For example, consider what just happened in the United Kingdom…

In what their lawyer calls a “modern-day heresy trial,” a British court has convicted two street preachers of a public order offense for preaching the Bible in public. The public prosecutor in the case claimed that publicly quoting parts of the King James Bible in modern Britain should “be considered to be abusive and is a criminal matter.”

So what did they say that was so bad? Well, apparently one of the things that authorities were extremely concerned about is the fact that they were claiming that Jesus is the only way to God…

Prosecutor Ian Jackson also told the court, “To say to someone that Jesus is the only God is not a matter of truth. To the extent that they are saying that the only way to God is through Jesus, that cannot be a truth.”

I was absolutely stunned when I read that, but none of us should be surprised. We always knew that great persecution of true believers was coming, and now Christians are actually being put in prison in the western world for simply sharing the gospel publicly.

But there is a faith that is growing even faster than Islam. It is called Wicca, and it is currently growing at an astounding pace. According to writer and publisher of the Economy blog, Michael Snyder,Wicca emerged as a faith in the middle of the 20th century, but the origins of many Wiccan practices actually go back for thousands of years, and some researchers believe that certain aspects of Wicca can actually be traced all the way back to ancient BABYLON.

Wicca ‘is a modern pagan, witchcraft religion’. But more Americans than ever are embracing the darkness, and each year this comes to a fever pitch on Halloween night.

There are “scheduled realities” to the US nuclear weapon systems, US Air Force General Paul Selva, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Ohio-class submarines, Minuteman III ballistic missiles and B-52 strategic bombers are all rapidly approaching the end of their useful lifespan, according to Selva and three other senior officers testifying.

“Our nuclear deterrent is nearing a crossroads,” Selva said. “We are now at a point where we must concurrently modernize the entire nuclear triad and the infrastructure that enables its effectiveness.”

The B-52 fleet was built in the 1950s, and the bombs and missiles they use were designed and built in the 1970s with a 10-year lifespan, Selva said. “We know today they remain relevant, but we can’t continue to maintain them,” he told lawmakers. “A decade from now, those weapons will not be able to penetrate Russian air defenses, and therefore there is an urgency to their replacement.”

Just last year in the run-up to the Brexit vote, the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister and pro-EU campaigner Nick Clegg blasted UK Independence Party’s (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage for misleading the voters on the issue of a proposed EU Army ahead of the referendum, saying Farage was spreading a ‘dangerous fantasy that is simply not true.’ That ‘dangerous fantasy’ is now coming true.

The German media coverage tried to paint Brexit vote and the election of President Trump as the triggers for this sudden pan-EU military consolidation, but the facts on the ground tell a very different story. As early as May 2016, NATO officials were accusing France of neglecting its commitment to NATO by diverting resources to build an EU Army. To counterweight Germany’s influence within the EU, France was positioning itself to play a greater role in a future EU Army.

Germany is equally hawkish on building EU’s military muscle. Last month, Roderich Kiesewetter, a leading German MP from Chancellor Merkel’s CDU party, called for a “European nuclear deterrence” which would rely on British and French nuclear arsenal, and be bankrolled by Germany.

Berthold Kohler, the editor of Germany’s leading newspaper ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ went even further and asked Germany to build its own nuclear arsenal as President Trump’s election victory has cast “doubts over America’s nuclear guaranty” and the “French and the British arsenal were too weak at this point".

The move, backed by political figures in Germany and Poland, has been put forward to address concerns that US President Donald Trump wants to cut his country's financial contribution to protecting Europe from any potential Russian threat.

Some supporters even want the UK's Trident missile system included in the force, although they admit Brexit makes British involvement in the initiative highly unlikely. But Tory backbencher Dr Julian Lewis, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, condemned the plan as a federalist plot to undermine the Nato alliance.

Dr Lewis said: "This is an idea that first came to attention 20 years ago - I thought it was insanity then and I think it is insanity now. It only goes to show how determined the fanatical EU federalists are that they wish to try and create a separate force from Nato and nowhere nearly as powerful as Nato."

Moreover, in January the Famine Early Warning System (FEWSNET) – a US government-funded organization created in 1985 specifically to predict famines and humanitarian emergencies – estimated that 70 million people affected by conflicts or disasters worldwide will need food assistance in 2017. This number has increased by nearly 50 percent in just the past two years.

What explains this rapid rise in the number of people who need emergency food assistance? And why, in an era of declining poverty and hunger worldwide, are we suddenly facing four potential famines in unconnected countries?

Famines are extreme events in which large populations lack adequate access to food, leading to widespread malnutrition and deaths. More of these deaths are caused by infectious disease than starvation because severe malnutrition compromises human immune systems. This makes people much more susceptible to killer diseases such as measles, or even common conditions such as diarrhea. Young children are especially vulnerable.

