“French president Francois Hollande has called for a stronger more harmonised eurozone following a politically turbulent few weeks in which crisis with Greece has exposed the fault-lines in how the single currency is managed... He called for a vanguard of countries that would lead the eurozone, which should have its own government, a ‘specific budget’ and its own parliament” (EU Observer, July 20, 2015).

Diplomats were smiling in Vienna last week when the United States and six other nations struck a nuclear weapons control deal with the Iranian government. Yet, while many in the West consider the deal a historic breakthrough, other nations such as Israel and Saudi Arabia now fear that Iran may use this deal as cover to create a nuclear weapon.

“A generation of adults who grew up uncomfortable asserting authority over children has produced teachers who have never learnt to control a classroom, a government adviser says. New teachers often have not been taught basic techniques for managing pupils’ behaviour because they were trained by people who were themselves uncertain how to go about it” (The Times, June 17, 2015).

“Pope Francis told a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople that the restoration of ‘full, visible communion’ between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches ‘represents one of my main concerns, for which I do not cease to pray to God’” (CatholicCulture.org, June 29, 2015).

“The United States is now the world’s second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico, according to a new study published by the prestigious Instituto Cervantes… there are 41 million native Spanish speakers in the US plus a further 11.6 million who are bilingual, mainly the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. This puts the US ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million) and second only to Mexico (121 million)” (The Guardian, June 29, 2015).