The slide in the US followed large losses all around the world and left all three major US indexes down at least 10 percent since the beginning of the year. The latest slump reflected heightened concerns that global economic growth is slowing, even as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen reiterated her confidence in the US economy in testimony to Congress Thursday.

"A lot of people are having trouble assessing the true value of stocks," said JJ Kinahan, TD Ameritrade's chief strategist. "What it says to me is we're going to continue with volatility." Financial companies were among the biggest decliners amid growing anxiety that interest rates in the US and elsewhere would remain low and sap bank profits.

The price of oil tumbled to $26.21, its lowest level since May 2003. Investors fled to the traditional havens of bonds and precious metals. Gold jumped 4.5 percent. In the first 42 days of the year, more than £181 billion has been wiped off Britain's biggest companies - that's more than double the amount that the blue chip index lost last year. In the first four days of this week, the FTSE 100 has surrendered £80.3 billion in value.

On Tuesday, the EU’s six original member nations - including Italy, Germany and France - stressed their commitment to “the process of creating an ever closer union among the people of Europe.” The declaration by foreign ministers comes at an awkward time for Prime Minister David Cameron, who is pushing for changes to Britain’s relationship with the EU ahead of a national referendum - probably later this year - on whether to remain in the bloc.

Cameron and EU leaders hope to strike a deal at a February 18-19 meeting in Brussels, but differences remain over contrasting visions for the future of the union. European Council President Donald Tusk, who is shepherding the negotiations, said Wednesday that the talks were “a very fragile political process” but he hoped to get an agreement next week.

Throughout the negotiations, Cameron has stressed that Britain is happy to be part of the EU’s free-trade zone, but wants assurances it will not have its laws and economy tied more closely to the other member states. “We are going to keep our borders,” Cameron said last week. “We are never going to sign up to things like a European army. We are never going to sign up to an ever closer union.”

British Euroskeptics seized on the six “core Europe” nations’ declaration as proof that the EU aims to become a European super-state. The tabloid Daily Express said it could leave Cameron’s reform agenda “in tatters.”

The Prime Minister has recently linked Britain’s EU membership to national security as he campaigns for the UK to remain in the 28-member bloc ahead of the upcoming in/out referendum. But, speaking at a conference of leading eurosceptics yesterday, Mr Cameron’s former minister described such an argument as the “least credible” that could be made by those campaigning for Britain to remain tied to Brussels - which he labelled ‘Remainians’.

Dr Fox pointed out how NATO and the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence community - made up of Britain, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia - were the main sources maintaining the UK’s national security. He asked: Which bits of these actually refer to the EU? “And therefore which part of our national security is damaged by being outside the EU?”

The Tory MP said a vote for Brexit would act as a "wake-up call" for NATO and will "end the EU’s defence pretensions". He said Britain cutting ties with Brussels would "mean the remaining EU simply does not have the military capacity to pretend it can be an alternative to NATO". He added: "That would be good for Britain, it would be good for the EU and it would be good for NATO."

As the US-led coalition steps up air strikes on IS positions in Syria and Iraq there are growing fears that the IS "enclave" around the Libyan city of Sirte is providing a safe haven in which jihadists can train, fund and plan attacks across the Mediterranean. So how real is this threat?

Last week the US State Department and the Pentagon jointly raised their estimate of the number of foreign jihadists with IS in Libya to 4,000-6,000. They believe large numbers are being recruited from African countries to the south, helped by cash inducements.

Libya today is awash with powerful weapons and there are unlimited places in which to train jihadists for future terrorist attacks, with little chance of being disrupted by any kind of central authority because there isn't one. Both IS and Western governments have made much of Libya's proximity to southern Europe, pointing out that it brings the group geographically much closer to the West than its bases in Raqqa or Mosul.

In a world where governments are blowing up children with drones and calling them collateral damage in phony terror wars on a daily basis, social engineering has turned average people into walking arguments that the film Idiocracy was actually a documentary, busily wasting their time fretting over how offensive otherwise innocuous words are. Human beings are mammals. A female mammal who has children has traditionally been called a “mother” or “mom,” to separate this mammal linguistically from the male version, who has traditionally been called a “dad” or “father”.

Well, not anymore in one Florida college classroom where a professor has decided that language is offensive because it isn’t “inclusive” enough. In the syllabus for her “Creativity In Context” class — a required course for any student pursuing a minor in Innovation — UF professor Jennifer Lee informs students of her four paragraph long classroom “communications policy” that she says will enforce “ethical conduct” in the classroom.

The syllabus explains that this means replacing the words “boyfriend”/”girlfriend” with the more inclusive “partner” or “significant other.” The rule applies to conversations about married couples too: saying “husband” or “wife” is forbidden. Even the words “mom” and “dad” have a more “inclusive” alternative — students are told to use the word “family” instead.

