Between 500 to 1,000 prisoners have escaped as a result of the attack, “most of them were convicted senior members of Al-Qaeda and had received death sentences," said Hakim Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament. Suicide bombers drove cars with explosives into the gates of the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad on Sunday night, while gunmen attacked guards with mortar fire as well as rocket propelled grenades.

The attacks on the two prisons came a year after Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi front group announced that it would be targeting the country’s justice system. “The first priority in this is releasing Muslim prisoners everywhere, and chasing and eliminating judges and investigators and their guards,” said an audio message attributed to the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in July 2012.

Sunni rebels, including Al-Qaeda-affiliated, have been gaining strength and regularly striking Shiite Muslims and security forces. The violence has increased fears of a return to conflict in the country.

Euroarea: 92.2%, up from 88.2% a year ago

Greece: 160.5%, up from 136.5% a year ago

Italy: 130.3%; up from 123.8% a year ago

Portugal: 127.2%, up from 112.3% a year ago

Ireland: 125.1%, up from 106.8% a year ago

Spain: 88.2%, up from 73.0% a year ago

Netherlands: 72.0%, up from 66.7% a year ago

Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves, but regulators want to ban the practice. If companies published all of their clinical trials data, independent scientists could reanalyse their results and check companies’ claims about the safety and efficacy of drugs.

Under proposals being thrashed out in Europe, drugs companies would be compelled to release all of their data, including results that show drugs do not work or cause dangerous side-effects. While some companies have agreed to share data more freely, the industry has broadly resisted the moves. The latest strategy shows how patient groups – many of which receive some or all of their funding from drugs companies – have been brought into the battle.

The email describes a four-pronged campaign that starts with “mobilising patient groups to express concern about the risk to public health by non-scientific re-use of data”. Translated, that means patient groups go into bat for the industry by raising fears that if full results from drug trials are published, the information might be misinterpreted and cause a health scare.

Two helicopters and around 3,000 soldiers, police and rescue personnel have been deployed, reports say. Thousands of buildings collapsed or were damaged in the magnitude 5.98 and 5.6 quakes. More than 9,000 houses collapsed, the Dingxi municipal government said on its verified microblog account.

Rescuers were digging through rubble to look for victims buried by landslides and mudslides triggered by the quake. By 18:00 (10:00 GMT) on Monday, the region had experienced 422 aftershocks, including one with a magnitude greater than five, Xinhua reported.

The palace said in a statement that the duchess and the baby were "doing well" and would stay in hospital overnight. The news has been displayed on an ornate easel in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in line with tradition. A bulletin, signed by key medical staff, was taken by a royal aide from St Mary's to the palace under police escort.

It will now become illegal for Hezbollah sympathisers in Europe to send the group money, and enables the freezing of the group's assets there. Some member states had been wary of the measure, saying it could further destabilise the situation in Lebanon. The BBC's Chris Morris in Brussels says some states had also argued it would be difficult to distinguish fully between the group's military and political wings. The US, which has blacklisted Hezbollah for many years, welcomed the EU move.

An undisclosed number of F-15 and F-16 fighter jets from both sides are participating in the training event. It’s held at Uvda Base in the southern Negev Desert, and the United States European Command (EUCOM) is involved in the aerial war games which will focus on air-to- air combat maneuvers, mid-air refueling, bombing runs and other missions. The exercise comes after a two-day visit to Israel on July 14 by EUCOM’s Commander General Philip M Breedlove.

"The combined exercise is designed to improve the interoperability and cooperation between the Israeli and US air forces, and has been planned for more than a year," an Israeli military source told Xinhua. The US is Israel's biggest ally and international supporter. It supports Tel Aviv financially, militarily and diplomatically. Washington is providing billions of dollars of military aid to Tel Aviv annually. During Fiscal Year 2013, the US is providing Israel with at least $8.5 million per day in military aid.

The Arab push was a mainstay of recent annual meetings of the 159-nation International Atomic Energy Agency, where it was usually narrowly voted down by Israel's allies. It was suspended in 2011 and 2012, in what Arab nations viewed as a concession to keep hopes alive of high-profile talks on banning weapons of mass destruction from the Mideast.

That attempt, co-sponsored by the United States, Russia and Britain, was called off late last year. While Syria's civil war, nuclear tensions with Iran and other Middle East frictions were cited as the official motive for the cancellation, diplomats then acknowledged that the real reason was the failure to bridge Arab-Israeli differences.

Israel has long said that a full Palestinian-Israeli peace plan must precede any creation of a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The Israelis refuse to confirm or deny whether they have nuclear weapons. They also describe Iran and its alleged work on nuclear weapons as the real regional menace.

The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where Goldman stores customers' aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back–and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country.

Only a tenth of a cent or so of an aluminum can's purchase price can be traced back to the strategy. But multiply that amount by the 90 billion aluminum cans consumed in the United States each year — and add the tons of aluminum used in things like cars, electronics and house siding — and the efforts by Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years, say former industry executives, analysts and consultants.

Professor Tim Benton, head of Global Food Security working group, added there could be shortages in the UK in the future as the emerging middle class in south-east Asia sparks a revolution in "food flows" such as the trade in grain and soya around the world. Professor Benton, from the University of Leeds, told the Daily Telegraph: "Food is going to be competed for on a global scale. There's been a lot written about where food prices are going to go but they are certainly going to double, with some trebling. It's not just fruit and vegetables, but everything."

The shock forecast came as the chief executive of Tesco, Philip Clarke, warned the era of cheap food was over because of the forecast surge in demand. In an interview over the weekend, the supermarket chief said: "Over the long run I think food prices and the proportion of income spent on food may well be going up."

