ISRAEL - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strongest coalition partner threatened to bring down the government if it tries to annex West Bank settlements following the breakdown of Mideast peace talks. Finance Minister Yair Lapid, speaking at the annual Herzliya Conference on politics and security, also challenged Netanyahu to reveal a map showing how he would delineate the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state. Lapid’s Yesh Atid party holds the second-greatest number of parliamentary seats after the prime minister’s Likud-Yisrael Beitenu alliance.

RUSSIA - Russian companies are preparing to switch contracts to renminbi and other Asian currencies amid fears that western sanctions may freeze them out of the US dollar market, according to two top bankers. “Over the last few weeks there has been a significant interest in the market from large Russian corporations to start using various products in renminbi and other Asian currencies and to set up accounts in Asian locations,” Pavel Teplukhin, head of Deutsche Bank in Russia, told the Financial Times. Andrei Kostin, chief executive of state bank VTB, said that expanding the use of non-dollar currencies was one of the bank’s “main tasks”.

RUSSIA - Russia has given up on the so called group of seven plus Russia, the G8. Vladimir Putin has decided that membership does not have its privileges. “Such a format does not exist for now,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a local radio station in Moscow on Thursday. Leaders of the G7 — meeting in Normandy to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day, when allied troops stormed the beach of northern France to launch a war against Germany and Italy — declared in March that they would boycott the G8 summit in Sochi this month. Instead, they took their silver spoons and shared tea and talk in Brussels for a two-day G7 summit.

USA - US Banks enjoyed more or less steadily climbing, or rather soaring, deposits by Russian institutions and individuals, having tripled in just two years to $21.6 billion by February, according to the US Treasury.

But in March, the Ukrainian debacle burst into the foreground with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which wasn’t very well received in the West. The US and European governments rallied to the cause, and after vociferously clamoring for a sanction spiral, they actually imposed some sanctions, ineffectual or not, that included blacklisting some Russian oligarchs and their money. So in March, without waiting for the sanction spiral to kick in, Russians yanked their moolah out of US banks. Deposits by Russians in US banks suddenly plunged from $21.6 billion to $8.4 billion. They yanked out 61% of their deposits in just one month! They'd learned their lesson in Cyprus the hard way: get your money out while you still can before it gets confiscated.

MIDDLE EAST - A former Hamas government spokesman revealed on Sunday that Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has said in private meetings he is lying in public statements to "trick the Americans." The spokesman, Ihab al-Ghussein, wrote on Facebook that "behind closed doors," Abbas had said "when I go out and say that the government is my government and it recognizes 'Israel' and so on, fine - these words are meant to trick the Americans." Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) translated the Facebook post. "Guys, let me (continue) saying what I say to the media. Those words are meant for the Americans and the occupation (ie Israel), not for you. What's important is what we agree on among ourselves… Don't harp on everything I tell the media, forget about the statements in the media," Abbas told Hamas, according to Ihab al-Ghussein.

GERMANY - Germany's foreign intelligence agency officially lifted the lid on some of its worst-kept secrets Friday, acknowledging that half a dozen facilities around the country are in fact spy stations — as anyone with Internet access could already figure out. The Federal Intelligence Service, known by its German acronym BND, maintained the facade for decades that it had nothing to do with sites bearing cryptic names such as "Ionosphere Institute." But amateur sleuths long suspected their true identities and posted them on websites such as Wikipedia. The subterfuge wasn't helped by the fact that some sites sport unmistakable signs of spy activity, like the giant golf ball-shaped radomes in Bad Aibling, near Munich — until now, the "Telecommunications Traffic Office of the German Armed Forces."

USA - Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) could pay more than $12 billion to settle probes by the US Justice Department and a number of states into the bank's alleged handling of shoddy mortgages, the Wall Street Journal said on Thursday, citing people familiar with the negotiations. At least $5 billion of that amount is expected to go toward consumer relief consisting of help for homeowners in reducing principal amounts and monthly payments, and paying for blight removal in struggling neighborhoods, the paper said, citing people with knowledge about the issue. The second-largest US bank faces multiple government probes over the underwriting, sale and securitization of residential mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.

