UK - Barclays Bank has been fined £26 million by UK regulators after one of its traders was discovered attempting to fix the price of gold. The trader, who has been sacked, exploited weaknesses in the system to profit at a customer's expense, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said. The incident occurred in June 2012, the day after the bank was fined a record £290 million for attempting to rig Libor.

VATICAN - The Vatican's Secretary of State made a dramatic revelation ahead of Pope Francis's visit to Israel next Sunday and Monday, declaring that the pope will talk about the "Palestinian people's right to have a homeland, sovereign and independent." Cardinal Pietro Parolin holds a role in the Vatican City State, located in the Italian capital of Rome, equivalent to that of a prime minister. Speaking to Vatican television on Thursday, he said "we know that the pope is going to a particularly suffering land," reports AFP. "I really hope that the fruit will be to help politicians and all people of goodwill take courageous decisions on the path to peace," Parolin stated.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - When Labor Party Knesset member Yehiel (Hilik) Bar joined Likud Knesset member Miri Regev in sponsoring a bill granting freedom of movement, religion and worship on the Temple Mount to Jews and Arabs alike, he knew the initiative would not pass quietly. But it seems he underestimated its explosiveness and the extent of the commotion it would cause. The fuss did not die down even after he decided to draw back his support from the proposed legislation. It will likely require the intervention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

ISRAEL - The commander of the Israeli Air Force on Wednesday described a top-to-bottom change that has led to a 400 percent increase in the IAF’s firepower over the past two years, drastically shortening the time it would take Israel to win a future war. “Quantitatively, not qualitatively, the air force is capable of striking in less than 24 hours what once took 33 days to hit,” Major General Amir Eshel said, referencing the 34-day war against Hezbollah in 2006. And the qualitative increase, he said, was far greater. The week-long campaign against Hamas and other terror organizations in Gaza in November 2012, he added, “would [today] take less than 12 hours.” Speaking of Hezbollah, he said that the damage Israel was capable of inflicting on the Shiite Lebanon-based organization, in terms of its military infrastructure, “would take decades to restore. Not one year, not two years and… in scope that is beyond understanding.”

UK - Britain's huge debt interest bill remains on course to hit £1 billion a week this year, after official data showed the Government borrowed £3 billion more in April than forecast by analysts. The larger-than-expected deficit helped to push up public sector net debt to £1.27 trillion in April, or 75.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The interest on Britain's debt pile is expected to hit £52.1 billion this year, according to projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) - or the equivalent of £1 billion a week. Britain's budget deficit remains one of the largest in the developed world.

RUSSIA - With the China-Russia deal conducted outside the dollar system we see the beginning of the de-dollarization and de-Americanization of the world, former assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts told RT.

ISRAEL - During his tour of the Holy Land which starts on Saturday, Pope Francis is scheduled to meet with a leader from the Palestinian Authority who once called for the extermination of Jews. According to the Jewish & Israel News source, Algemeiner.com, the Pope will meet Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the most senior religious figure in the Palestinian Authority, who is described by Palestinian Media Watch as having "an ongoing record of vicious Antisemitic hate speech, which has been condemned internationally."

ISRAEL - Pope Francis will arrive this weekend in the land where Christianity was born — and where Christians are disappearing. This ancient community has dwindled to around 2 percent of the region's population as economic hardship, violence and the bitter realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have sent Christians searching for better opportunities overseas. The Christian exodus, underway for decades, has reached critical levels in recent years. Emigration is a central concern to local Vatican officials, who are trying to stave off the flight with offers of jobs, housing and scholarships.

ISRAEL - Two days before Pope Francis arrives in the Holy Land, Israelis and Palestinians were putting the finishing touches Thursday on a flurry of festive preparations for the visit. In Jerusalem, preparations for the pontiff's arrival are somewhat more muted, overshadowed by a stepped-up security and police presence. Some 8,000 extra police officers are to be deployed on Jerusalem's streets for the duration of the visit. The three-day visit kicks off Saturday when Francis flies to Jordan. He will travel on to Bethlehem Sunday morning, then to Israel, where he will spend the rest of the day and Monday in Jerusalem before heading home.

EUROPE - Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a radical shake-up of the EU on the eve of European parliamentary elections expected to result in big gains for populist parties. In a clear bid to rally voters to his centre-right UMP party, which is under threat of losing in France to the anti-EU National Front, Mr Sarkozy broke a two-year virtual silence on political issues to issue a ringing defence of the need for the union to preserve peace in Europe and beyond. Those who want Europe to break up “forget the lessons of history and will lead us to the abyss”, he wrote in a long article published in Le Point magazine and the German newspaper Die Welt on Thursday. “France and Europe are inseparable geographically, historically, culturally and, now, politically. Europe should be vibrantly saluted and supported.”

USA - In 2009, a French court found Monsanto guilty of lying; falsely advertising its Roundup herbicide as "biodegradable," "environmentally friendly" and claiming it "left the soil clean." We're now starting to understand just how false such statements are. For example, last summer, a groundbreaking study revealed a previously unknown mechanism of harm from glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.

UK - There are several billion barrels of oil in shale rocks under large parts of southern England, a report published later is expected to say. But getting the oil out of the ground will involve the controversial process known as fracking. The study by the British Geological Survey (BGS) covers areas including Sussex, Hampshire, Surrey and Kent. The government is planning to offer more compensation for towns affected by fracking, according to press reports. A series of reports has concluded that locally, fracking for oil and gas is relatively benign, if done with care. But reports continue to emerge from the USA and Australia about careless fracking polluting air and water.

USA - The head of the FBI says he understands why people worry about the scope of the government's powers, and in fact, he agrees with them. “I believe people should be suspicious of government power. I am,” Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning. “I think this country was founded by people who were worried about government power so they divided it among three branches,” he added. Though the controversial surveillance raised privacy concerns and made people fret that the government was snooping on their behavior, Comey said that the FBI’s programs are run responsibly. He added that those operations had also helped to track down kidnappers and save children.

CANADA - The Anglican and United Church of Canada dialogue has issued an interim report that proposes “to explore what steps can be taken to make a mutual exchange of ministries between our two churches normative”. As a first step, the dialogue members propose to explore the interchangeability between the order of priests in the Anglican Church and ordained ministers in the United Church. The interim report, prepared in January, has been received by the respective churches and was published May 20. Approving the proposal, the two churches have asked the dialogue to report on its progress in time for the Anglican General Synod in 2016.

CHINA - There was some trepidation yesterday when, after the first day of Putin's visit to China, the two countries did not announce the completion of the long-awaited "holy grail" gas deal, and fears that it may get scuttled over price negotiations. It wasn't: moments ago Russia's Gazprom and China's CNPC announced, that after a decade of negotiations, the two nations signed a 30 year gas contract amounting to around $400 billion. And with the west doing all it can to alienate Russia and to force it into China's embrace, this is merely the beginning of what will be a far closer commercial (and political) relationship between China and Russia.