Days later, Huckabee met with a member of parliament named Yehudah Glick, the man that Israeli police labeled the “most dangerous man in the Middle East” following a long period of bloodshed sparked by his provocations. Glick is the public face of the Temple Movement, an apocalyptic outfit masquerading as a campaign for Jewish prayer rights.

Consisting of a tiny number of extremists on the fringes of Israeli society just a few decades ago, the Temple Movement has grown exponentially over the last decades. As its ideological home in the Religious Zionist camp has taken control of the country’s institutions, they have developed into a highly organized movement with broad public support, political influence and deep pockets.

“The Temple Mount and the Western Wall will always remain under Israeli sovereignty,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared. The mention of the Temple Mount was a new development for the Prime Minister – a nod to the political power of the emergent Temple Movement.

Though Israeli public discourse about al-Aqsa is couched in a liberal discourse of “prayer rights,” the ideological core of the Temple Movement actually wishes to abolish the concept of prayer entirely. It aims instead to revert to what it considers the purest form of worship: animal sacrifice.

Indeed, the hardcore organizers at the heart of the movement, the Temple Institute, often put on animal sacrifice events in public spaces in preparation for the construction of a Jewish temple  – or what would more accurately be described as a slaughterhouse of worship.

With tension brewing again around Jerusalem, Israeli escalations at the Al-Aqsa compound and the rising power of the Temple Movement could spark a bloody summer of holy war. As one Israeli soldier recently remarked, “Every year, in spring you train. In the summer, you find out if it will really happen.”

The announcement elevates the threat of what experts and the military say are moves by Islamic State to exploit the poverty and lawlessness of predominantly Muslim Mindanao island to establish a base for extremists from Southeast Asia and beyond.

"What's happening in Mindanao is no longer a rebellion of Filipino citizens," Solicitor General Jose Calida told a news conference. "It has transmogrified into invasion by foreign terrorists, who heeded the call of the ISIS to go to the Philippines if they find difficulty in going to Iraq and Syria," he said, using the acronym for Islamic State.

President Rodrigo Duterte has delivered on his threat to impose martial law on Mindanao, the country's second-largest island, to stop the spread of radical Islam. He has been pleading with Mindanao governors and religious leaders to work with the government to keep extremists at bay.

Duterte recently warned that Islamic State fighters driven from Iraq and Syria would end up in the southern Philippines and his country was at risk of "contamination".

She said: “We are not going to take part in the madness of the Brussels elite, we want to help the people, not the political elites. If you cannot see that today terrorist danger is a fact that can hurt every country in Europe and you think that Poland should not defend itself, you are going hand in hand with those who point this weapon against Europe, against all of us.

“This is an attack on Europe, on our culture, our tradition. Why am I talking about that? That is a good question because all of us in this room have to answer the question…  Do we want politicians that claim that we have to get used to attacks and who describe terrorist attacks as ‘incidents’?

“Or do we want strong politicians that can see a danger and fight against it effectively?” The passionate speech comes as tensions grow between Poland and the bloc after it refused to take on refugees and the EU threatening legal action against members failing to comply with quotas.

"If the national interests are high enough, and I think this is the mistake that [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un needs really to think about, if you start pressing on an issue that has to do with the survival of the United States against a nuclear attack, the tragic becomes conceivable to stop it. It could be tragic.”

Mr Locklear’s views were then echoed by Admiral Timothy J Keating, another former commander of Pacific Command. He said: "There are a wide range of options" that are "readily available to the president and the secretary of defence resident in the planning warrens at Pacific Command.”

Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened both its close neighbours such as South Korea and Japan as well as the US with nuclear strikes with the reclusive communist state believed to possibly possess up to 15 nuclear weapons.

Muslims believe that God revealed the Quran to the Prophet Mohammed on the 27th day of Ramadan (Laylat Al Qadr, or the Night of Power). Throughout the month many will recite the holy book, pray, and contemplate their relationship with God. Fasting (sawm in Arabic) is one of the five key pillars of Islam, along with prayer (salat), charity (zakat), faith (shahadah) and making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Those who are fasting will abstain from food, liquids and sex, from dawn until dusk. Muslims will wake early to eat and pray before sunrise, and will break the fast after sunset with a communal meal (Iftar). The holy month changes dates each year due to the Muslim calendar, which follows the movements of the moon and is around 11 days shorter than the standard Gregorian calendar.

This means that the first day of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, moves backwards by around 11 days each year. So while fasting takes place in the summer this year – meaning longer days and higher temperatures, sometimes Ramadan can fall in the winter – with shorter, more comfortable days. Ramadan 2017 ends on the evening Saturday, June 24.

