At their meeting last month, the pope gave US President Donald Trump a signed copy of his 2015 encyclical letter that called for protecting the environment from the effects of climate change and backed scientific evidence that it is caused by human activity.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin urged Trump in a separate meeting not to quit the Paris accord. "If he really does (pull out), it would be a huge slap in the face for us," said Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which has hosted numerous international conferences on climate change.

"It will be a disaster for everyone," he told the Rome newspaper La Repubblica. In a telephone call with Reuters, Sanchez Sorondo confirmed the comments in the newspaper.

"It would be hard, I think, not to see what's happened in the past 50 years as a tremendous – not just fulfillment of prophecy – but a tremendous jump start, a tremendous fast forward," Richman said. "It's more than prophetic. It's like a kiss from Heaven. It's like a divine kiss. It's like an intimate brush with the reality of God's compassion and love. He keeps His promises."

The Institute is already working on blueprints for the new temple.

"Today there's a lobby in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) of how many members of Knesset that are constantly speaking about Jewish rights to pray on the Temple Mount," Richman said. "There are members of Knesset that actually talk about the rebuilding the Holy Temple. Do you realize that 20 years ago these people wouldn't have been given a moment on prime time television to say these things. They would have been laughed out.”

Wilders, whose PPV came second in Dutch parliamentary elections in March, faces charges of incitement in the complaint filed by the human rights advocacy group back in March 2015, when he claimed that Islam “calls on people to be terrorists” and “be violent” and that the “Koran leaves no doubt about it.”

The provocative statements made by Wilders during a speech at the conference of PPV's Austrian ally Freedom Party (FPO) drew ire of the local Austrian Muslim Initiative (AMI) group.  Its chairman, Tarafa Baghajati, lodged a criminal complaint against Wilders, accusing him of resorting to “Nazi rhetoric of the 1930s,” Dutch News.nl reported.

"They (Austrian prosecutors) must now investigate whether Wilders has committed nation incitement and whether he insulted Islam as a religion," Baghajati told Der Telegraaf at the time. Meanwhile, Wilders hit back at the Dutch prosecutors, saying that instead of tackling crime and fighting terrorism, they focus on hunting “a politician for speaking the truth about Islam,” he wrote on Twitter, accompanying the message with #legaljihad hashtag.

'We don't want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any more. And they won't be. They won't be,' Trump declared. 'I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.' Before he even sat down, his predecessor Barack Obama launched an all-out assault, saying Trump 'joins a small handful of nations that reject the future'. 

The leaders of France, Germany and Italy said the decision was 'regrettable' and that the deal was 'non-negotiable'. Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire, said he was quitting advising the White House, tweeting: 'Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.'

Trump complained in the White House's Rose Garden that major polluters like China are allowed to increase their emissions under the agreement in a way that the US cannot. India is hinging its participation on billions of dollars of foreign aid. 'The bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States,' he said. 

He argued later, 'The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries. This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States,' he contended. 'As someone who cares deeply for the environment, which I do,' Trump said, 'I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States - which is what it does – the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.'

Trump specifically named India and China as countries that can do what they like to the detriment of the United States' economy. 'China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement,' he said. 'India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it: India can double their coal production. We’re supposed to get rid of ours.' 

Palestinian leaders had warned the move would threaten a two-state solution. Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since the 1967 Middle East war. It annexed the area in 1980 and sees it as its exclusive domain. Under international law the area is considered to be occupied territory.

Israel is determined that Jerusalem be its eternal, indivisible capital. But Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future state. Successive US administrations since 1948 have maintained that the status of Jerusalem is to be decided by negotiations and that they would not engage in actions that might be perceived as prejudging the outcome of those negotiations.

Dr Siegfried O Wolf, a senior researcher at Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute ...believes China’s efforts to create a new world order conducive to its own strategic interests create substantial common ground for New Delhi and Berlin to build a solid framework for economic and political cooperation.

Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, also denounced campaigns to erase Jewish and Christian history in Jerusalem, saying, “History must be respected. Jerusalem is a holy city for three religions.”

UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, has recently passed several Arab-sponsored resolutions ignoring Jewish and Christian ties to Jerusalem, particularly the Temple Mount. The latest resolution, which was voted on as Israel celebrated its 69th Independence Day, claimed that Israel has no historical or legal right to any part of Jerusalem. Earlier UNESCO resolutions affirmed the Temple Mount’s sanctity for Muslims only, prompting Guterres to point out that a Jewish temple once stood on the site. 

Palestinian officials blasted Guterres for those remarks, with a Palestinian Authority minister saying that Guterres “neglected the UNESCO resolutions, which clearly said that the al-Aqsa Mosque is purely an Islamic heritage.”

Guterres pledged before the World Jewish Congress in late April to be “on the front lines in the fight against anti-Semitism” and said “the modern form of anti-Semitism is the denial of the existence of the State of Israel.” In January, the UN chief said that Israel should be treated as any other nation by the UN General Assembly, which adopted 20 resolutions against the Jewish state in 2016 and only six on the rest of the world combined.

With that line, it became clear that the United States is no longer the reliable partner her country and the rest of Europe have long depended on. Since World War II, the United States led the way in building a new international order rooted in NATO and the European Union as well as a belief in democracy and free markets.

Britain, France and Germany were central to that effort, which for 70 years kept the peace and delivered prosperity to millions of people while standing firm against the Soviet threat, helping end the Bosnian War and combating extremism in Afghanistan.

This trans-Atlantic partnership is still vital. But how, and how well, it will function as American leadership recedes is unclear. So far, no one is talking about dissolving NATO; Europe still depends for its security on America’s nuclear and conventional arsenals. But Ms Merkel’s remarks underscored profound divisions between Europe and the United States that have one clear beneficiary, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has longed for the alliance, Moscow’s Cold War adversary, to unravel.