USA - At least 35 people have been killed in tornadoes that ravaged neighbourhoods across six US states and the severe weather was set to continue with forecasters warning of hail the size of baseballs. In hard-hit Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, at least 17 people were killed on Monday, CNN television said.

USA - Secretary of State John Kerry says he chose the wrong word in describing Israel's potential future after coming under withering criticism for saying the Jewish state could become an "apartheid state" if it doesn't reach a peace deal with the Palestinians.

CHINA - As China boosts its military spending, rattling neighbours over territorial disputes at sea, an AFP investigation shows that European countries have approved billions in transfers of weapons and military-ready technology to the Asian giant. China's air force relies on French-designed helicopters, while submarines and frigates involved in Beijing's physical assertion of its claim to vast swathes of the South China Sea are powered by German and French engines - part of a separate trade in "dual use" technology to Beijing's armed forces.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL – Right-wing Jewish organizations distributed a leaflet across Jerusalem Monday urging Jews to join an emergency conference to discuss means to secure a Jewish presence inside the al-Aqsa compound. The conference, according to the leaflet, will be held Tuesday at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem to address how to guarantee a Jewish presence inside the holy place and to force Israeli police to open all gates to Jews and allow them to perform Jewish rites freely. The leaflet reads that workshops and panels will be held to listen to suggestions on how to impose “complete Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount.” Panelists in the conference include rabbis, Israeli ministers and Knesset members…

UK - Experts say humans are past their peak and that modern-day people are 10 per cent smaller and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. And if that’s not depressing enough, our brains are also smaller. The findings reverse perceived wisdom that humans have grown taller and larger, a belief which has grown from data on more recent physical development. The decline, said scientists, has happened over the past 10,000 years. They blame agriculture, with restricted diets and urbanisation compromising health and leading to the spread of disease.

UNITED NATIONS - Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, warned world nations on Tuesday that with the Hamas-Fatah unity pact, any funds they transfer to the Palestinian Authority (PA) may end up in the hands of Hamas and be used for carrying out terrorist attacks. “As we speak, millions of dollars are being channeled to the Palestinian Authority. Now that the Palestinians have signed a unity agreement, that funding will be at the disposal of Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization,” Prosor said in a speech before the UN Security Council.

ISRAEL - Hamas will never recognize Israel's right to exist or put its terrorist army under Palestinian Authority (PA) control according to a senior Hamas official, who on Tuesday revealed his version of the unity government deal reached last Wednesday. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared on Saturday that the new government will "obey my policy," and would "recognize Israel and reject violence and terrorism, and recognize international commitments," even as he re-declared the government would never recognize Israel as the Jewish state - a point Hamas concurred on.

USA - America’s gazillion-dollar Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to go virtually unseen when flying over enemy turf. But that’s not how things are working out. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — the jet that the Pentagon is counting on to be the stealthy future of its tactical aircraft — is having all sorts of shortcomings. But the most serious may be that the JSF is not, in fact, stealthy in the eyes of a growing number of Russian and Chinese radars. Nor is it particularly good at jamming enemy radar. Which means the Defense Department is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to a fighter that will need the help of specialized jamming aircraft that protect non-stealthy — “radar-shiny,” as some insiders call them — aircraft today.

NORWAY - More than 20,000 crops from more than 100 nations have arrived at a "Doomsday vault" in the Arctic Circle. The latest delivery coincides with the sixth anniversary of the frozen depository in Svalbard, which now houses more than 800,000 samples. The shipment includes the first offering from Japan, where collections were threatened by the devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The facility is designed to withstand all natural and human disasters.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud) sharply criticized US Secretary of State John Kerry Monday, over Kerry's remarks claiming that Israel is bound to become an "apartheid state" if it ceased conceding to the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s demands. Katz connected Kerry's comments to Holocaust Memorial Day. "Holocaust Day ceremonies. We hear terrible descriptions of how the Nazis and their collaborators, drenched in hate and race theory, turned millions of defenseless Jews into dust and ashes - and the world stood by in silence," Katz wrote, in a Facebook post.

USA - Conservative columnist George Will says global warming is just another way for liberals to get what liberals want: more government power. "Global warming is socialism by the back door," Will told The Daily Caller. "I mean, the whole point of global warming is it is a rationalization for progressives to do what progressives want to do, which is concentrate more and more power in Washington, more and more Washington power in the executive branch, more and more executive branch power in independent czars and agencies, to micromanage the lives of the American people." The reason, he explains, that global warming is such a good tool for liberals to give the government so much power is that "everything becomes involved in the exigencies of rescuing the planet."

USA - US Senator Rand Paul said he will introduce legislation that would cut US funding to the Palestinian Authority unless its government recognized Israel as a Jewish state. Paul (Republican for Kentucky), a likely contender for the Republican presidential nod in 2016, said the law was needed because of the interim governance agreement last week between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. He said he would introduce the legislation this week if there is no such statement after five weeks — the deadline set by Hamas and the Fatah faction to establish an interim government that would lay the ground for elections.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - Israeli authorities have arrested two young Jews after hanging a poster on one of the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Al-Quds (occupied East Jerusalem), calling for the eviction of Muslims from holy site to pave the way for the construction of the "Temple Mount." In a statement, the Israeli police said an Israeli court has banned the two from entering the Old City of Al-Quds for 30 days. In recent months, groups of extremist Jewish settlers, often accompanied by Israeli security forces, have repeatedly forced their way into the Al-Aqsa complex.

UK - European election candidate accused of religious and racial harassment after he repeats wartime prime minister’s words on Islam during campaign speech. Paul Weston was arrested on the steps of Winchester's Guildhall. Chairman of Liberty GB was detained on suspicion of racial harrassment. He quoted a passage from Winston Churchill's 1899 book The River War. The passage from the book, written by the wartime Prime Minister and first published in 1899, focuses on Churchill's observations about Islam while serving during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan.

USA - At least 17 people have been killed by tornadoes as a huge storm system swept across the central and southern United States. Sixteen of the victims were in several suburbs of Little Rock in Arkansas, officials said. One other person was killed in the town of Quapaw in the north-east of Oklahoma where officials said many buildings were badly damaged. Tornadoes also struck in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri.