Israel is reinforcing its border with the Gaza Strip after Palestinian militants and the Israel Air Force traded strikes overnight, leaving at least 15 people injured and two residential buildings in ruins.

Rockets that struck the two buildings in the southern Israeli town of Sderot caused no casualties, but caused extensive damage.

"We heard an explosion, and then a really strong explosion," a woman, who hid in a reinforced room with her three children, was cited as saying by Haaretz daily.

Another building was used as a nursery for infants, The Jerusalem Post reported police as saying.

The airstrikes knocked out electricity supplies in part of the town.

Experts believe al-Qaida bomb-maker could be working with ISIS - and that jihadists with western passports might target planes

Concern about the prowess of al-Qaida's bomb-maker in chief - and his willingness to work with Isis insurgents in Syria and Iraq - underlies the decision to increase security at British and other European airports.

Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, a Saudi chemist who became a bomb-maker, has for years been high on America's most-wanted list, because he is believed to be behind many audacious attempts to bring down transatlantic flights, using his skills as a chemist to devise increasingly imaginative ways to conceal explosives, with the best known being the "underwear" bomber.

The new element that led to the present scare is intelligence linking Asiri for the first time to two groups in Syria and Iraq, the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis).

The worry is that Asiri's skilfully disguised bombs might be carried on to transatlantic airlines by passport-holders from the US or Europe.

Asiri has survived several assassination attempts in Yemen, the latest a drone attack in April. He has been reported killed, only to resurface.

By using Sberbank as a source of loans in eastern Europe, the Kremlin is quietly exerting its influence again.

A quarter century ago, when communist regimes in central and eastern Europe tumbled one after another, the economically devastated Soviet Union could do nothing but watch. The USSR fell apart, and the eastern Europeans rushed to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. Russia never gave up on its former sphere of influence. Now, instead of sending troops, it is building a web of economic ties with its old satellites.

Whether it's bankrolling a Hungarian nuclear power plant or the construction of the South Stream pipeline in Bulgaria, Russian money is buying leverage in eastern Europe. Much of the region finds it increasingly counterproductive to act against Russia's interests, even as the nation tangles with Ukraine. Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech politicians have openly opposed stricter EU sanctions against Russia, arguing their economies would bear a higher burden than their neighbors to the west.

"The Russians are playing a classic game of divide and conquer with the EU," says Otilia Dhand, an analyst with political risk adviser Teneo Intelligence. "They're making sure that the national interests of individual members have bigger weight in their decision-making than the common EU interest."

One of Russia's main weapons is Sberbank, its largest state-controlled lender. In the past few years, with almost €12 billion ($16 billion) in assets, Sberbank Europe has built a strong presence in central Europe and the Balkans. Besides expanding its branch network, it's providing hefty loans to companies in former communist Europe. In April the bank agreed to lend $820 million to Agrokor, a Croatian company, for the acquisition of Slovenia's Mercator, a deal that will create the top food retailer in the Balkans.

Russia's main focus is energy. Early this year it agreed with Hungary to build two nuclear reactors. To fund the project, the Kremlin offered the Hungarians as much as €10 billion in a 30-year loan at below-market rates - conditions no western European commercial bank could match.

In what may have been the most expensive and farce of an election in the history of Colorado, the oil and gas industry has likely spent $1 million to buy a fracking election in the city of Loveland, CO. When the votes were tallied last night for a two-year fracking moratorium in Loveland, "no" votes squeaked out a victory by a 10,844 to 9,942 margin, getting just 52 percent of the vote.

The industry has so-far reported spending more than $375,000 on those 10,844 votes, but massive unreported spending that exploited a loophole in the Colorado campaign finance law ruled the election. As long as the industry's ads didn't say "vote for" or "vote against," they didn't have to report their spending. That resulted in a deluge of an aerial attack of TV ads, radio ads, newspaper ads and inserts, and mailers that inundated voters in Loveland. Residents reported getting one and sometimes two mailers a day over the last three weeks, many including bucolic photos of pristine Colorado landscapes while hailing positive aspects of fracking.

Anti-fracking activists from a local group Protect Our Loveland spent about $7,500 trying to pass the moratorium. In the end, Protect Our Loveland was likely outspent by a 100 - 1 margin by the most profitable industry on the planet.

