ISRAEL - In a heated attack on John Kerry’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Steinitz accused the US Secretary of State of holding a gun to Israel’s head in the peace negotiations. Kerry triggered a wave of criticism in Israel when he said there is “talk of boycotts” if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not come to an end.

EUROPE - EU Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen threatened Israel Monday over the outcome of peace talks."There is a risk that you will face increasing isolation," Faaborg-Andersen said, in a statement to Channel 2. "Not necessarily as a result of European Union policy, but Israel has to realize that economic relations are established by private economic actors - be it consumers, be it companies - and we, as a government, have no influence on the private decisions that private citizens and companies are making." Faaborg-Andersen's comments came just days after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Israel of similar consequences if peace talks fail, in remarks widely perceived as a threat against Israel.

GERMANY - German President Joachim Gauck has said his country should put aside World War II anxieties and play a bigger military role abroad. “While there are genuine pacifists in Germany, there are also people who use Germany’s guilt for its past as a shield for laziness,” he said on Friday (31 January) at the Munich Security Conference, a yearly meeting of European and US security chiefs. “This [guilt] gives Germany a questionable right to look the other way … Restraint can be taken too far.” Gauck indicated that Germany’s role in leading the EU on the financial crisis could be repeated in leading the way on EU military co-operation. “We’re not calling the alliance with the US into question. But we’ve observed symptoms of stress and uncertainty about the future,” he said of Nato.

CHINA - Speaking for the first time since her departure from Fitch last year, Chu, who has taken a new job at Autonomous, the respected independent research firm, says she remains adamant that a Chinese banking collapse of some description remains not just an outside chance, but a certainty. “The banking sector has extended $14 trillion to $15 trillion in the span of five years. There’s no way that we are not going to have massive problems in China,” she says. As the problems in the Chinese financial system become harder to ignore, it is likely Chu’s opinions are going to be increasingly sought as investors look for insight on what is going on in the world’s second-largest economy.

USA - Emerging markets faced intense pressure on Thursday after the US Federal Reserve cut its stimulus further, with currencies in India, South Africa and Turkey failing to rally despite interest rate rises. Asian shares fell heavily and European stocks also retreated, extending a global rout driven by worries about emerging markets. Concerns were stoked when the US central bank further reduced its quantitative easing (QE) stimulus overnight.

USA - Despite great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death. The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

CHINA - China has forced another foreign correspondent to leave the country, the latest in a series of expulsions that have heightened tensions between western media companies and the Communist Party. The reporter, Austin Ramzy of The New York Times, left Beijing on Thursday for Taipei. Chinese officials had declined to issue new work documents to Ramzy, a longtime resident of China who has in the past renewed his credentials without incident. Ramzy will join a growing group of reporters that have been denied access to the mainland.

ARGENTINA - Argentina's president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her ministers blame foreign 'vultures' for an economic meltdown as power cuts hit Buenos Aires and goods vanish from supermarket shelves. The sudden dollar scarcity on Argentina's exchange market sent the peso's official value crashing to eight pesos to the dollar, while the "blue" illegal rate shot up to nearly 13 pesos. Retailers immediately marked up their prices to reflect the new reality. In some cases, items were pulled en masse from the shelves, as retailers pondered how much to mark up their goods.

UK - Will the emerging market rout be different this time? The fear is it won't. Defending a currency is a tricky business. Take Thailand in 1997, where massive overspending left it with a huge current account deficit and high interest rate, inflated to protect a currency pegged to the dollar. The dominos are lining up. Argentina gave up trying to support the peso last week, resulting in a double-digit fall against the dollar, while Russia has stormed into action, pledging “unlimited” intervention to prop up the rouble. Talk of capital controls is now increasing, especially in Turkey, which has no more aces up its sleeve.

CHINA - The growing problems in the Chinese banking system could spill over into a wider financial crisis, one of the most respected analysts of China’s lenders has warned. Charlene Chu, a former senior analyst at Fitch in Beijing and now the head of Asian research at Autonomous Research, said the rapid expansion of foreign-currency borrowing meant a crisis in China’s financial system was becoming a bigger risk for international banks. George Magnus, senior independent economist at UBS, said the Chinese banking system resembled that of Japan during the 1980s in the years leading up to the country’s financial crash.

IRAN - A top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards boasted Saturday that his forces have plans in place to attack the United States from within, should the US attack the Islamic Republic.

ISRAEL - On an ancient hill dotted with 1,000-year-old olive trees, Israelis are busy excavating in search of the first palace of King David in the heart of the West Bank. The Jewish settlers who started the dig with the help of Israel's Antiquities Authority say they want to turn it into an archaeological park to celebrate its historical significance.

UKRAINE - The ‘progressive’ Western political elites and the establishment journalists who act as PR agents for them would like us to think that they are unequivocally opposed to neo-Nazism, homophobia, racism and far-right political extremism.

UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, better known as UNRWA, was designed to provide aid and services to Arab refugees and their descendants from the time of Israel’s founding.

BERLIN, GERMANY - Just before the Munich Security Conference opened, Germany's Foreign and Defense Ministers have suggested the possibility of expanding EU military interventions. It is "rightfully expected that we will become involved" declared Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Military means must not "be banned from consideration." Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen had just declared, "Europe makes no progress in the global power play, without military means."