Pretty soon the only way to be “free of stereotypes” will be to not speak at all. Then they’ll have to move on to weeding out the offensive facial expressions. Take this all the way out and we end up in one of those dystopic futures like in the film The Giver where everyone is medically forced into having no emotions at all because emotions are just too “dangerous” and “offensive”.

The group had been gathering during their lunch hour to sing and pray together since 2001. However, when they attempted to place an announcement in the newsletter that titled the theme of their meeting, which is "Jesus is our life," that's where there was an issue. NASA's legal department explained that including the name 'Jesus' within the club's announcement made that announcement "sectarian" or "denominational."

Under Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah, the space agency has not only promoted a communist agenda, but been ordered to reach out to Muslims. Perhaps this is partly where some of this comes from. NASA is not violating the First Amendment by publishing the name Jesus in its newsletter and it should know better. Thankfully, there are those that do and are holding these NASA attorneys accountable and calling them out.

Its significance for both Churches is immense. Whatever the joint declaration they sign when they meet in Cuba, the simple fact of their meeting is a clear signal the hostility and chill of the past thousand years or so since the Great Schism may finally be edging towards a warmer phase in relations.

That relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church matters because about two-thirds of the world's more than 200 million Orthodox Christians are Russian. Earlier popes tried to pave the way for such a thaw with Moscow, most notably Pope Saint John Paul II, who tried to reach out to the Russian Orthodox Church.

However, those efforts were hindered by post-Cold War suspicion - above all in Moscow - which was only added to by the Pope's own Slavic roots. This "personal conversation" between the two leaders at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana has been made possible by many relatively recent geopolitical shifts.

Grave sins include defiling consecrated bread and wine, violating confessional secrecy, and plotting to kill a pope. Pope Francis has often said the Church needs to be less rigid and judgemental.

He has declared this a Holy Year of Mercy, and is using it to spread a message of forgiveness - particularly among Catholics who have strayed from the faith and are keen to return. At a Vatican ceremony on Tuesday, the Pope addressed some 700 of the chosen priests, saying penitents should be welcomed with open arms, instead of being judged with "a sense of superiority".

The grave sins that the priests can temporarily forgive may usually only be pardoned by senior bishops, Vatican officials or the Pope himself. Abortion falls within the category of serious transgressions, but the Pope last year announced that he would allow all regular priests to grant absolution for this sin to women who wished to repent, for the duration of the Holy Year. The Pope said that he recognised some women felt they had no choice but to take the "agonising" decision to have an abortion.

Such images remain potent but they hinder real engagement with the questions of how Germany will use its current economic and political influence, and how far the EU can or should contain that power. For answers we should look back in time to when Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The legacy of two world wars has encouraged those outside Germany to fear its leadership as potential hegemony but the history of the Holy Roman Empire reveals a time when Germany was part of a wider pacific order.

And it is here that we see most clearly what the empire can tell us about Europe’s possible future. Its inhabitants generally identified with it positively because it preserved their own autonomy and ways of life. It cannot be a blueprint for today’s EU, because the social order which underpinned that local autonomy was also riddled with inequalities we would find abhorrent.

Yet it does suggest an alternative to the stark choice between the EU as a single, homogeneous superstate or fatally weakening Europe’s global position by fragmenting it into a mosaic of national states.

While there are those who insist that the Holy Roman Empire can help inspire a different European Union, we can do better than look to the example of Charlemagne. “Power was always multiple and plural. The management of daily life was devolved to more local powers,” writes Oxford historian Professor Peter Wilson, as though the Empire were the epitome of subsidiarity, unforced brotherhood and elective fraternity.

Try selling that notion to the 4,500 Saxons who were massacred in Verden, Lower Saxony, in the year 782. Charlemagne’s Reich was built on bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and horrific war crimes. He was the Hitler of his day, but history is a marvellous eraser of wrongs and redactor of truth.

The bishops of the Roman Catholic Church customarily issue guidance at election time, but one wishes they would respect the democratic intellect of British Roman Catholics. Man-made government is a necessary evil for the ordering of society, and, in the absence of the reigning King of Kings, it is for each Christian to discern the lesser evil. “How we vote is ultimately a matter of personal conscience,” said Bishop Noel Treanor, Bishop of Down & Connor, in his 2014 ‘Pastoral Reflection’ on the run-up to elections to the European Parliament.

The Christian task, he says, is “to influence the values that will shape future public policy”, observing that we are “called to inform our conscience”, which means “weighing up the position of each candidate and political party in the forthcoming elections and deciding how, in exercising our Christian responsibility to vote, we can maximise the common good”.

