Arriving at a summit in Brussels, EU High Representative Federica Mogherini hailed a “historic decision that turns the European Union into a credible security provider, globally,” saying that the EU is already contemplating “the possibility of deploying one of our battlegroups in one of the crisis theaters.”

"For many years the strongest argument against PESCO had been the fear that it would lead to the weakening of NATO. But it is quite the opposite - strong European defense naturally strengthens NATO," said EU President Donald Tusk. "This is why PESCO is not only good news for us, but it is also good news for our allies and bad news for our enemies," he added, before heading to the leaders’ group photo call and signing ceremony.

While European officials have refrained from referring to the future force as an EU army, mentioning only a series of 17 projects – such as a Cyber Rapid Response Team and a European Medical Command – EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker did not conceal that the EU is aiming to create an independent military structure of its own. “EU Member States have woken up the Sleeping Beauty of the Lisbon Treaty - today we take a giant leap towards the real Defence Union I have long called for.”

Businesses are just starting to test programs to automatically detect such signals. Mindstrong, for instance, an app developer in Palo Alto, California, is developing and testing machine-learning algorithms to correlate the language that people use and their behaviour — such as scrolling speed on smartphones — with symptoms of depression and other mental disorders.

Next year, the company will expand its research to focus on behaviour associated with suicidal thoughts, which could eventually help health-care providers detect patients’ intentions to harm themselves more quickly. And in late November, Facebook announced that in much of the world, it was rolling out its own automated suicide-prevention tools. Tech giants Apple and Google are pursuing similar ventures.

Some mental-health professionals hope such tools could help reduce the number of people who attempt suicide, which is rising in the United States, where it is the second leading cause of death among people between the ages of 15 and 34. And young people are more likely to reach out for help on social media than to see a therapist or call a crisis hotline, according to social-work researcher Scottye Cash at Ohio State University in Columbus.

He says he was investigated and suspended after he said, “well done, girls” to a group of female pupils, including a pupil who “identified” as a boy. The teacher says he apologised immediately after the incident, but documents seen at the time showed that he had also referred to the pupil with the feminine pronouns “she” and “her” on other occasions.

The Christian is now suing the school for constructive dismissal and discrimination.

Mr Sutcliffe later told senior staff that he didn’t think it was wrong to call a biologically female pupil a girl, but insists he did not use the term on purpose because he is a professional. Now, he is arguing that forcing him to abide by transgender ideology, despite his personal beliefs, has breached his rights.

The Pew study, based on interviews conducted in recent weeks with 1,503 adults, found that while a vast majority of Americans still celebrate Christmas, most find the religious elements of the holiday are emphasized less than in the past — and few of them care about that change.

Like much else in the United States, a strong partisan divide runs through the survey results, with responses from Republicans seeming to place an emphasis on religion and those from Democrats on secularism. But the data complicate efforts to portray Christmas as either in mortal danger or in no trouble at all, a central issue in a years long debate over whether Christmas in America respects Christianity or has been undermined by liberalism.

Personally, I spent eight years at public universities, and I can tell you that the quality of education that our college students are receiving is a complete joke.  Especially on the undergraduate level, almost all testing consists of either true/false, multiple choice or fill in the blank questions.  Students learn very few useful skills at our “institutions of higher learning”, and many of them leave school barely even able to function in society.

I am about to share with you a list of 37 of the most ridiculous courses that are currently being offered at major US colleges and universities today.  This information comes from a brand new report that was just put out by Young America’s Foundation, and it is tempting to chuckle as you read through what they have compiled, but the truth is that what is happening to our system of higher learning is not a laughing matter.

For a long time I have been describing our colleges and universities as “indoctrination centers”, and most parents have absolutely no idea what is really going on at our “institutions of higher education”.  The following are 37 examples of real college courses that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 MCL 135: Vampires: Evolution of a Sexy Monster (University of Kentucky)

#2 HIST 336: Saints, Witches, and Madwomen (University of Nebraska)

#3 WOMGEN 1225: Leaning In, Hooking Up (Harvard University)

#4 SOAN 261: Campus Sex in the Digital Age (Washington & Lee University)

#5 GSWS 434: The Politics of Ugly (University of Pennsylvania)

#6 AMS 398: FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body (Princeton University)

#7 GWS 462: Hip Hop Feminism (University of Illinois)

#8 GWS 255: Queer Lives, Queer Politics (University of Illinois)

#9 SOC 388: Marriage in the Age of Trump (Davidson College)

#10 HISTORY 330-0: Medieval Sexuality (Northwestern University)

#11 AI 318: Zombies: Modern Myths, Race, and Capitalism (DePaul University)

#12 SOCI 332: Alternative Genders (Texas A&M University)

#13 AMCULT 103: Drag in America (University of Michigan)

#14 AMCULT 334: Race, Gender, Sexuality and US Culture in Video Games (University of Michigan)

#15 AMCULT 411: Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of Michigan)

#16 WGS 255: Deconstructing the Diva (DePaul University)

#17 GLBT 3404: Transnational Sexualities (University of Minnesota)

#18 GSFS 0208: Unruly Bodies: Black Womanhood in Popular Culture (Middlebury College)

#19 MC 2002: Media, Sport and Culture: Amplifying the Sporting-Ism (Louisiana State University)

#20 THEO 025: The Bible and Horror (Georgetown University)

#21 SOAS 3500: Queerness in South Asian Literature and Cinema (University of Iowa)

#22 AADS 2204: Black Women and the Politics of Blackness and Beauty (Vanderbilt University)

#23 AFR 334: Radical Theories of Political Struggle: Anti-Black Racism and the Obama Administration (Williams College)