For many years experts believed that famines were caused by a shortfall in food availability. Then in 1981 economist/philosopher Amartya Sen published “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,” which showed that famines actually resulted when food was available but some groups could not access it. Although many people believe today that famines occur mostly in Africa, the deadliest famines of the 20th century were in Europe (Ukraine) and Asia (China).

Today we recognize famines happen only with some degree of human complicity. Some analysts assert that famines are crimes of either commission or omission, because human decisions and actions determine whether a crisis deteriorates into a full-blown famine. They also contend that we cannot eradicate famine without holding people who cause it accountable.

Famines typically have multiple causes. They can include climatic factors such as drought, economic shocks such as rapid inflation, and violent conflict or other political causes. Their impacts are more severe when underlying factors make some groups more vulnerable.

Sorry! I’ll read that again. International Women’s Day is the moment when we solemnly measure how far we have moved from that dismal stereotype of womanhood and toward women claiming an equal place in the workforce and leaving half the care work to men. According to UN Women, we have not advanced nearly far enough along this path, and the agency is calling on states to “step it up” for gender equality.

The Washington Women’s March sisterhood and their allies around the world are organising a women’s strike to drive the point home. For 99 percent of the world’s women, it’s safe to say, this will be another ordinary day: they will go to work or look after the children, and perhaps hear something on the evening news about the pay gap, or how few women CEOs there are, or how little housework the men do.

However, there is one small group, at least, who will be celebrating: 100-plus “biz mums”, mostly from Australia, will have a lovely day on social media talking about the creative ways they have entered the workforce by starting their own business. They don’t seem bothered by the gender gap.

But our big sisters at United Nations headquarters in New York definitely are. [The] UN HQ slogan is, “Step It Up for Gender Equality towards a Planet 50-50 by 2030.” The difference between a man and a woman means that together they can do something that is impossible for each alone.

The trouble with the UN/feminist programme is that they treat these momentous realities as irrelevant to the rest of life and, in particular, to the world of work. They want an absolute equality that only comes at the cost of woman’s unique “productivity” – her motherhood, as we see in the clamour for abortion rights. And the price is too high.

And I don’t even like to use the term “conspiracy theorist” much, because the truth is that most “conspiracy theorists” are simply citizen journalists that are attempting to expose things that the mainstream media doesn’t want to talk about. And one of the things that the mainstream media has always been hesitant to address is the unconstitutional surveillance that US intelligence agencies systematically conduct on their own citizens.

But now the mainstream media is being forced to talk about government surveillance because Wikileaks has just exposed it for all the world to see. According to Wikileaks, the CIA has been secretly running “its ‘own NSA’ with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified”.

It is known as the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, and it has produced “more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware”. In fact, the computer or phone that you are reading this article on may be infected with one of their programs right now. The documents that were released by Wikileaks show that government spooks can remotely take control of Apple iPhones, Google Android phones, Microsoft Windows operating systems and Samsung smart televisions, and once in control of those devices they can use them to spy on their owners.

The ironic thing is that while Barack Obama and members of Congress have been accusing Russia of conducting cyberattacks, the truth is that US intelligence agencies have been perhaps the biggest offenders of all.

This is an absolutely massive scandal, and I truly hope that it gets the attention that it deserves in the days ahead. Now that all of this is out in the open, America has two choices. We can end this unconstitutional surveillance and go back to being a nation that respects privacy, or we can allow it to continue and keep heading down the road toward becoming a “Big Brother” surveillance society far worse than anything that George Orwell ever warned about.

The Brazilian economy was once the seventh largest on the globe, but after shrinking for eight consecutive quarters it has now fallen to ninth place. And in Venezuela the economic collapse has gotten so bad that more than 70 percent of the population lost weight last year due to a severe lack of food.

Most of us living in the northern hemisphere don’t think that anything like this could happen to us any time soon, but the truth is that trouble signs are already starting to erupt all around us. It is just a matter of time before the things currently happening in Brazil and Venezuela start happening here, but unfortunately most people are not heeding the warnings.

The global economy is more interconnected than ever before, and pain that starts in one region can rapidly spread to others. The biggest debt bubble that the world has ever seen is starting to burst, and over the coming years we are going to see financial pain on a scale that would be unimaginable to most of us at this moment.

A 7.9 earthquake in 1857 – the last major temblor to strike – was so powerful that it caused the soil to liquefy and trees to sink and uproot. The shaking lasted between one and three minutes. Since then, land on either side of the fault has been pushing against the other at a rate of more than 1in per year, accumulating energy which will be suddenly released in a major earthquake that would move land along the fault line by many feet.

A repeat of the 1857 quake could move the land as much as 20ft, damage aqueducts that ferry water into Southern California from the north, disrupt transmission lines, and damage Interstate 5.

The San Andreas Fault extends roughly 1,300km (800 miles) through California. It has three segments, each with a varying degree of earthquake risk. The most significant is the southern segment, which passes within about 56km (35 miles) of Los Angeles.