ISRAEL - An ongoing partial strike of the Foreign Ministry may make Pope Francis's first visit to Israel in May "impossible," according to Yigal Palmor, a spokesman of the ministry. "Imminent planned visits by foreign leaders, including (British Prime Minister) David Cameron next week or the pope in May, will be complicated, and perhaps impossible," Palmor told AFP on Friday. The strike stepped up a notch on Tuesday, potentially shutting off the state to diplomatic visits. The pope announced his visit in January. In response to the strike the Vatican has clarified it has no plans to cancel the trip. Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi noted the strike "is likely to cause complications in preparing for the trip. There's nothing more to it."

MIDDLE EAST - Palestinian sources report that at a meeting that was held about a week ago in Paris between Secretary of State John Kerry and Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Abu Mazen, the Palestinian leader threatened to ‘turn over tables’ and sent Kerry back to the United States to draw up a new peace proposal. Senior officials in the PA asserted, “The American proposal is outrageous”. According to the newspaper [“Al-Quds”], the American proposal included the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, the maintenance of Israeli control over the Jordan Valley, and the necessity of the presence of an international security force in the new Palestinian state as its conditions. In addition, Kerry pressured Abu Mazen to allow for the annexation of 10 Israeli settlements as part of the land swaps within the agreement.

USA - Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee slammed the White House for its weakness on foreign policy, saying the United States' standing in the world has diminished under President Barack Obama and its next leader faces a tough task in rebuilding America's might. He pointed to the current situation in Ukraine during his 10-minute speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Maryland, and blasted Obama for allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin to take advantage of our weakness. He said, "No one trusts us, no one listens to us, no one respects us, no one fears us." Huckabee, who is weighing a possible presidential campaign in 2016, says the United States has reduced its military power and other nations have taken advantage of it.

LIBYA - Western countries voiced concern on Thursday that tensions in Libya could slip out of control in the absence of a functioning political system, and they urged the government and rival factions to start talking. Two-and-a-half years after the fall of former leader Muammar Gaddafi, the oil-rich North African state is struggling to contain violence between rival forces, with Islamist militants gaining an ever-stronger grip on the south of the country. "The situation in Libya is very worrying," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters on the margins of a conference in Rome to discuss the Libyan crisis. He said the uncertain security position, especially in the south, worsened an unstable political situation which required Libyan political forces to come together to reach a solution.

NORTH KOREA - China declared a "red line" on North Korea on Saturday, saying that China will not permit chaos or war on the Korean peninsula, and that peace can only come through denuclearization. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic supporter, though Beijing's patience with Pyongyang has been severely tested following three nuclear tests and numerous bouts of saber rattling, including missile launches. "The Korean peninsula is right on China's doorstep. We have a red line, that is, we will not allow war or instability on the Korean peninsula," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters on the sidelines of China's annual largely rubber-stamp parliament.

USA - The Dalai Lama delivered the opening prayer in the US Senate Thursday morning, noting that he is a "simple Buddhist monk - so pray to Buddha and all other gods." He read his prayers in both English and his native tongue: "With our thoughts, we make our world. Our mind is centered and precedes our deeds. Speak or act with a pure mind. And happiness will follow you, like a shadow that never leaves. May there be joy in the world, with bountiful harvest and spiritual wealth," he said, when he reverted to English. "May every good fortune come to be. And may all our wishes be fulfilled."

GERMANY - School students should be given a "European Union education" in the classroom to tackle "ignorance" and growing public Euro-scepticism, according to an election manifesto signed by Angela Merkel and eight other of Europe's leaders. The European People’s Party (EPP), the EU’s biggest political grouping, is convinced such a programme would improve the public image of Brussels, which has never been lower. Its manifesto for May’s European elections calls for the introduction of “EU education in schools across Europe in order to prepare the next generation for future challenges and to nurture a European approach”.

