our core message is that there is a broad majority for Juncker in the EP and we expect Van Rompuy to propose him to EU leaders on 27 June," centre-right EPP group leader Manfred Weber said in a press conference after meeting Van Rompuy. He said any other name coming out of the council would go against the promise made to voters that the top candidate (Spitzenkandidat) of the party who wins the elections becomes commission president.

USA - Stunning defeat of Eric Cantor is a reminder of Tea Party's power and its determination to defeat Republicans seen as dealing with the White House. President Barack Obama's few remaining hopes of finding compromise with Republicans were in tatters today after the Tea Party claimed a stunning victory over the party's more moderate leadership. In one of the greatest upsets in recent US political history, Eric Cantor, the deputy Republican leader in Congress, was defeated by a little-known conservative academic.

UK - The number of schoolchildren speaking English as a second language has soared by a third in just five years amid fresh concerns that immigration may be putting a strain on the education system. Official figures show that the number of pupils who speak another language in the home exceeded 1.1 million for the first time this year. The proportion of non-native speakers in primary schools has now reached almost one-in-five following a year-on-year increase over the last decade. In some parts of London, children with English as a second language now make up as much as three quarters of the school roll, with around half of pupils being classified in towns and cities such as Slough, Luton and Leicester. Children who do not have English as their mother tongue generally perform as well as native speakers and are valued in many schools for creating linguistic and cultural diversity.

UKRAINE - Ukraine’s volatility exacerbates the risk for the country’s 15 Soviet-style nuclear reactors, warn German experts. They demand more attention for the country where the world’s worst nuclear accident took place. The recent news of a water shortage due to a broken pipeline affecting thousands in strife ravaged Eastern Ukraine spells trouble for the safety of the country's nuclear power plants. That's because the security and reliability of a country's critical infrastructure like its electrical power and water grid is essential to safely run nuclear reactors. "Once you have decided to operate a nuclear power plant or like in this case a nuclear reactor park, you must guarantee you don't have unstable social situations and you definitely can't have a war," Michael Sailer, chairman of the German Nuclear Waste Management Commission and member of the German Reactor Safety Commission, told DW.

USA - It is hard to put into words how reckless they [global banks] have been. At the low end of the estimates, the total exposure that global banks have to derivatives contracts is 710 trillion dollars. That is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable. And the reality of the matter is that there is really not all that much actual "money" in circulation today. In fact, as you will read about below, there is only a little bit more than a trillion dollars of US currency that you can actually hold in your hands in existence. If we all went out and tried to close our bank accounts and investment portfolios all at once, that would create a major league crisis.

RUSSIA - Russia has deployed 24 Baltic Fleet warships and vessels, along with heavy fighter jets and bombers, as reinforcement for military drills in the westernmost Kaliningrad region while NATO stages its own war games across the border. On Wednesday, Moscow deployed a grouping of 24 Baltic Fleet warships and vessels for military drills in its exclave on the Baltic Sea coast. The drills were launched on Tuesday in response to NATO’s international drills – Saber Strike 2014 and BALTOPS 2014 – near Russia’s border. "The squadrons of warships are performing the tasks of ensuring the protection of the state border of the Russian Federation, protecting marine communications, providing for shipping safety, organizing air defense, and searching for and detecting surface ships and submarines of the imaginary enemy," said Russia's Defense Ministry.

USA - President Barack Obama said in a recent address that he’s become ‘frustrated’ with America’s lack of movement toward civilian disarmament. As police in the USA become increasingly militarized (with Obama’s help), the president is using crime as an emotional tool to soften Americans toward gun control. Surrounded by heavily armed body guards, Obama said on June 10th: “Couple of decades ago, Australia had a mass shooting, similar to Columbine or Newtown. And Australia just said, well, that’s it, we’re not doing, we’re not seeing that again, and basically imposed very severe, tough gun laws, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since. Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country that would put up with this.”