I have been advised by a marketing consultant to talk more about insights from my foreign travels. In London this summer there is a steady drumbeat of propaganda against female genetic cutting and the marriage of underage girls among the immigrant community, which of course I support.

Some days ago I went with my sister-in-law to a rather posh party where the most striking woman present was dressed in an African gown with a gorgeous gold gossamer headdress, so as an instinctive snoop (or journalist) I went to speak with her.

While Vanessa (not her real name) was only Obama-colored, she had a memorable Ibo accent which I associate with our au pair in Paris, Joyce from Onitsha, who stayed for years and helped me raise my children. I and my grown children love that accent.

Like Joyce too, Vanessa was also strongly Roman Catholic. And she put the touch on me to contribute to funding female education in Nigeria, which I approve of in any case. The education I donated for will probably be by nuns. But based on what Joyce was like, nuns encourage an independent spirit in their alumnae.

So shocking my sister-in-law, I pulled a 5-pound note out of my evening bag to donate it to Vanessa's cause. The exotic beauty then gave me an elastic bracelet in the papal colors of yellow and white with a small Maltese cross, a card about the teachers, and a charm reading “love”. Because she is jealous of these goodies, I will give them to my sister-in-law when we next meet.

I also learned from Vanessa something unstated in the vast press coverage of Boko Haram kidnapping boarding schoolgirls in northeastern Nigeria. Boko Haram officially states the educating girls is ''haram'', not kosher for Muslims. But more is going on.

She told me that the school and the villages the girls are from belong to a Christian enclave amidst the Muslim Nigerian north. I cannot imagine why this fact is not mentioned elsewhere. Sectarianism should not be encouraged, but sometimes it helps to know the facts.

Thanks to Vanessa's blessing perhaps our Model Portfolios now are reported to have produced a 1-yr return of 18.82% . This was calculated by Mark Hulbert of Hulbert's Financial Digest, part of Dow-Jones Marketwatch. It was the best level in a decade, despite the headwind of a strong dollar. The benchmark Mark uses, the Wilshire 5000, purely US stocks, had a 24.92% return over the same period. While our portfolio is marginally more risky than the W5000, based on volatility (Sharpe ratios), in fact investing internationally cuts down on your risk thanks to diversification across countries, currencies, and industries from the US benchmark.

Today we have news from Belgium to Ireland, from Britain to Luxembourg, from Portugal to Canada, from Ethiopia to Israel, from Germany to The Netherlands, from Brazil to Finland including a poor quarter for one of our shares.

*Despite or because of its respiratory franchise, GlaxoSmithKline surprised on the downside in Q2 sales and earnings today. Profits were off over 30% y/o/y and to GBP 1.4 bn or 19.1 pence per share from prior year, and also well below the consensus forecast of 21.6 p. Its Advair lung med lost US patent protection and reimbursements by Medcoceased. The new chronic obstructive pulmonary disease drugs, Breo and Anoro, are not selling as fast as expected and GSK sales overall fell 4% to GBP5.56 bn, ($9.5 bn), 5% below the average forecast, and  off 13% sequentially.

The strong pound, which affects my every move these days, did not help GSK in its British results but we US ADR owners can offset it and continue to collect a generous dividend. GSK now forecasts full year profits similar to those of 2013. Earlier it expected them to rise 4% to 8% this year.

Everyone hemmed and hawed at the conference call and CEO Sir Andrew Witty did not have to talk much about the Chinese probe into bribery by the firm he heads although this surely also hurt sales worldwide. He reduced forecasts and said GSK plans to auction off a portfolio of mature drugs. Bidders might include Lupin of India and US firms looking for a way to cut their taxes with a British drug portfolio. The stock fell 3% in UK trading so far. Thomson Reuters reitereated GSK's buy rating.

