INDIA - As it happens, floccinaucinihilipilification is, in fact, an actual word. It means the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. Although, possibly thanks to its perplexing length and spelling, it doesn’t appear to have withstood the Latin language decline after the 18th century. Not yet impressed with the extent of their flowery vocabulary, Governor Shaktikanta Das then proceeded to address members with his speech on the state of the economy, and was quoted as saying: “I am not saying we maintain a Panglossian countenance and smile away every difficulty.” Panglossian, for those of us unfamiliar with the term, means being either naively or unreasonably optimistic. India has one of the largest economies in the world, but corruption and violence have cost the state dearly – an estimated $1 trillion in 2017 alone. After an already slow start to the year, financial projections say economic growth is set to decline yet again in the second quarter.

USA - Burmese pythons have no natural predators here. They do, however, have an uncanny ability to swallow things significantly larger than their own heads. Able to grow to more than 20ft in length, these stealthy invaders ambush their prey, squeeze until the prey stops breathing and then split their jaw apart to take the prey whole. Masters of camouflage, they can slide by an eagle-eyed biologist in just a few inches of water, and they can cover huge distances. One was recently discovered coiled up on a floating crab pot more than 15 miles out to sea. It’s estimated that there are tens of thousands of pythons now living in the Florida wild. A 2012 study in the Everglades suggested that a disturbing number of mammals have been swallowed by the invasive species: a spike in python sightings since 2000 coincided with a more than 90% reduction in raccoons, opossums and rabbits.

UK - Angela Merkel has challenged Boris Johnson to come up with a solution to avert a no-deal Brexit “in the next 30 days”, putting responsibility for stopping the UK crashing out of the EU firmly at the British prime minister’s door. After weeks of diplomatic tension, the German chancellor used her first face-to-face meeting with her UK counterpart on Wednesday to emphasise that Britain still has the power to resolve the crisis, suggesting that the backstop was “a placeholder that will no longer be necessary” if a solution to the impasse over the Irish border can be found.

GREECE - Yanis Varoufakis claimed that former French President François Mitterrand brought about the monetary union despite knowing it would create a “gigantic” economic crisis because he believed it was the only way to establish a federal Europe, throwback footage of an Oxford Union debate reveals.

GHANA - It's bad enough that drought-like conditions and rapid population growth have stoked a shortage of water and other vital resources in Ghana, a country that boasts one of the fastest growing economies on Earth (if it is still poor). But a banking crisis is just now roiling the country's economy, and has wiped out $1.6 billion. One couple, two of some 70,000 investors who were impacted by the shuttering of some 23 savings and loan companies described to Bloomberg how they deposited money in a short-term investment product, intended to help save money for the wife to finish her economic Phd, only to discover they may never get the money. The fallout for thousands of Ghanians will be financial crisis-level bad. "It’s cutting across all the finance houses and when it happens like that the government needs to step in to build confidence again," Mensah said. "There’s nothing we can do apart from making sure that we create that necessary environment to regain investors’ confidence again."

ITALY - Giuseppe Conte’s shock resignation as Italy’s Prime Minister has plunged the country into chaos - with former leader Matteo Renzi hinting he could even team up with rival Five Star Movement in a desperate bid to counter Lega chief Matteo Salvini’s resurgent Euroscepticism.

USA - More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the mortgage lending market nationwide — and in Baton Rouge — is reopening to risky, or unconventional, borrowers, as strict lending requirements put in place after the crisis begin to loosen. Home buyers lacking traditional employment, as well as those with low credit scores or high debt, are now finding it easier to obtain credit, The Wall Street Journal reports. Lenders are seeing an uptick in what’s called non-qualified mortgages, or non-QM, which don’t meet the postcrisis standards set by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for qualified mortgages. Borrowers took out $45 billion of these unconventional loans in 2018, WSJ reports, and such loans are on track to rise again in 2019. “It is fair to say that the credit box has opened more as we’ve gotten further and further away from the financial crisis,” Hodges says. “It has been a supplement to our business and has given opportunities to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get into a house.”