Food inflation in the UK has been running around 4 per cent for much of the year, and is among the highest in the EU after poor harvests last year and the rising cost of feed. Fruit prices in June were 7.5 per cent more expensive than a year ago. The UK already imports nearly half the food it consumes. Separately, Birds Eye warned this year's pea harvest could be hit by the heatwave, raising fears of higher prices for one of Britain's favourite vegetables.

The campaign to bring more transparency and accountability to the bank started under Benedict XVI, but has dramatically picked up momentum under Pope Francis since his election in March. The forensic review is being orchestrated by Ernst von Freyberg, a German banker, lawyer and member of the Knights of Malta chivalric order, who was appointed president of the bank earlier this year.

He has brought in forensic accounting experts from Promontory Financial Group, a risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firm which works in 50 countries. A dedicated group of around 15 experts from the company have moved into the bank's headquarters, a medieval tower within the tiny sovereign state. They are conducting detailed background checks on its 19,000 account holders, from priests, nuns and employees of the Vatican City State, to religious orders, Catholic charities and dioceses.

They are analysing around 1,500 accounts a month and since starting work in May have sifted through around a fifth of the bank's clients.They scrutinise the client's identity, check whether there are any other signatories on the account, and hunt for any suspicious financial activities.

"We have made enormous progress over the last 12 weeks in opening up to the world," Mr Von Freyberg told The Daily Telegraph from his office inside the bank. "Our work is to make the bank transparent. The second important element is to clean up our accounts. Promontory is conducting a full forensic review. We need to become compliant with international financial laws, including on money laundering. The Pope strongly endorses a Vatican bank that serves the Church and no one else."

What are the largest financial obligations the city is facing? Pensions. $3.5 billion worth of pensions, to be exact. Yes, Detroit owes former government employees - teachers, firefighters, cops and more - a whopping $3.5 billion in current and future payments. Except Detroit doesn't have $3.5 billion to pay the pensions. The city is in a state of economic collapse.

Remember, the US government used billions in taxpayer money to help General Motors move its manufacturing offshore to countries like China. As a result of economically-insane actions and criminal mismanagement, a city that used to be the hub of industrial output in America has become a ghost town of abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure and financial destitution.

Realizing it flat-out doesn't have the money to pay these pension obligations, Detroit had little choice but to declare bankruptcy in an effort to avoid paying the pensions. In effect, this is a confiscation of all pension funds by the government, meaning that retired cops, firefighters, school teachers and so on will never see a dime of the pensions they thought they had earned.

“I believe that over the long haul these radical Islamic regimes are going to fail because they don’t offer the adequate enfranchisement that you need to develop a country economically, politically and culturally,” Netanyahu told the German weekly Welt am Sonntag. He said he thought radical Islamism was wholly unsuited to dealing with a global economic and information revolution, and “goes right back to medievalism against the whole thrust of modernity, so over time it’s bound to fail”.

Jerusalem had previously responded more cautiously to Morsi’s removal by the Egyptian army on July 3. Netanyahu avoided any comment at the time, though a confidant expressed hope that Egypt’s new leaders may restore Cairo’s largely frozen contacts with Israel.

In the interview, Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s concern that the US-brokered 1979 peace treaty with Egypt remain intact, alluding also to a surge of violence in a Sinai border region since Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak was toppled from power in Egypt two years ago. “Preserving the peace with Egypt through these convulsions is of central importance to us,” Netanyahu said.

"This is a significant and welcome step forward,” he added. “The agreement is still in the process of being finalized so we are absolutely not going to talk about any of the elements now." The top US diplomat added that PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and Israeli negotiator Justice Minister Tzipi Livni would meet him in Washington "to begin initial talks within the next week or so."

In his brief comments to the press, Kerry praised the courage of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. "No one believes the long-standing differences between the parties will be resolved overnight or just wiped away. We know that the challenges require some very tough choices in the days ahead," he said, according to AFP.

US President Barack Obama on Thursday urged Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to resume talks. "The president encouraged Prime Minister Netanyahu to continue to work with Secretary Kerry to resume negotiations with the Palestinians as soon as possible," the White House said in a statement, after the two leaders spoke by telephone.

Meanwhile, a PA leader told the Associated Press on Friday that Kerry’s plan to get Israel and the PA talking again involves getting Israel to release hundreds of terrorist prisoners.

"In the curia there is talk of a 'gay lobby.' And it is true, it's there. Let's see what we can do," Francis said on June 6 to Latin American religious received in audience. And again: "It is not easy. Here there are many of the pope's 'bosses' with great seniority of service," he confided a few days ago to his Argentine friend and former student Jorge Milia.

In effect, some of these 'bosses' have hatched against Jorge Mario Bergoglio the cruelest and most subtle deception since he was elected pope. They kept in the dark important information that, if he had known it before, would have kept him from appointing Monsignor Battista Ricca "prelate” of the Institute for Works of Religion.

With this appointment, made public on June 15, Francis intended to place a trusted person in a key role within the IOR. With the power to access all of the proceedings and documents and to attend all of the meetings both of the cardinalate commission of oversight and of the supervisory board of the disastrous Vatican “bank.” In short, with the task of cleaning house. Before the appointment, Francis had been shown, as is customary, the personal file on Ricca, in which he had not found anything unseemly. He had also heard from various personalities of the curia, and none of them had raised objections.

Just one week after appointing the “prelate,” however, during the same days in which he was meeting with the apostolic nuncios who had come to Rome from all over the world, the pope became aware, from multiple sources, of some episodes from Ricca's past previously unknown to him and such as to bring serious harm to the pope himself and to his intention of reform.

Sadness over having been kept in the dark with regard to such grave matters, and the intention to remedy the appointment he had made, albeit not definitive but “ad interim": these were the sentiments expressed by Pope Francis once he was aware of those matters.