*Luxembourg's Rioforte Investments SA, the borrower from Portugal Telecom which owes it euros 847 mn ($1.15 bn) , has filed from protection against its creditors in the Grand Duchy. PT will sue to get its money back. It is now up to a Luxembourgeois court to approve the process of stopping creditors collecting, which as has already been done for Espirito Santo Investments International, ESII, which filed for protection last week. The two entities in turn control 49% of another holding company called Espirito Santo Financial Group SA, also of Luxembourg, owner of just over 20% of the largest listed Portuguese bank, Banco Espirito Santo, Portugal's 2^nd largest bank.

*Munich Germany's MorphoSys AG (MOR in Frankfurt) and our Galapagos of Belgium are moving into preclinical development of MOR 106, an antibody against inflammatory diseases. MOR 106 is based on a novel GLPGY target (not being disclosed) that it silences. The 2 companies are now working together to develop their next-generation antibody library after initially joining up in 2008 to share expertise, GLPGY in targets and cellular assays and MOR in its Ylanthia human antibody target-directed technology. MOR developed an antibody library technology for the pharma industry called HuCAL which produced a pipeline of over 80 human antibodies for treating cancer, arthritis, and (we hope) Alzheimer's disease.

*Alkermes plc, ALKS-Q, a recent addition to the portfolio, is testing in phase I clinical trials its novel monomethyl fumarate molecule against placebo in healthy volunteers. The ALKS 8700 drug is designed to convert to MMF in the body to treat multiplke sclerosis. The current comprable is dimethyhl fumarate or Tecfindra, which also competes with Teva's copaxone in treating MS. ALKS won US INDA designation for the new drug from the US FDA and a patent, both in March, before we bought the share. The Irish firm has a pipeline of ~20 drugs and a strong pipeline focused on central nervous system diseases, a parallel to what Teva is doing now too with its takeover of Labrysyesterday as its chief scientist forucses on CNS drugs too. ALKS manufactures in Georgia and Ohio and does research in Waltham (MA) but also does research and production in Athlone. It is not a pure tax inversion candidate but shares some aspects of this. Without much of a tax edge it may be a buy for the Israeli firm, with a market cap now of ~$52 bn. But even without this, thanks to Ireland's 12.5% tax rate we collect a 3% dividend.

*The Lummus unit of Chicago Bridge & Iron, Dutch CBI, in strategic partnership with Swiss Clariant, will build a Ziegler-Natta process polypropylene catalyst plant in Louisville (KY) going on-stream next year to produce new catalysts they developed jointly to improve productivity and quality in for chemical producer customers.

*Allana Potash, the Canadian developer of a new fertilizer mine in furthest Ethiopia, was the subject of a favorable article in The Globe and Mail yesterday. The paper stressed that ALLRF (or AAA in Toronto) had a couple of good assets: a 16.4% stake held by Israel Chemicals; and smaller holdings by Liberty Metals and Mining and the World Bank's private equity arm, the International Finance Corp. It thus has a potential buyer of as much as 80% of future ouput from ISCHF and up to $59 mn in future funding above the $25 mn already invested. The Israelis already use solar brine evaporation to produce potash at the Dead Sea Works which is a cheap production method. Allana also has a helper in building the railroad and port required to export the potash from its Danakhli mine and has excellent support from Addis Ababa, a mine-friendly govt. They have no Boko Haram there. And the site has plenty of water.

Moreover African potash shortages are expected to grow with the population and markets already exist for up to 400,000 tonnes of potash per year for crops in east Africa, notably Kenya, and also Ethiopia itself. The capital expenditure for the plant is only $642 mn (US) and the expected price will be $300-350 per tonne, well below current levels, on which Allana can make a profit. By 2050, Africa will account for a quarter of the world's population vs 15% today. And they will all want to eat.