At the same time that the industry bought the election, it also fought fiercely to manipulate the election date and process. Anti-fracking activists in Loveland gathered the signatures and tried to place the vote on the ballot in November of 2013 at the same time that anti-fracking elections swept neighboring cities of Fort Collins, Boulder, Lafayette and Broomfield in Colorado's "Frack Zone." But, the oil and gas industry sued in court to get the election postponed and bullied the Loveland City Council into delaying the vote. A couple months later, a judge ruled against the industry and the city and forced the election to occur. An industry-friendly city council then cherry-picked a date - June 24 - for the election that coincided with the hotly contested Republican Governor's race in Colorado, thus ensuring a large turnout of very conservative voters.

On the day India launched a French earth observation satellite and four smaller satellites from Germany, Canada and Singapore, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was in New Delhi for talks.

The wheel has come full circle in just about four decades since India and France started their space exploration cooperation. Then, Indian satellites were being launched using French launch vehicles. Now it is the other way round and India is charging $20,000 per kilo for each satellite launched.

Unsurprisingly, the foreign minister of Singapore, another country whose satellite was launched by India, landed up in New Delhi a day after Fabius' June 30 visit. Shanmugam, who also doubles up as Singapore's law minister, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on July 1 and discussed a wide array of bilateral, regional and international issues like Fabius had done with Swaraj the day before.

The next day after the Singaporean foreign minister's talks with Sushma Swaraj, it was the turn of American Senator John McCain, a former Presidential candidate, to sit with the Indian foreign minister. Later this month, US Secretary of State John Kerry too is visiting New Delhi.

An Austin Texas woman, who is a peaceful antiwar activist was visited by the FBI.

They wanted to know if she "had any plans to destroy property."

She handled the situation like a professional, flexing her rights.

A leaked memorandum from the RAND corporation think tank suggests the Ukrainian govt should engage in an all-out war in eastern regions, including shutting down all communications, putting citizens in internment camps and kill all who resist such actions.

The RAND Corporation is non-profit global think tank which offers research and analysis to the US armed forces.

In the shocking letter, which has been leaked to the press, the advice offers a step by step brutal guide in how to deal with the population in eastern Ukraine.

Disgraced entertainer Rolf Harris has been jailed for nearly six years for 12 indecent assaults against four girls - including one aged just seven or eight.

Mr Justice Sweeney said Harris, 84, had taken advantage of his celebrity status and had shown "no remorse".

The sentence of five years and nine months has already been referred to the Attorney General's Office under the "unduly lenient sentence scheme".

One victim said the abuse had taken away her "childhood innocence".

Harris, who was found guilty of offences that took place between 1968 and 1986, was told by the judge he had "no-one to blame but himself".

He displayed no emotion and stared straight ahead as he was jailed.

A group of jihadists claiming to be part of ISIS have vowed to invade Spain along with all other "occupied lands" in a video posted on the web.

The men say Spain is the land of their forefathers and that they are prepared to die for their nascent Islamic State.

The video of two men claiming to be militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has taken the Spanish media by storm. The minute-long footage shows them speaking in Spanish, and saying that ISIS will take over Spain.

"I tell you, Spain is the land of our forefathers, and, Allah willing, we are going to liberate it, with the might of Allah," says one of the men. He adds that the group won't stop at Spain and intends to spread its Islamic Caliphate across the world.

New Ukrainian Defence Minister Valeriy Heletey has promised that the army would retake Crimea, restoring the country's territorial integrity.

Addressing parliament in Kiev, he said: "There will be a victory parade... in Ukraine's Sevastopol."

Russia annexed the peninsula - which has a Russian-speaking majority - in March after a controversial referendum.

In eastern Ukraine, a government offensive against pro-Russian separatists is continuing.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have urged Russian President Vladimir Putin in a conference call to use his influence to put pressure on the rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Mr Putin said he was "deeply concerned about the rise in deaths among the civilian population and sharp increase in refugees" entering Russia from south-eastern Ukraine, according to the Kremlin.

All three leaders agreed that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) should play a more active part in monitoring the situation in the conflict zone.