#24 COLT 0510F: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men and the Myths (Brown University)

#25 HIST 379: Queering Colonialism (Washington & Lee University)

#26 AMST 274: Rainbow Cowboys (and Girls): Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality in Westerns (Wellesley College)

#27 AFA 4430: Black Lives Matter (University of Florida)

#28 RELI GU 4355: The African American Prophetic Political Tradition from David Walker to Barack Obama (Columbia University)

#29 RELG 032: Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology (Swarthmore College)

#30 RELG 033: Queering the Bible (Swarthmore College)

#31 ENVS 042: Ecofeminism (Swarthmore College)

#32 FRSEMR 61D: Trying Socrates in the Age of Trump (Harvard University)

#33 GSWS 2219: Deconstructing Masculinities (Bowdoin College)

#34 GSFS 0325: American Misogyny (Middlebury College)

#35 BLSTU 3850: Gender, Hip Hop, and the Politics of Representation (University of Missouri)

#36 AAS 301: Black to the Future: Science, Fiction, and Society (Princeton University)

#37 SOC 105: Race, Religion, & Donald Trump (Davidson College)

The surprise announcement came despite Saudi Arabia and its allies sending low-level officials to the heads of state Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit in Istanbul on Wednesday, suggesting an unwillingness to adopt a strong position.

The final communique declared "East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine" and invited "all countries to recognise the State of Palestine and East Jerusalem as its occupied capital". It stated it rejected and condemned "in the strongest terms the unilateral decision by the President of the United States America recognising Al-Quds [Jerusalem] as the so-called capital of Israel, the occupying power." 

It said the move was considered "null and void legally" and "an attack on the historical, legal, natural and national rights of the Palestinian people, a deliberate undermining of all peace efforts, an impetus to extremism and terrorism, and a threat to international peace and security".

Five years later, under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University, the two archeologists procured a government license to have the ancient debris transferred to Emek Tzurim National Park on the western slope of Mount Scopus, where they established the headquarters of the Temple Mount Sifting Project. Since then, more than 500,000 artifacts – from a 3,000-year-old seal from the time of King David to coins, stone vessels, jewelry and flooring tile fragments from the Second Temple period – have been painstakingly documented for future generations.

Nevertheless, to the outrage and utter befuddlement of millions, last October UNESCO approved a resolution denying Jewish ties to the Temple Mount. According to Barkay, professor emeritus from Bar-Ilan University and recipient of the 1996 Jerusalem Prize for Archeological Research, “Temple Mount denial” is a political phenomenon that began during the period of the Oslo Accords.

“Temple denial started in the 1990s, even though the Islamic Wakf itself in the 1920s and ’30s issued booklets which were given to visitors of the Temple Mount in which they said the existence of the Temples is beyond any doubt,” said Barkay last month. “It was accepted and in the Islamic literature through the generations there is a plethora of mentions of Solomon’s Temple and the Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, so it is very strange that they deny it now.”

“They claimed that Jerusalem has no significance to the Jews, and want to have sole control of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount,” he said. “The whole thing is a political matter and misuse of ancient history for current political purposes.”

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amounts to only five exabytes.

It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications. “The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and it’s said to be about terrorism but inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.”

The so-called Thomas fire, one of several burning around the state, has burned over 900 structures, at least 700 of them homes. Another 18,000 buildings are under threat. 

It has stretched across nearly 370 square miles of territory, consuming 236,000 acres, making it the fifth largest in state history. It is now over five times the size of the District of Columbia, which is 68 square miles. Over 7,800 firefighters are working to hold back the blaze, which has now been 25 per cent contained. 

The fire straddling Santa Barbara and Ventura counties has burned for ten days, with the cause still being investigated. Yesterday, firefighters finally eked out progress on the titanic task of cutting fire lines around the gigantic conflagration.  But the wildfire is still raging, threatening thousands of homes and stranding tens of thousands of evacuees. 

A report in Science Magazine estimates that 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced to date. Of this, 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic are now waste – a majority of which, some 79 per cent, is in landfill or the natural environment. 

Plastic will outweigh fish by 2050.

David Attenborough warned in this week's Blue Planet that "the oceans are under threat now as never before in human history". Looking at the data, it's hard to come to a different conclusion. It is estimated that there is now a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton and, left unchecked, plastic will outweigh fish by 2050.

A nappy will be on Earth five times as long as the baby it helps. Many of us would forget about a nappy the second it gets put into a bin – but that nappy will stay on Earth for 450 years.

For every 100 miles of British beach, there are over 200 plastic or polystyrene items.

We are selling 20,000 more bottles every second. One of the biggest contributors to plastic pollution is drinks bottles. Some 480 billion plastic bottles were sold globally in 2016 – more than one million per minute. 

“He is evil, he’s not like mist. He’s not a diffuse thing, he is a person. I’m convinced that one must never converse with Satan - if you do that, you’ll be lost,” he told TV2000, a Catholic channel, gesticulating with his hands to emphasise his point. “He’s more intelligent than us, and he’ll turn you upside down, he’ll make your head spin.

“He always pretends to be polite - he does it with priests, with bishops. That’s how he enters your mind. But it ends badly if you don’t realise what is happening in time. (We should tell him) go away!” he said. He uses various terms to refer to the Prince of Darkness, including Satan, the Evil One, the Seducer, Beelzebub and the Great Dragon.

"It's a Jesuit thing. He's a Jesuit who is deeply imbued with the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, which allow people to discern the movements of the good and bad spirit," said Austen Ivereigh, a Vatican analyst and the author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.