*Warren Buffett doesn't have this tsuris problem. Phoenix Insurance, the insurance arm of our Delek Group, is being audited in Israel for allegedly making excess profits in liability insurance in 2013, ranking well ahead of 3 much larger competitors. While it is being cut to invest in offshore gasfields, DGRLY still owns 52% of Phoenix which owns Israeli non-insurance financial companies. DGRLY just sold its former 100%-owed Republic Insurance arm in the USA to a daughter of Donald Trump and her Jewish real estate magnate husband. It is financing the takeover because the Trumps and other real estate magnates are always short of cash.

*Royal Bank of Scotland now aims to sell its Ulster Bank which operates on both sides of the boarder, according to Reuters, to a US private equity firm like KKR orApollo. The price will be between euros 500 mn and 2.5 bn, so there will be tough negotiations. RBS needs money to be privatized without loss to the UK govt. We own its preferred shares in various series.

*Also from Ireland, reader Dr MR of Colorado succeeded in buying Paddy Power plc at $76 last week, with some help. The US ADR market for PDYPF is illiquid and some brokerages (like Charles Schwab) will not trade the stock at all, claiming bookies are illegal. The doctor asked me to let him in on some more of my US shareholdings for him (and other readers) to do their own due diligence on. One stock I have owned for decades is Thermo Fisher (I bought it when it was Thermo Electron), which today reported brilliant Q2 profits beating forecasts by ~9% thanks to its acquisition of Life Technoligies, a genetic testing company

*According to Dow Jones, Nokia cost Microsoft nearly $700 mn in its Q4 accounts which fell short of the 60 cents/sh earnings estimate from analysts at 55 cents. MSFT paid over $7 bn for the privilege of buying out the NOK mobile phone business. It expects to break even on the phone biz in 2 years.

*Vale has been heavily shorted by US investors who pushed the daily volume to cover their options to over 8 days. Most analysts rate VALE neutral but have cut their target prices to ~$17-18, nicely up from the close yesterday when the stock fell in the final minutes of trading. Since US liquidity is what options traders are after, shorting uses ADRs not BovespaR Brazilian shares. I think for most of us this is an irrelevance but I would advise against any reader taking on the monster institutional and commodity markets by shorting Vale now. Its shorting expresses worry about the forthcoming Brazil election and fear of another round of iron ore price cutting. We just hang in there.

Fund notes:

*Mexican REIT Fibra Uno (FBASF on the pinks) will buy the R-15 Corporativo Masaryk 111 property holding in the center of the Avenida Masaryk in Mexico City, an area of big business offices and high-end retailing, for NMP 1.484 bn, of which $63 mn will be in the form of assumed debt and the rest through grants of its shares. But FBASF also will take back-rents of NMP 146.9 mn which will reduce the total cost by this sum. The offices and shops are both 100% let at present, and cover 24,400 sq meters and 1,850 sq m respectively. The income over the next 12 months will be NMP 112.6 in net operating income of which 3/4 is denominated in US$s.

*Insiders at Mexico Fund, MXF, have substantially boosted their holdings, which indicates that they expect to make money with it, the only reason insiders buy. For a fund that means they believe in Mexico. We own Mexican Equity & Income Fund and the REIT.

*Canadian General Investments, CGIRF, declared a 12 loony cent capital gains dividend/sh to be distributed Sept 15 to shareholders of record Aug. 29.

Dividend notes:

*Banco Santander paid its latest dividend in the form of shares. To avoid the DRIP accounting nightmare I will sell the surplus SAN stock.

*Veresen declared another C$0.0833/sh dividend payable in common shares at a 5% discount but will only enroll Canadians for the disocunt. I tried 3 mos ago both via my broker and via their administrator with no success. FCGYF, the ticker symbol, stands for Foolish Canadians Gyp Your Friends (this is a family newsletter so I resisted other ideas.)

*I told you first. We sold Retalix too soon, before it was bought by NCR. But now the Israeli checkout and inventory software firm has been taken down hard by cancellation of a big deal with troubled Target, whose credit card woes are well known. In Israel it is laying off up to 15% of its staff.l