World News

Fighting in Libya escalated Thursday as Islamic militias claimed to control the country’s second-largest city, Benghazi, while foreigners and U.N. workers continued their exodus in what increasingly is looking like a full-blown civil war, the Washington Times reported.

Financial markets went into a tailspin Thursday after Argentina defaulted on its debt, raising fears among skittish investors already fretting about weak corporate earnings growth, rising interest rates and an aging bull market.

China has acknowledged the existence of a new intercontinental ballistic missile said to be capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads as far as the United States, according to Agence France-Presse.

Standard & Poor’s declared Argentina in default after the government missed a deadline for paying interest on $13 billion of restructured bonds, Bloomberg reported.

Five days ago American Patrick Sawyer, 40, died of Ebola. However, days before his death he visited four airports and those in contact with him in Nigeria’s capital Lagos airport may be at risk spreading the disease globally. Now the hunt is on for 30,000 people who may be hosting the organism which kills 60 percent of its sufferers.

France has suffered the worst violence, but anti-Semitism is spiking across Europe, fueled by the war in Gaza. In Britain, the Community Security Trust (CST) says there were around 100 anti-Semitic incidents in July, double the usual number. The CST has issued a security alert for Jewish institutions. In Berlin a crowd of anti-Israel protesters had to be prevented from attacking a synagogue. In Liege, Belgium, a café owner put up a sign saying dogs were welcome, but Jews were not allowed.

A revival is taking place in the Islamic world as between two and seven million former Muslims have converted to Christianity, World Magazine reported.

A key bridge north of Baghdad, used by Iraqi forces as a supply line, was destroyed when Islamic State jihadists detonated a suicide truck bomb on Tuesday.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) blasted U.S. nuclear negotiations with Iran Tuesday, saying the rolling back of sanctions and allowance of the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism to enrich uranium constituted a “dangerous national security failure,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

President Obama along with Western Nations announced new, tougher sanctions against Russia on Tuesday targeting key sectors of the Russian economy: energy, arms and finance.

The State Department issued a dire report Monday on the state of religious freedom around the world, with an alarming warning that the Christian presence in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East is becoming a “shadow of its former self,” Fox News reported.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee has nearly completed “The Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act of 2014”, which will prevent the Lebanese terrorist organization from receiving financing from international institutions.

Iraq has effectively been split into three States, each representing ethnic factions, according to a former U.S. Ambassador.

The Obama administration has accused Russia of violating a 1987 nuclear missile treaty by testing a ground-launched cruise missile and says the U.S. is prepared for immediate high-level dialogue with Moscow over the matter, Fox News reported.

Last Thursday, a river in China mysteriously turned a blood red color. China’s environmental protection bureau has yet found the cause of the incident, but suspicions are the ‘blood red’ color was a result of illegal dumping.

The United Nations called South Sudan’s food crisis the ‘worst in the world’ and urged donor nations who pledged $618 million to make good on their promise.

Qatar recently cemented an enormous weapons deal with the United States. But this week, the tiny, resource-rich Gulf kingdom with out-sized geopolitical ambitions — and a seemingly bottomless pocketbook — might be setting itself up for more problematic relations with the U.S., Business Insider reported.

The United States released a series of satellite images Sunday that appear to support its claims that Russian forces have fired across the border into Ukraine to support rebels there, suggesting a new level of direct Russian involvement in the conflict, USA Today reported.

The Islamic State have released images of captured soldiers being beheaded following a battle for a large Syrian military base on the outskirts of the city of Raqqa.

Russia has begun supplying military helicopters and fighters jets to Iraq, a report said Thursday, as Iraq’s defense minister visited Moscow to press for equipment to thwart a jihadist offensive, AFP reported.