EUROPE - Everything is weird about this week’s Euro-election, and nothing weirder than the possibility that the party that comes top of the poll will be one that hasn’t got a single seat in Parliament. Our other parliament, in Brussels and Strasbourg, plays an important part in producing a huge proportion of the laws we must all obey. Yet on Thursday we shall only be choosing a bunch of unknown nonentities to represent us there, commanding just 9 per cent of the votes that can pass or reject those laws – and, hardly surprisingly, the majority of the British electorate will not even bother to turn out to vote for something they don’t begin to understand.

CHINA - China is stockpiling oil for its strategic petroleum reserve at a record pace, intervening on a scale large enough to send a powerful pulse through the world crude market. The move comes as tensions mount in the South China Sea, and the West prepares possible oil sanctions against Russia over the crisis in Eastern Ukraine. Analysts believe China is quietly building up buffers against a possible spike in oil prices or disruptions in supply. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its latest monthly report that China imported 6.81 million barrels a day in April, an all-time high. This is raising eyebrows since China’s economy has been slowing for months, with slump conditions in the steel industry and a sharp downturn in new construction.

ISRAEL - Hundreds of Palestinians attending the funerals of two Palestinians on Friday rioted and clashed with Israeli security forces near the Beitunia checkpoint, north of Jerusalem. The two Palestinians had been shot dead on Thursday when demonstrators clashed with Israeli security forces during a "Nakba Day" protest marking the "catastrophe" of Israel's inception. Riots also erupted on the Temple Mount on Friday after the weekly prayer services, as dozens of Arab youths clashed with Israeli security forces stationed at the volatile holy site.

TEMPLE MOUNT, ISRAEL - Member of Knesset Issawi Farij (Meretz) sharply attacked Secretary-General Hilik Bar of the Labor Party, Sunday, after Bar expressed support for a bill by Likud Beytenu Knesset member Miri Regev to regulate Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. Farij said Bar's "populist statement ignores the explosiveness of the site and the inherent dangers" in the proposal, citing steps by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term and afterward by then opposition leader Ariel Sharon in 2000. Calling the status quo of Muslims praying on the Temple Mount and Jews praying at the Western Wall the key to preserving quiet, he called Bar's support a "dangerous provocation" reserved until now for "Regev and her friends," and cited Labor leadership for not condemning it.

TEMPLE MOUNT, ISRAEL - The Jewish people will be allowed to pray freely at their holiest site, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, according to a controversial bill proposed by Labor MK and former Jerusalem city councilman Hilik Bar. Bar, who sponsored the bill together with Likud MK Miri Regev, wants prayer for Jews to be legalized and set in a way that would not harm the Muslim religious Wakf and would be sensitive to Islam.

EUROPE - The European Union must pull closer collectively and establish a powerful military presence, so it can act as a ​"​moral anchor​"​ to the United States, the economist Kenneth Rogoff has warned. Speaking ahead of next week​'​s European elections, Mr Rogoff, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, stated the EU really should strive to grow to be additional ​"​like a single country​"​.

GERMANY - Helmut Schmidt, 95, claimed the crisis in Ukraine is "increasingly comparable" to the period leading up to the 1914-1918 Great War. And he blamed the European Commission and NATO for seriously misreading the worst East-West tension since the end of the Cold War. "I think very little of talking up the threat of World War III, and especially of demands for more money to arm NATO," he told German newspaper Bild. "But the danger that the situation gets ever more tense, as it did in August 1914, is growing day by day."

GERMANY - Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, deemed the father of national reunification, on Thursday urged closer EU integration and warned that "Europe remains a question of war and peace". In a rare interview ahead of May 22-25 European parliamentary elections Kohl, one of the key architects of the continent's push toward unity, also said Europe must be "a matter of the heart" for its people.

USA - Speaking at a gathering of local atheists, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheists in a chemistry lecture hall at Stanford University, David Silverman, president of American Atheists, a national advocacy group for nontheists, announced Tuesday (May 6) that his New Jersey-based organization would launch the first television channel dedicated to atheism in July. “Why are we going to television?” he asked the audience, a mix of about 100 students and people from the local community. “It’s part of our strategy of going where we are not.” Silverman, 49, said the television channel, which will be available via Roku, an Internet streaming player that attaches to televisions like a cable box, will run atheist content seven days a week, 24 hours a day. He estimated it will reach 7 million households and will be free, at least initially.

UK - Only a strong single European state would be able to fend off the threat from Russia and solve the euro crisis, a prominent supporter of a federal Europe tells Channel 4 News.

GERMANY - Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has been portrayed as Hitler’s daughter. And her country has been painted as “an imperial power that will not be loved or admired by the rest, but hated and resisted”, in a warning by George Soros, the financier, “because it will be perceived as an oppressive power”. His is not a lone voice of complaint. Indeed from Rome to Dublin, from Athens to Madrid, there has been a mounting chorus of disapproval directed at Germany over the terms it imposed - as the biggest lender - when helping out stricken European economies, especially Greece, Spain and Cyprus.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - One of the greatest infringements on civil rights in the Western democratic world has yet to gain the much deserved attention of human rights groups. It is time to let Jews pray on the Temple Mount. One need not agree or identify with Feiglin or Glick in order to accept that they have a basic right to freedom of religion. In fact, the infringement on human rights here is so clear that one must wonder why human rights organizations are not lining up to condemn the Wakf for stopping Jewish prayers on the Temple Mount.

RUSSIA - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Ukraine is on the brink of civil war, making it difficult to hold free and fair elections later this month. "When Ukrainians kill Ukrainians I believe this is as close to a civil war as you can get," Lavrov said in an interview with Bloomberg television. Lavrov added that "in east and south of Ukraine there is a war, a real war, with heavy weaponry used. And if this is conducive to free and fair elections then I don't recognise what free and fair is." Ukraine is due to hold crunch presidential elections on May 25.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - An imam at the Al Aqsa Mosque atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount has publicly urged the armies of the Arab world to invade Israel thus fulfilling the great Muslim longing of destroying the hated “Zionist entity.” In a televised sermon from Milan, Italy that was broadcast by Al Jazeera, Imam Raed Al-Daan said that Muslims everywhere are beginning to realize that “the Jewish state will vanish, and that the morning sun will rise on Palestine.” Al-Daan went on to state that he and the other clerics who serve on the Temple Mount as part of the Palestinian Authority-appointed Islamic Trust (Waqf) “await the legions of the conquerors. We await the armies from Tunisia, from Jordan, from Egypt, from Iraq, from the Maghreb (Morocco and Algeria), and from the Hijaz (Saudi Arabia).” To clarify that he was not speaking of a Palestinian state confined to the so-called “West Bank,” Al-Daan repeatedly referred to Muslims shouting victory cries from Israeli cities such as Jaffa, Haifa, Beit Shean, Lod and Ramle.

LOS ANGELES, USA - Thousands of people fled raging wildfires in southern California which destroyed homes and triggered evacuations at a nuclear power plant, a military base and a Legoland amusement park. The blazes, which also closed a major north-south highway, come amid record temperatures in the western US state, where the annual wildfire season typically starts much later in the year. California and other western US states are routinely hit with wildfires during the summer and fall, but blazes have occurred earlier in the year in recent times. Southern California including Los Angeles has been bracing for record temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) this week…