A day after US President Donald Trump concluded a 28-hour visit to Jerusalem, the prime minister vowed the city would not be divided again. During a plenum session marking the passage of 50 years since the Six Day War and the reunification of the city’s western and eastern halves, Netanyahu pointed to the US president’s visit to the Western Wall as having “destroyed UNESCO’s propaganda and lies,” referring to a series of resolutions by the UN cultural body that ignored Jewish ties to the city and Israeli sovereignty.

While he met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the US president made no mention of Palestinian statehood or the US embassy move during his visit.

• On the fourth leg of a grueling overseas trip, President Trump lectured NATO allies in Brussels on not spending enough for collective defense, and declined to plainly endorse Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty, which states that an attack on any member is an attack on all.

• For some of the European leaders, testing Mr Trump seemed to be as important as finding common ground with him, amid anxiety about their relationship with a leader who had dismissed the alliance as “obsolete” and called the Belgian capital a “hellhole” after a terrorist attack.

• Earlier, Mr Trump met with Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission. Mr Tusk said afterward that there were differences of opinion over Russia, but that when it came to Ukraine, “it seems that we were on the same line.”

• Analysts said expectations were low that Mr Trump and European leaders would agree on issues like climate change, trade and terrorism. (He also shared an eyebrow-raising handshake with President Emmanuel Macron of France.)

• In the wake of Mr Trump’s suggestions that the alliance was not doing enough against terrorism, NATO announced that it would formally join the fight against the Islamic State.

If there was any real drama over Mr Trump’s visit, it concerned whether he would go off script on the question of Article 5. He had been expected to explicitly endorse the principle in a speech when he unveiled a September 11 memorial — a piece of twisted metal from the World Trade Center — outside NATO’s new building.

But in his speech before the leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, he did not explicitly do so. Instead, Mr Trump offered a vague promise to “never forsake the friends that stood by our side” in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks — a pledge that White House officials later said was an affirmation of mutual defense.

According to the report, in the next several months Romania and the Czech Republc will integrate one brigade into the German armed forces. "In doing so, they'll follow in the footsteps of two Dutch brigades, one of which has already joined the Bundeswehr's Rapid Response Forces Division and another that has been integrated into the Bundeswehr's 1st Armored Division," the journalist wrote.

Bro argues that such integration will enable the Bundeswehr to increase its combat power in a short time and take care of Europe's security. Commenting on Bro's publication, the German edition of The Huffington Post wrote that the analysis sounds like a conspiracy theory. However, in fact the activities the journalist wrote about have indeed much to do with reality.

"Germans are very serious about multinational military integration," military expert Johannes Varwick from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg told The Huffington Post. "What we see now is certainly not a European army, but a step towards it."

On Monday night, Salman Abedi detonated a “highly sophisticated” nail bomb at Manchester Arena, killing 22 people including young children. Twenty people are in a critical condition in hospital. It was Britain’s worst terrorist attack since the 7/7 atrocity 12 years ago.

Abedi’s support for terrorism was reported this year to MI5, and five years ago friends had called Britain’s anti-terrorist hotline with concerns about his views, the Times reports. It is unclear whether Abedi had been under any form of surveillance.

It has emerged that the younger brother of Abedi, who was arrested in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, on Wednesday night, knew he was planning an attack in Manchester. Hashim Abedi, 18, has confessed that both he and his brother were members of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, and another brother, 23-year-old Ismail, have also been arrested.

The crime scene photographs were leaked to the New York Times after being shared with US intelligence, prompting a furious response among ministers. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, had publicly asked US law enforcement agencies to stop leaking shared intelligence and said she had been “very clear with our friends that that should not happen again”.

She said the leaks had been compromising the fast-moving investigation into what police have described as a “network” behind Abedi, but her warning was ignored as the extraordinary series of pictures were leaked in the US, prompting a major diplomatic row. The Telegraph understands that Theresa May will raise the matter with President Donald Trump when she meets him at a Nato summit in Brussels today.

The Republican academic blasted the rest of Europe as “ungrateful” for the massive US support in rebuilding the continent after the war and said it was riven with “anti-Americanism”. But in contrast he heaped praise on Britain, which is leaving the club, saying it shared the strongest ties with America and would be front of the queue for a trade deal. Dr Malloch said the EU had “failed” and had to abandon its dreams of ever-closer union or collapse during a combative speech to the Open Europe think-tank in Brussels this afternoon. 

New French president Emmanuel Macron is pushing for further integration of the eurozone including a centralised EU finance ministry and budget - a proposal which for the first time Germany is not openly opposing. But Dr Malloch, who has no official capacity but is close to the Trump administration, warned the US would fiercely defend its interests against any increased “protectionism” from Europe.