The surprise runaway theatre success in London this summer is playing at the Lyttleton, a part of the National Theatre, called Great Britain, a title with British understated irony. It opened June 30 and has been a sellout virtually ever since. We paid heavily for two very good seats. It tells of the exploits of a politically connected newspaper mogul who will stop at nothing to sell many copies of his rag, which ultimately goes too far in an investigation of a murdered girl, cooperating with an idiotic police chief who has a full-time PR and a randy cop to hand to make love to the newspaper's news editor named (geddit?) Paige Britain.

This plus some attacks on the Queen results in the arrest of the editorial team. The proprietor, Paschal O'Leary, with an Irish accent, gets off Scot free thanks to his political and ecclesiastical network, but the news editor and her NY counterpart head for trial and maybe prison.

The Irishness of the boss is a red herring; the story is about News of the World and Rupert Murdoch, who has an Australian accent. It is uproariously funny and I would love to see it again to try to get the jokes I missed the first time round. But it is unlikely to run in the USA as it is a very British tale. But I suspect Time-Warner would like it to open on Broadway.

In Finchley, in north London, a Reform Jewish synagogue opened its doors to Muslims celebrating the daily post-sundown feast which is part of Ramadan after their mosque was burned down. In Sarcelles, a Paris suburb, Muslims protesting the Israel incursion back into Gaza (to stop missiles aimed at Israeli civilians) attacked a synagogue and a kosher grocery. France has about 20 times as many policemen per Muslim as Britain does.

One of my US shares, Illumina, a maker of genetic sequencing arrays and devices, is becoming a big player in Doha, where the Qatari government is building the Sidra Medical and Research Center which will use high-throughput genomics to find genetic links to diseases. ILMN via its partner Alliance Global will supply sequencing machines for exploring genomics. Our newsletter's biotech maven and its editor, both Jewish, are now deeply involved in Arab world drug discovery and pharmaceuticals. Th

More from Portugal, Russia, Israel, Dubai, Jordan, Britain, The Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Indonesia, and the USA.

*Our current holding in the Arab drug business is Hikma Pharmaceuticals, HQ'd in Jordan and listed in Dubai and London, with an ADR. It is mostly into generics and injectables. HKMPY is much less in advanced technology than the Sidra program in Qatar.

*Teva acquired Labrys, which has a humanized monoclonal antibody in phase III trials for preventing migraine headaches, LBR-101. Labrys got the drug after Pfizer dropped it. This will back up TEVA's iontotophoretic patch which treats acute migraine, which the Israeli firm acquired by buying Zecuity. Both are part of Teva's new push on reurological drugs backed by its surviving Anglo-Saxon exec, Chief Scientific Office Michael Hayden, who survived the putsches against Dr Philip Frost as chairman and Dr Jeremy Levin as CEO. Price for Labrys was not revealed.

*Yandex which operates search in Russia and Ukraine was sold off for fear of new sanctions by 4% yesterday. YNDX is Dutch.

*So too is Schlumberger Ltd. But anyone reading the bullish article by ''Value Hunters”, one of those anonymous contributors to www.seekingalpha.com you should mistrust, thinks it is French and will defy US sanctions to sign fracking contracts with the Russian pariah government. No way! SLB is run from Houston and Paris but observes embargoes, and the Netherlands is likely to take the lead in imposing new sanctions on Russia as it was the homeland of the most dead among the 298 victims on the Malayan Airlines plane brought down by a Russian Buk missile in eastern Ukraine. SLB went into tax inversion mode before World War II thanks to links between its family owners and Dutch banker relatives. It was formally incorporated in the Dutch Antilles (Curacao) but is not simply Dutch. Both the bankers and the developers of the oilfield services company were Protestants, of which more below.

*Spain's sealed-bid auction for the govt-bailed-out Banco Catalunya produced a surprise loser, Banco Santander. SAN which apparently failed to offer as much money as the winner, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Hispano-Americano.

*I tried to use some of my COV ill-got gains to buy more Portugal Telecom but as expected the stock recovered Monday in the USA after Portugal. The word on the Lisbon bolsa is that asset sales by the Rioforte Luxembourg defaulted borrower will enable it to pay back PT after all. This will allow the telco to complete its planned takeover of Oi in Brazil. Rioforte is the owner of hotels and resorts, private healthcare facilities, the Tranquilidade insurance company, and other assets now on the block to repay PT and also cover the needs of Banco Espirito Santo in Portugal.

I recall my Rothschild source again. Back in the 1970s, he spoke of BES management as so bad it was a revenge for the Inquisition (which drove out Jewish Portuguese bankers of which there were many in the early 16th century). And the Rothschild also said of the clan Espirito Santo, “our gene pool is better than theirs'', graciously including your editor in the same tribe as the Rothschilds.The Espirito Santo family got into banking and brokerage only at the end of the 19th century by which time the Rothschilds had been at it for a century or so. PT is at euros 18 as I write but it was at 18.5 earlier this morning and is making a bottom. If nothing else it probably will be able to pay its 5.6% dividend now if all the gossip about the Espirito Santo asset sales are correct.

While it is mostly Protestant or Jewish banking families who have a reputation for probity and who will sell their assets or even their children if needed to maintain it, a quick look at the consequences of bank failure in Ireland or the Vatican proves that Catholic bankers are now held to the same high standard.

*But I did put more money into Uranerz, the Canadian US uranium miner I also wrote about yesterday. It can go into the model portfolio if enough readers ask for it. But its sole mine is in the USA, unlike Cameco, CCJ. And it is high risk.

*Brokers Peel Hunt put a sell on Catlin, the insurance firm, after a string of losses. It says the weight is on the downside and predicts the share, at GBP 5.45 now will fall to 5.2. We told you first.

*We also got out of Indonesia before the now contested elections show the risk of a civil war there. We sold PT Semen Indonesia mainly because our reporter covering PSGTY changed jobs last summer.

*Two other US faves of mine have good news. State Street Bank, which is a custody body rather than a real bank, reported nicely up earnings this morning. The other of course is Illumina, which I wrote about when it became a 10-bagger (it has since fallen back). Several readers asked why I didn't share this idea from Patti the Biotech Maven with them? But it is a purely US company; no excuse to put it in our Global Investing portfolio.