ISRAEL - A close aid to Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday that the gaps between Israeli and PA negotiators only have widened in seven months of talks. Quoted by The Associated Press (AP), Mohammed Shtayyeh said an extension of talks appears unlikely after what is bound to be a missed April 29 deadline for a framework deal.

UK - The links between Government ministers and food manufacturers, and indeed between scientists who are supposed to advise the Government and the food manufacturers, are nothing short of astonishing. For these are the same food manufacturers who have been adding extra sugar to processed foods, confectionery and fizzy drinks for decades. It is the closeness of those links that are widely blamed for a compulsory food traffic-light system — an idea once enthusiastically championed by the Food Standards Agency and designed to give shoppers an idea of the nutritional value (or not) of the item they were about to buy — quietly dying a death soon after the Coalition came to power.

UK - The shrinking value of money means that £9.48 in 1973 would have the same spending power as £100 in your wallet today. An analysis of retail prices found the cost of a pint of lager is 20 times what it was 40 years ago – from 14p to £2.87 now. A loaf of bread is now priced at 12 times the 11p it was in 1973, while the price of a pint of milk has risen around sevenfold, from 6p to 46p. A detached house would set a 1970s buyer back £16,980, but a family now looking for a similar home faces paying 18 times this, at £305,391. Meanwhile, the price of putting fuel in your car has risen 17 times since the early 1970s. A litre of diesel’s price has grown to around £1.41, from 8p in 1973. Overall, the value of money has dropped by 91 per cent over the last 40 years, according to Lloyds Bank’s analysis of Office for National Statistics figures.

USA - The nation’s top military commander painted a dark picture Tuesday of future US defense capabilities clouded by shrinking Pentagon budgets and adversaries’ technological advances that he said would erode American battlefield superiority. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided his sobering views as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated evaluation of US military strength issued every four years. Dempsey predicted that it would become increasingly difficult to balance the competing demands of protecting allies abroad, securing Americans at home and deterring future wars.

USA - By a more than three-to-one margin on Tuesday, communities voting on whether to support the creation of a public bank in Vermont approved the idea, calling for the state legislature to establish such a bank and urging passage of legislation designed to begin its implementation. The specific proposal under consideration, Senate Bill 204, would turn an existing agency, the Vermont Economic Development Authority, into a public bank that would accept deposits and issue loans for in-state projects. Currently, the only state in the US to maintain a public state bank is North Dakota. However, since the financial downturn of 2008, other states have looked into replicating the North Dakota model as a way to buck Wall Street while taking more control of state and local finances.

USA - Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded Chicago’s credit rating, citing the city’s unfunded pension liabilities. The agency announced Tuesday it’s lowering the rating on $8.3 billion in debt from A3 to Baa1, putting it only three notches above junk-bond status. Moody’s gave Chicago a negative outlook indicating another downgrade could occur if there’s no pension fix. Moody’s says the rating “reflects the city’s massive and growing unfunded pension liabilities.” Moody’s says those liabilities “threaten the city’s fiscal solvency” unless major revenue and other budgetary adjustments are adopted soon and are sustained for years to come.

UK - Sixteen people have died in Manchester in the past four years from a highly resistant superbug spreading across North West England, figures show. Klebsiella Pneumoniae Carbapenemase (KPC) is causing more concern and far more cases than better known superbugs. Some 1,241 patients were affected within the Central Manchester University Hospitals trust area from 2009 to 2013, the figures show. Despite infection control, the numbers have increased year on year.

EUROPE - Sensitive information should not be sent over public wi-fi hotspots, to avoid hackers stealing it, Europe's top cybercrime police officer has warned. Troels Oerting, head of Europol's cybercrime centre, told BBC Click people should send personal data only across networks they trusted. He said the warning was motivated by the growing number of attacks being carried out via public wi-fi. The attacks meant that data swapped when people communicate with a bank, shop via the web or log in to social media sites could be captured by attackers. "Everything that you send through the wi-fi is potentially at risk, and this is something that we need to be very concerned about both as individual users but also as police," he told Click.