UK - The number of firms going into insolvency in England and Wales continued to rise in the second quarter of the year. The Insolvency Service said the number of firms going into receivership, administration or a company voluntary arrangement rose by 1.5% from the first quarter, to 1,310. That means company insolvencies were 6% up on a year ago.

SYRIA - Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is quitting as international peace envoy for Syria, frustrated by "finger-pointing" at the United Nations while the armed rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad becomes increasingly bloody. As battles raged on Thursday in Syria's second city, Aleppo, between rebel fighters and government forces using war planes and artillery, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced in New York that [Mr] Annan had said he would go at the end of the month. [Mr] Annan's mission has looked irrelevant as fighting has intensified in Damascus, Aleppo and elsewhere.

BERLIN, GERMANY - A European think tank, with ties to Germany, is calling for the establishment of an EU controlled "Grand Area" stretching from the Arctic, through Central Asia, the Middle East to North Africa.

ISRAEL - Time is running out for the international community to halt Iran's nuclear programme by peaceful means, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told US defence secretary Leon Panetta in Jerusalem on Wednesday.

SPAIN - Capital outflows from Spain quadrupled in May to €41.3 billion from May 2011 in a sign of waning confidence in the country's ailing banking sector. In the first five months of this year, outflows reached a record €163 billion, according to figures from the country's central bank.

GERMANY - There have been plenty of banking scandals, but none quite like this: Investigators and political leaders believe that the manipulation of the Libor benchmark interest rate was the result of organized fraud. Institutions that participated could face billions in fines and penalties.

LONDON, UK - So far $2 trillion has been created by the Fed and £375 billion by the Bank of England, but where has all this new money gone? The fact is that all the new money has been spent on buying bonds. QE has thus inflated bond prices and boosted bank profits, but achieved little else.

ISRAEL - Israel is likely to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in a matter of weeks, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy indicated, speaking to the New York Times. “If I were an Iranian, I would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks,” he warned. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned that any American plans must be carried out quickly. “Right now the Iranian regime believes that the international community does not have the will to stop its nuclear program,” he said. “This must change and it must change quickly because time to resolve this issue peacefully is running out.”

NORTH KOREA - Torrential rain and a typhoon in North Korea have killed 31 people and left 16 missing since Sunday, the official news agency reported on Wednesday. Earlier in July, a week of heavy rainfall and floods caused 88 deaths and left thousands homeless. It is feared that flooding in many parts of the impoverished country will deal a severe blow to North Korea's already malfunctioning economy. The storms destroyed 46,000 hectares of crops to exacerbate its already serious food shortage.

ISRAEL - Tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox rabbis attended ceremonies to mark the completion of their study of an ancient work of Jewish laws. The haredi men packed into two venues in Israel to celebrate a labour of love that has seen them learn one page of the 2,711-page Babylonian Talmud every day, a task that has taken seven-and-a-half years. In Jerusalem, around 20,000 rabbis attended Siyum HaShas at the Teddy Stadium for an event arranged by the Shas political movement.

USA - President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing US support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter said. [Mr] Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other US agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust [Mr] Assad. The White House is for now apparently stopping short of giving the rebels lethal weapons, even as some US allies do just that.

UK - UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage has claimed he "could not care less" who wins the next election as the UK is "governed from Brussels". Mr Farage, whose party wants to leave the European Union, suggested UK voters could no longer change governments but merely had a "choice of managers". He told the BBC the Conservatives were "virtually indistinguishable" from Labour and the Lib Dems on many issues. Mr Farage said there was "no way" the eurozone could survive in its current form and the exit of countries such as Greece and Spain would be a "liberation not Armageddon".

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO - Attacks against religious liberty are happening in several parts of the world. Sometimes with diatribes, other times with bloodshed, but also through laws that infringe people’s fundamental right to believe and follow a moral conviction received from their faith. In the United States a real “battle” is being waged between the present government and religious institutions who are fighting to prevent the implementation of the Health and Human Services mandate, which would oblige establishments run by religious entities to provide medications that threaten the life of unborn children and the principles of responsible parenthood.

USA - Wednesday morning's stock snafu had a familiar ring to it — mysterious volume in trades that simply could not have been made by a human comes surging out of nowhere, causing brief but acute market mayhem. By now, many players on trading floors have gotten used to the disruptions that can come from the highly automated new world of high-frequency trading. But that doesn't mean they like it. "This algorithmic trading is kind of out of control," Phil Silverman, managing partner at Kingsview Capital, said as officials at the New York Stock Exchange tried to make sense of what happened. "It seriously hurts investor confidence."

USA - A contract proposal from the Defense Department’s research arm DARPA revealed the Pentagon is looking to develop computer algorithms which would mine data from social media websites and use it to track and analyze the behavior of various criminal and terrorist groups. In order to understand group dynamics and “forecast trends”, the DOD hopes to understand how a group evolves, interacts, recruits, influences other groups and affect the opinions of individuals and communities.