USA - It's no secret that falling behind on student loan payments can squash a borrower's hopes of building savings, buying a home or even finding work. Now, thousands of retirees are learning that defaulting on student-debt can threaten something that used to be untouchable: their Social Security benefits.

GREENLAND - Greenland is a frontier Eldorado with untapped reserves of critical rare earths under the Arctic ice-cap but a nimble China has already stolen a march in getting access, EU industry commissioner Antonio Tajani warns. The Italian travelled to Greenland on June 16 to initial a deal for the European Union to share exploitation rights to rare earth metal ores in return for technological and environmental mining know-how.

JAPAN - While all eyes are on the absurdist tragicomedy playing out in Europe, Japan is quietly circling a financial black hole as its export economy is destroyed by its strong currency and the global recession.

ITALY - Wine bottles featuring Adolf Hitler on the label have been called "offensive" after complaints from US tourists in the Italian city of Garda. Michael Hirsch, a lawyer from Philadelphia, complained to local media after he found a supermarket near his hotel was stocking wine bottles with Hitler in various poses and another bottle featuring an image of Pope John Paul II.

UNITED NATIONS - The world could face a new food crisis of the kind seen in 2007/08 if countries resort to export bans, the UN's food agency warned on Thursday, after reporting a surge in global food prices due to a drought-fuelled grain price rally. A mix of high oil prices, growing use of biofuels, bad weather, restrictive export policies and soaring grain futures markets pushed up prices of food in 2007/08, sparking violent protests in countries including Egypt, Cameroon and Haiti.

UNITED NATIONS - The man from the United Nations is not sugar-coating the threat he says the world faces as a result of future food, water and energy shortages. "We know clearly that inequalities around food, water and energy wealth do create wars," says David Nabarro, UN special representative on food security and nutrition. "They may not always be the direct trigger... but unless they can be dealt with, the future for all of us is going to be very difficult." Global commodity prices have risen by 147% since 2000.

UNITED NATIONS - Global food prices sharply rebounded in July due to wild swings in weather conditions, a UN food and agricultural body has said. The rise has fanned fresh fears of a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis which hurt the world's poorest. Untimely rains in Brazil, drought in the US and production difficulties in Russia drove the rally, said the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Food prices jumped 6% in July from June.

USA - "Over 100 Million People in US Now Receiving Some Form Of Federal Welfare." "The federal government administers nearly 80 different overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs," the Senate Budget Committee notes. The data comes from the US Census’s Survey of Income and Program Participation and shows that nearly 110,000 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011. This is not just Americans, however. "These figures include not only citizens, but non-citizens as well," according to the committee.

LONDON, UK - UK investment bank Standard Chartered could be suspended from operating in New York after state finance regulators found hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions with Iran. "Motivated by greed, SCB acted for at least ten years without any regard for the legal, reputational, and national security consequences of its flagrantly deceptive actions," the New York Department of Financial Services says. The state regulator alleges the bank colluded on tens of thousands of transactions totaling more than $250 billion, earning Standard Chartered millions in fees.

UK - A website offering parents advice on childhood immunisation has been ordered to remove information about the MMR vaccine after renewing claims that it could be linked to autism. Babyjabs.co.uk said the vaccine "could be causing autism in up to 10% of autistic children in the UK". It also said: "Most experts now agree that the large rise (in autism) has been caused partly by increased diagnosis, but also by a real increase in the number of children with autism." A further claim said the vaccine-strain measles virus has been found in the gut and brain of some autistic children.

SWITZERLAND - Seventy years ago, on August 8, 1942, the World Jewish Congress representative in Geneva, Gerhart M Riegner, sent a telegram to British and American diplomats providing them with reliable information about Hitler’s plans to annihilate millions of European Jews. The telegram was the first authoritative word that the Nazis actually had a coordinated extermination plan. For the rest of his life, Riegner was haunted by the knowledge that many of the six million Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps could have been saved if the United States and Britain had acted promptly on his warning dispatched from Switzerland.

EUROPE - One of the founding fathers of the euro admits that some states may be forced to abandon the single currency, but insists Germany would be better off staying in. Otmar Issing, a former European Central Bank chief economist, warned that the eurozone could be heading towards fracture in a book called 'How we save the euro and strengthen Europe' published this week. "Everything speaks in favour of saving the euro area. How many countries will be able to be part of it in the long term remains to be seen," said Mr Issing.

UK - The Bank of England cut Britain's growth forecast from a predicted 0.8 per cent for 2012 to around zero today as it warned the country's economy would grind to a halt. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said that the threat from the eurozone, tough austerity measures and tight lending conditions have dragged on the British economy and stopped growth. In reaction to the comments, Jason Conibear, Sales & Trading Director at forex specialists, Cambridge Mercantile, said: "The wheels of the economy are well and truly off." The Bank of England hasn't got the foggiest how things might pan out in the economy, just that it's likely to be a long and slow process — something we all know anyway.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - M K (Member of Knesset) Zevulun Orlev of the Jewish Home party has called for massive reforms, including new Basic Laws, in order to establish a Third Temple in Jerusalem.

VATICAN - The Vatican is alarmed at what it sees as the erosion of religious freedom in the United States, warning of a threat of “unprecedented gravity” to the Catholic Church’s “liberty and public moral witness.”