USA - Now even one of the biggest banks in the entire country is openly admitting that a “slowdown” is upon us. Over the past week or so, the mainstream media has been filled with chatter about the possibility of a recession and what that would mean for the Trump campaign in 2020, and we continue to get more evidence on a daily basis that economic activity really is decelerating. All of the numbers are pointing in the same direction… But first, I want to address what Morgan Stanley just released to the public. In a note that was just published, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist unequivocally stated that “the wheels for a slowdown are in motion”…The downtrend in some global economies is becoming contagious as weakness in the manufacturing sector begins to spread, according to Morgan Stanley, which warned clients that “the wheels for a slowdown are in motion.”

USA - So that just happened. Yes, President Trump, when asked about his ongoing trade war with China, deemed himself "the chosen one" when talking with reporters outside the White House on Wednesday. As Trump put it, when it comes to dealing with China's trade practices, "somebody had to do it." He then added "I am the chosen one" as he looked up to the sky. The odd comment comes just after Trump compared himself to some kind of deity in a Wednesday morning tweet. He seemed to be watching Wayne Allyn Root's show on the conservative network Newsmax, and tweeted a quote from Root saying that "the Jewish people in Israel love [Trump] like he's the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God." And the day before, Trump accused "any Jewish people that votes for a Democrat" of having "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty."

UK - August’s wet weather has brought this year’s wheat harvest to a “shuddering halt”, the deputy president of the National Farmers’ Union has said. Guy Smith said farmers outside the south-east of England had been left unable to start to harvest their crop because of heavy rainfall this month. Smith said farmers in the south-east had been able to begin their harvest earlier because of earlier hot weather, but that very little had been done in the west and north of England. “We are not quite sure what the impact is yet,” he said.

BRAZIL - We have never seen anything quite like this. This week the skies above Brazil’s largest city turned black in the middle of the afternoon due to the massive wildfires that are currently raging in that country. But the wildfires aren’t actually happening anywhere near São Paulo. In fact, the smoke that turned the skies black actually came from fires that were happening more than 1,000 miles away. Can you imagine how powerful the fires have to be in order to do that? And it isn’t just Brazil – right now horrific fires are scorching vast stretches of our planet from South America all the way up to the Arctic. Some of the fires are producing so much smoke that you can actually see it from space. And in the process, irreversible damage is being done to our ecosystems.

ITALY - Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced his resignation Tuesday, setting the country on an uncertain political course that could lead to a snap election or a new governing alliance. Conte’s move preempted a confidence vote that had been expected to take place 12 days after Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League party and Italy's interior minister, called for such a motion. Before announcing his resignation, Conte held a one-hour speech critical of Salvini, noting that the minister's decision to end the coalition government with the populist 5Stars Movement "has major consequences for the country and its economy." ...Hitting back at Conte's comments, Salvini said he would “do everything all over again” and defended his use of religion in political campaigns, which the prime minister had criticized. “I will always invoke the Virgin Mary to guide me,” he said.

VATICAN - Though usually styled as a pope of the peripheries, Francis has never made a speech directly sketching a social and political future for, say, Asia or Africa. Yet when it comes to Europe, he’s laid out such a vision five separate times - suggesting there’s a special place for the cradle of Western civilization in the heart of a pontiff from the edge of the world.

VATICAN - Pope Francis has further dug in his heels as the anti-populist pope, writing in the forward to a new book that organized citizens in action are the “antidote to populism.” In his forward to The Eruption of Popular Movements: The Rerum Novarum of Our Time, the pope waxes poetic, praising so-called “popular movements” as “a great social alternative, a profound cry, a sign of contradiction, a hope that ‘everything can change.’”

UK - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote a four-page letter to European leaders before a week of meetings with top EU officials and heads of state in what may be the last attempt to renegotiate Theresa May’s failed withdrawal agreement, only to see his proposals immediately rejected. With just ten weeks to go until the promised “do or die” Brexit day, on which the Prime Minister has vowed to take the country out of the European Union with — as is his preferred outcome — or without a deal, Mr Johnson called on European leaders to consider a renegotiation.