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.

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."