They’re saying conditions can get worse in the New South Wales fires, especially in the Blue Mountains.  You can help with a donation to the Red Cross.  Meanwhile, a very large American bank will pay dearly for its role in causing the 2008 financial crash – You won’t believe what security cameras caught Kenyan troops doing during the Westgate Mall siege – And a deported schoolgirl tells the President of France, “Not without my family!”

America’s largest bank JP Morgan Chase has reportedly reached a tentative US$13 billion deal with prosecutors to settle a wide range of issues from the sale of bad mortgages.  And even with a record settlement deal, the bank would not be immune to potential criminal liability.  The bad mortgages were packaged into bonds and sold to investors from 2005 to 2007.

A suicide car bomb hit both sides of the Syrian Civil War pretty evenly at a checkpoint outside Damascus.  The explosive, detonated by an al Qaeda faction of the rebels, killed 15 of their fellow opposition fights and 16 Syrian troops.  The rebels say after the blast they took control of the checkpoint.

Video has emerged of Kenyan security forces charging into a store inside the Westgate Mall where terrorists slaughtered at least 67 people – and leaving with bags full of stuff.  Was it evidence inside those shopping bags?  Two of them are seen rifling through the goods left out on the counter.  The cops and soldiers carry their shopping bags past the blood-drenched floor where a man was repeatedly shot by al-Shabaab gunmen earlier. 

Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke will be buried in secret at an undisclosed location.  That’s the deal reached with his family, after Italian authorities seized his coffin and took it to an army base, over the objections of his family.  Italy and Germany do not want the burial site to become a magnet for neo-nazis, and Argentina where Priebke hid for decades after World War II didn’t want him back.  Priebke was convicted for murdering 335 Italian civilians in 1944, on Hitler’s orders.

A Roma schoolgirl is rejecting French President Francois Hollande’s offer to allow her to return to France for her education – alone, without her deported family who are now in Kosovo.  15-year old Leonarda Dibrani’s family wants to stay together.  The way she was deported last week set off days of robust demonstrations by indignant French students.  Cops pulled Leonarda off of a school bus in front of her classmates who were going off on a school outing.

Anti-austerity demonstrators battled police on the streets of Rome, their complaints being unemployment, government cuts, and money being diverted from social services to a high-speed rail line to France.  Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s 2014 budget plan, released last week, has ignited protesters concerned with the lousy economy, environment, and immigration disaster such as what happened off Lampedusa earlier this month.

80-people are recovering from various injuries after an Argentine commuter train crashed into the end of the line at the terminus station in Buenos Aires.   Most of the injured were on the train, but others were hit by shattering glass as they stood on the platform.  It happened at Once Station, the very same place where a train crashed last year, killing 52 people in the earlier collision. 

A gunman dressed as a clown managed to get into a drug kingpin’s family gathering in Mexico, and kill the eldest brother of one of the isthmus’s most notorious drug trafficking families.  Not only that, but after killing 63-year old Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix of the Tijuana Cartel, the clown and two accomplices managed to get away.  Cops say they are investigating if the killer had ties to organized crime (you think?).