USA - US authorities negotiating with BNP Paribas over alleged sanctions violations at one point suggested that France's biggest bank pay a penalty as high as $16 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. While the sources said that number was only proposed as a negotiating tactic in response to an offer from BNP of about $1 billion, the dollar figures being thrown around demonstrate what bankers and their allies say is an alarming trend of ever-increasing record penalties. A $16 billion settlement would have pushed BNP's penalty above the biggest ever for a bank - JPMorgan Chase & Co, which paid $13 billion last year to resolve a number of civil mortgage-related allegations.

USA - Amid all of the attention that the Libor rate-fixing scandal has received, the world is completely overlooking a far worse Libor “scandal” that has been occurring right under our noses this entire time. Though the Libor rate-fixing scandal is certainly no trivial matter, the losses caused by it amount to a few tens of billions of dollars, which is ultimately a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the global economy and financial system. In addition, as dramatic as the term “rate-fixing” sounds, the Libor manipulations only moved the Libor rate by a few basis points (basis points are .01 percentage points) for just a few brief moments at a time. The Libor manipulations did not move the rate by significant magnitudes such as from 5 percent to 2 percent, for example.

UK - David Cameron has held “candid” talks with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, over his opposition to the appointment of arch-federalist Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. The Prime Minister held talks with Mrs Merkel on Wednesday night as he continued to rally support from other European leaders as part of his bid to block Mr Juncker’s appointment. Mr Cameron believes that Mr Juncker, a proponent of a United States of Europe, would hinder his attempts to reform Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

GERMANY - After extensive review, Germany's federal prosecutor has announced he is launching formal investigative proceedings into allegations that the NSA monitored Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. The claims have burdened trans-Atlantic relations for months.

UK - Two weeks ago when news broke about the first confirmed instance of gold price manipulation (because despite all the "skeptics" claims to the contrary, namely that every other asset class may be routinely manipulated but not gold, never gold, it turned out that - yes - gold too was rigged) we said that this is merely the first of many comparable (as well as vastly different) instances of gold manipulation presented to the public. Today, via the FT [Financial Times], we get just a hint of what is coming down the pipeline with "Trading to influence gold price fix was ‘routine’." We approve of the editorial oversight to pick the word "influence" over "manipulate" - it sounds so much more… clinical.

EUROPE - The European Central Bank has just reduced interest rates and installed a negative rate on bank deposits for the first time in its history. The bank cut its main lending rate to 0.15%, a new low, from the 0.25% rate held since November, and lowered its rate on emergency overnight loans by 35 basis points to 0.40%. The ECB also dropped the rate on bank deposits parked overnight with the central bank to minus 0.1%, thereby charging commercial banks for keeping their money at the ECB. That will sure get the banks from letting cash pile up. I consider it one of the most aggressive moves towards accelerating price inflation in the last 50 plus years. This is an extremely dangerous move, putting the eurozone on a major inflation path.

USA - Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning investigative reporter who resigned from CBS News earlier this year, says the news media are heading down a dangerous path with attempts to “censor or block stories” that don’t align with their preferred agenda. “There’s a tendency in the news media, on the part of some managers, to censor or block stories that don’t fall in line with the message they want sent to the viewers,” Attkisson said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal. “I think that’s really a very dangerous perspective to have.” Attkisson made headlines in March when she left CBS News after a 20-year career at the TV network. In subsequent interviews, she cited her inability to get her stories on the air. “What I’m seeking out now,” Attkisson said, “is the opportunity to bring under-served stories to a broad audience through an editorial process that doesn’t censor, that doesn’t try to direct a story to go in a certain unnatural direction.”

CHINA - An immense scandal involving pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been unfolding in China over the last year. It centers on a massive bribery operation uncovered by Chinese police that included nearly every aspect of GSK’s business in China. Billions of yuan in bribes were channeled through an immense network to buy off doctors, hospitals, healthcare organizations, and even government officials to boost sales of GSK drugs.