Of course, in issuing his guidance, Bishop Noel is mindful of Roman Catholic Social Teaching, centred around the right to life; the uniqueness of marriage between a woman and man; the promotion of justice, social inclusion and concern for the poor; and the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. Archbishop Paul Gallagher will have the same ‘goods’ in mind.

And therein lies the tension, for the political entity that is the European Union may promote peace, mutual understanding and reconciliation, and yet, in the pursuit of justice and equality, it negates the right to life and nullifies the God-ordained institution of marriage.

The real estate billionaire was speaking to the French conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles, saying the German chancellor had made “a tragic mistake with the migrants.” "If you don't treat the situation competently and firmly, yes, it's the end of Europe. You could face real revolutions," Trump was quoted as saying, as cited by Reuters.

Merkel’s approval ratings have taken a nosedive and she has also received criticism from within her ruling coalition for her ‘open-door’ refugee and migrant policy, which saw an estimated 1.1 million asylum seekers arrive in Germany in 2015. Germany’s Economics Minister Gerd Muller stated in January that an estimated 8-10 million refugees could look to enter Europe over the coming years.

"The EU is like the orchestra playing on the Titanic," Renzi told Bloomberg, insisting his revitalized and reformed Italy had earned the right to play a leading role in shaping the bloc's destiny. "Today we have done reforms and we are in a position to say to EU partners: 'friends, we can change this wrong, bureaucratic approach'." Renzi has notably clashed with Brussels over Rome's demands for leeway on the EU's Stability Pact budget rules to allow him to revive the struggling Italian economy with tax cuts and growth-orientated spending.

In a reflection of Italy's more active diplomacy, Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni on Tuesday hosted a dinner for his counterparts from the bloc's six founding member states.

Billed as the start of a reflection on the EU's future, the ministers endorsed a statement reiterating their commitment to "ever closer union" while signalling that not all member states would be expected to pursue the goal.

At the time, he was a virtual unknown in Italian politics, but six months later he won the race to lead the centre-left Democratic Party and by February 2014, he was appointed Prime Minister. Riding high in the popularity sweepstakes at home, Renzi worked hard to earn Italy the respect of its European neighbours, especially after the embarrassments of the Silvio Berlusconi era.

He quickly ushered in reforms to reignite the country’s debt-stricken economy and has reduced the public sector deficit within less than two years in power, earning praise from and inspiring the confidence of Merkel.

The general secretary of the Scandinavian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Signor Mirijam Kaschner said much of the interest is focused on the Pope himself. “Since he became Pope whatever he undertakes or plans, wherever he goes or whenever he signs a document, it is reported in the media up here in the north. That was never the case up to now,” Signor Mirijam wrote on the Cologne diocesan internet portal.

The one-day visit, on 31 October, will feature a joint ecumenical commemoration to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Pope Francis will lead the ecumenical commemoration in Lund alongside Bishop Munib Younan, president of the Lutheran World Federation, and the Reverend Martin Junge, federation general secretary, said a joint press release by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and the LWF.

With the Western World and China in danger of going into deflation, major banks have already started to charge negative interest rates. Denmark’s central bank was a pioneer when it first cut its deposit rate below zero in 2012, and the trend has now spread to the eurozone and Japan. The Danish deposit rate now stands at minus 0.65 per cent. - Financial Times

Sweden has followed suit. The USA is set to follow. Major Bankers are calling for an abolition of money. It may be the only fix left, now that quantitative easing is failing. But no one is going to put their money in banks! Not if it means negative interest rates. Don't worry. Governments will rise to the occasion and soon will be making cash illegal. People will be forced to put their money in banks or the market, thus rescuing the central governments and the central banks that are incestuously intertwined with them.

Beyond that, cash is probably the last arena of personal autonomy left. It can be spent anyway one pleases, with no one watching. It can be hidden from the government to avoid taxes. It can be used to engage in transactions of a semi-legal nature. It has power that the government cannot control; and that is why it has to go.

The end result will be the loss of all autonomy. This will be the darkest of all tyrannies. From cradle to grave one will not only be tracked in location, but on purchases. Liberty will be non-existent.

However, it will be sold to us as an expedient and simplicity itself, freeing us from crime: Fascism with a friendly face. The real purpose of a cashless society will be total control: Absolute Total Control.

Perhaps the scariest consequence of all is that an individual can be "terminated" by a bureaucrat erasing his identity. Do not kid yourself, it will happen. Real "Mark of the Beast" stuff.

Rev 13:16-17 ‘And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark ...’ (Rev 13:16-17). I do not know if we are there yet; but if recent headlines are a clue, we may be very close.