USA -We are at war with the mosquito. A swarming and consuming army of 110 trillion enemy mosquitoes patrols every inch of the globe save Antarctica, Iceland, the Seychelles, and a handful of French Polynesian micro-islands. Since 2000, the annual average number of human deaths caused by the mosquito has hovered around 2 million. We come in a distant second at 475,000, followed by snakes (50,000), dogs and sand flies (25,000 each), the tsetse fly, and the assassin or kissing bug (10,000 each). The fierce killers of lore and Hollywood celebrity appear much further down our list. The crocodile is ranked #10 with 1,000 annual deaths. Next on the list are hippos with 500, and elephants and lions with 100 fatalities each. The much-slandered shark and wolf share the #15 position, killing an average of ten people per annum. The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history.

UK - A jubilant Boris Johnson won a surprise Brexit boost yesterday from Emmanuel Macron. The French President suggested the EU Withdrawal Agreement could after all be amended to allow the UK to quit the bloc with a deal. The concession saw the Prime Minister raise his hands in the air in apparent triumph on his return to Downing Street from his talks in Paris.

USA - President Donald Trump is expected to unleash multibillion dollar tariffs on the European Union’s imports, an EU chief has warned. The European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom has warned the bloc that they need to prepare themselves for Trump’s sanctions as trade tensions continue. Products including whisky, cheese and olives, could be affected following a dispute over aircraft subsidies. The European company Airbus attacked the US’s Boeing ‘Dreamliner’ programme as only being possible due to illegal subsidies. Last month, Mr Trump tweeted: “The World Trade Organisation finds that the European Union subsidies to Airbus has adversely impacted the United States, which will now put tariffs on $11 billion of EU products. The EU has taken advantage of the US on trade for many years. It will soon stop.” The Trump administration has now claimed that the estimated damage to Boeing following the ‘illegal subsidies of Airbus’ is $11 billion.

EUROPE - Like an annual holiday gathering where the main goal is to get through the day without a family explosion, one of France’s main objectives as host of this weekend’s Group of Seven summit is to minimize the chances that President Trump will blow it up. Subjects on which to tread lightly include some of the biggest problems the world’s major economies are facing – including trade, the system of international rules that has ordered the democratic world for decades and climate change, according to US and other G-7 officials.

USA - US President Donald Trump is about to return to Europe. He sets off on Friday for the G-7 summit in France and is back again at the end of August for a trip to Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II. Although he'll be right next door, Trump has made no moves to visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel either on this trip or in the foreseeable future. In over two years as president, Trump has only met Merkel in Germany once — at the 2017 G-20 summit in Hamburg — and never as her guest in Berlin.

ITALY - Matteo Salvini slipped the rosary out of his pocket right before Premier Giuseppe Conte began his speech to Parliament. He took it out and kissed it again midway through the address, just as Conte began admonishing him for exploiting his Catholic faith for political ends. The interior minister’s blatant brandishing of Catholic symbols has gone down as one of the most significant exchanges of his successful bid to topple Conte’s 14-month-old government, which collapsed Tuesday after Salvini’s League party withdrew its support. While right-wing populists in the US and Europe have increasingly invoked their Christian roots to justify policies against Muslims and other migrants, Salvini’s gestures and rhetoric have carried particular resonance here since they directly challenge those of Italy’s other major figure: Pope Francis. Francis has made caring for migrants a hallmark of his papacy…

USA - The US ambitions have put the world on the brink of a new arms race that can easily spiral out of control, warned the Russian envoy to the UN. Washington responded by blaming Moscow for the INF treaty’s collapse. “Are you aware of the fact that all of us have found ourselves just one step away from an uncontrolled arms race, because of the US geopolitical ambitions?” Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, said at the emergency session of the Security Council that Moscow and Beijing convened on Thursday, in the wake of the US missile tests. Washington apparently planned to leave Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty long before announcing its withdrawal from the 1987 agreement back in February, Polyanskiy added, since this is the only way it could have tested a new ground-launched cruise missile that violated the accord mere weeks after it officially expired.

USA - Since cannibalism is found throughout the animal kingdom and therefore is something natural, perhaps it is time for humans to rethink the “ultimate taboo” against eating human flesh, Newsweek proposes in an article Wednesday. There is nothing necessarily unethical or unreasonable about eating human flesh, declare psychologists Jared Piazza and Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University, but careful reasoning over the merits of cannibalism is often “overridden by our feelings of repulsion and disgust.” While not going so far as to recommend cannibalism, saying “there is no need to overcome our repulsion for the foreseeable future,” the two authors suggest that humans could master their aversion for human flesh if they needed to.

USA - From ‘felon’ to ‘justice-involved person’... Amid a rising tide of crime, inequality, and literal human waste, San Francisco, California has chosen to sanitize – language. Felons, offenders and addicts will now have to be called new, more politically correct names. The new “person-first” language guidelines were recently introduced by the city’s Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. From now on, a convicted felon released from jail will be called a “justice-involved person” or a “returning resident.” A juvenile delinquent will now be delicately referred to as a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system.” A drug addict will be called “a person with a history of substance use,” while someone out on parole will be called a “person under supervision.”

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.