Francis arrived at the cemetery well ahead of the Mass, spending time walking among the graves of the fallen soldiers. “Please Lord, stop. No more wars. No more of these useless massacres,” the Pope said, adding that remembering the victims of the wars of the past was crucial “today that the world once more is at war and is preparing to go even more forcefully into war.”

He reiterated his point made the day before during an address at St Peter’s Square in Vatican, that the “wars produce nothing other than cemeteries and death.” Pope addressed today’s warmongers, warning them against pushing for a larger conflict, since “everything is lost with war.”

“There are men, who are doing everything to declare war and to enter into conflict. They end up destroying themselves and everything,” Francis said. “But humanity has not learnt the lesson and seems not to want to learn the lesson.”

Now China’s most powerful leader in decades, Xi has sought to reassure the world that his country’s rise would be peaceful — a bid to avoid the so-called Thucydides trap that says a growing power will clash with an established force. Still, China’s growing military and economic interests are reason enough for the world’s strongest powers to worry.

“Xi’s vision includes — for the first time in contemporary Chinese history — staking out a global leadership role,” said Jonathan Sullivan, director of University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute. “This will inevitably bring China’s interests up against those of other powers.”

China’s next chance to demonstrate its confidence could come as early as next week, when Xi hosts US President Donald Trump on a state visit to Beijing. Topping the agenda will be North Korea and trade, issues that highlight both the US’s unease about Chinese economic might and its desire for Beijing to take greater responsibility as a regional peacemaker.

This fact was known at the beginning both to former CIA director John Brennan and to former FBI director James Comey. Yet both went along with the DNC-invented story of Russian election hacking and Christopher Steele’s fake “dossier” on Trump’s imagined relations with Russians.

The presstitute media told the lies that they were supposed to tell. The consequence of this plot has been to waste the first year of Trump’s presidency and to prevent President Trump from reducing the dangerously high tensions with nuclear power Russia. This is a disservice not only to President Trump but also to the American people and the planet itself.

Every half century, many Christian Zionists believe, history makes a concerted push toward its endpoint: the return of the Messiah to Jerusalem. According to this pattern, something momentous should happen to Israel before the end of 2017.

“Reading Israel’s modern history, there seems to be something unusual in 50-year cycles,” said David Parsons, the vice president of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. “It means we should expect something incredible to happen this year to further propel Jerusalem and Israel into its prophetic destiny.”

Christian Zionists, most of whom are part of the world’s 700 million-strong evangelical community, view themselves as the Jews’ partners in God’s plan. Like many Orthodox Jews, they believe that after a world war, the Messiah will take the throne of a Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem and lead the world to peace and prosperity.

“If I did write something, I wanted it to be of help to Pope Francis, to the Church, and to the faithful,” he said. Although Weinandy wrote the letter last July, he only made it public after he received assurances from the Vatican that it had been delivered to the Pope. He chose to publish the letter, he said, because it “expresses the concerns of many more people than just me, ordinary people who’ve come to me with their questions and apprehensions. I wanted them to know that I listened,” he said.

In the letter, Father Weinandy lists five points that illustrate the “chronic confusion” that seems to mark the Francis pontificate, namely, intentional ambiguity, disdain for doctrine, the naming of heterodox bishops, sowing division in the Church, and vindictiveness in the face of criticism.

Almost two-thirds of Americans, or 63 percent, report being stressed about the future of the nation, according to the American Psychological Association’s Eleventh Stress in America survey, conducted in August and released on Wednesday.  This worry about the fate of the union tops longstanding stressors such as money (62 percent) and work (61 percent) and also cuts across political proclivities. However, a significantly larger proportion of Democrats (73 percent) reported feeling stress than independents (59 percent) and Republicans (56 percent).

The “current social divisiveness” in America was reported by 59 percent of those surveyed as a cause of their own malaise. When the APA surveyed Americans a year ago, 52 percent said they were stressed by the presidential campaign. Since then, anxieties have only grown.

A majority of the more than 3,400 Americans polled, 59 percent, said “they consider this to to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember.” That sentiment spanned generations, including those that lived through World War II, the Vietnam War, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. (Some 30 percent of people polled cited terrorism as a source of concern, a number that’s likely to rise given the alleged terrorist attack in New York City on Tuesday.)

Analysts say improved availability, low prices and growing demand due to loose monetary policy, economic uncertainty and volatile geopolitical factors are the three key reasons behind the German investors’s gold rush. Their fondness for gold is a relatively recent development and before 2008 investment in physical gold barely registered with average annual demand at 17 metrics tons. 

But then the financial crisis struck and sparked a series of events that ultimately pushed many Germans into seeking a more reliable store of value. A WGC report said: “While the world fretted about Lehman Brothers, German investors worried about the state of their own banking system. “Landesbanks, the previously stable banking partners of corporate Germany, looked wobbly. People feared for their savings.”

Economic development in Germany has been strong over the past decade but investors have been very cautious about the risks to European financial and political systems. And the latest surge in demand for gold in Germany is being fuelled by fears of the economic impact of Brexit and Catalonian independence efforts, high public debt worldwide, successive bail-outs of Greece, fall-out from the migrant crisis and the resurgence of nationalist politics.

In an interview with the Qatari-financed Al Jazeera broadcaster last week, Saleh al Arouri — the deputy head of the Hamas political bureau who led the delegation to Iran — explained, “It is well known that Iran supported the Lebanese resistance, until the Israeli occupation was driven out.” “I assure everyone that, with regard to the current and future situation of the resistance, the national reconciliation will never harm the resistance,” Abu Zuhri said.

Abu Zuhri continued: “In the arena of the fighting, the resistance is very strong, and can inflict heavy blows upon the Zionist enemy. We will invest all our efforts in obtaining all the tools and equipment needed for strength and might, so that we will be able to take back our rights from the enemies.”

While Israel has not cut ties with the PA over its reconciliation with Hamas, the Israeli government insists that the organization formally abandon terrorism and recognize Israel before it can be part of any peace negotiations.

The Supreme Court annulled the first vote in August citing "irregularities and illegalities". In his first official reaction to the re-run, Mr Odinga called for a "national resistance movement" including the formation of a "people's assembly" to bring civil society groups together to "restore democracy". But he did not explain how that would work.

"This election must not stand. It will make a complete mockery of elections and might well be the end of the ballot as a means of instituting government in Kenya. It will completely destroy public confidence in the vote," he said.

According to CBC, the Royal Canadian Mint is investigating how a sealed, "pure gold" wafer with proper mint stampings has emerged as a fake. According to the Canadian press, the one-ounce gold piece, which was supposed to be 99.99% pure, was purchased by an Ottawa jeweller on October 18 at a Royal Bank of Canada branch. The problem emerged when tests of the bar showed it may contain no gold at all. And, when neither the mint nor RBC would take the bar back, jeweler Samuel Tang contacted CBC news.

"Who is going to make sure those gold wafers are real?" asked Tang. "I am worried there are more of those gold wafers out there, and no one knows." Following the news, RBC felt an obligation to pick up the bar and returned it to the mint for testing, refunding Tang the $1,680 purchase price. The Royal Canadian Mint said in a statement to CBC it is in process of testing the bar, "although the appearance of the wafer and its packaging already suggests that it is not a genuine Royal Canadian Mint product." 

"A currency counterfeiter doesn't make just one fake $50 bill," he said. "They make a whole lot of them. So I would suspect this might just be the tip of the iceberg."