Before the Temple can rise, builders must secure a red heifer, or “para aduma,” a three-year-old female cow with totally red hair that is supposed to be able to restore a state of “purity” after ritual slaughter. The Temple Institute, an Israeli organization dedicated to constructing the Third Temple, has launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to breed such animals and has already succeeded in accumulating almost $15,000 in three days.

The group’s previous campaign in 2014 succeeded in raising more than $100,000 to pay for the creation of construction plans that meet both architectural and Scriptural standards. The group admits red heifers are not uncommon around the world, but claims a “para aduma” suitable for ritual use actually must be raised in Israel and meet painstaking specifications laid out in Scripture.

Yet the fierce debate over the Third Temple and its importance for the contemporary world does not detract from a shared sense among many commentators of prophecy being realized in the modern world. Noting what he sees as the rise of global immorality, ominous signs of war in the Middle East, and the return of the state of Israel, Carl Gallups - pastor, talk-show host and author - enthuses, “The solid signs of Jesus’ soon return are all around us.”

And Joel Richardson - filmmaker, evangelist and best-selling author - believes Christians are going to be forced to confront their deepest held beliefs about the end times sooner rather than later. “If the Christian church seems divided now, imagine the great controversy in the days ahead when the third Jewish Temple is rebuilt. Those days are indeed coming and coming quickly.”

Excuse the slightly strange introduction to this week’s column. I don’t know why but when I read this week about the tourists queuing round the block for days at a time to snap up prime London real estate, this song started playing in my head. The flats, which started at £350,000 for a studio, sold out within four hours, with half of the buyers living overseas; many of the purchasers of Maine Tower’s “elite lifestyle services” have never seen the plot on which the 41-storey skyscraper will be built. But who cares what it looks like, as long as your money is safely invested out of your own faltering economy?

More likely, they’ve got bored and decided to gamble on real estate in another part of the property playground they never plan to inhabit. Meanwhile, local people are priced further and further out, unable to live in the land they call home.

In a capital city where so many cannot afford their own homes, and so soon after housing benefit was taken away from the already much-maligned young, it seems obscene to learn that vast swathes of it are being bought up by rich foreigners who will probably leave their luxury apartments empty because renting harms the property’s market value.

Up to 200,000 Germans are believed to have filed official declarations last year renouncing their membership of the Protestant church, the highest number in almost two decades. A similar number are thought to have left the Catholic Church. Church members in Germany are required by law to pay tax to fund church activities, which is collected by the government.

Under German law, anyone who was baptised as a child is automatically a member of the church and obliged to pay the tax, charged as a percentage of their income, regardless of their beliefs or whether they attend church services. Until recently, many Christians have been prepared to pay the extra tax for the benefits it brings them, including access to church schools and day care facilities that are funded by the state.

A decision to extend the 8 or 9 per cent charge to capital gains income, or the profit earned from selling an asset, appears to have sparked the sharp decline in church membership. The new tax regulation was “just the straw that broke the camel’s back for people who were already thinking of leaving”, Ruth Levin, spokesman for the Protestant church in Disnlaken, told Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

Around 30.8 per cent of Germans, or 24.7 million people, are Catholics, according to the 2011 census, while 30.3 per cent, or 24.3 million people, are Protestants.

Our government's incessant tightening of already restrictive Rules of Engagement, compounded by the failed COIN (Counterinsurgency) strategy — also known as "winning hearts and minds," has made an otherwise primitive enemy formidable.

Our best and brightest come home in body bags as politicians and lawyers dine over white linen tablecloths; writing, modifying, and re-modifying these lethal rules… rules that favor the enemy rather than the American soldier. Rules so absurd they're difficult to believe until you hear the same stories over and again from those returning from battle. In a delicate discussion with an Army Ranger who recently left the military, we heard the following: "I had to get out. I have a family who needs me. I didn't join to be sacrificed. I joined to fight."

This decision came shortly after he lost a close friend to the Rules of Engagement. He went on to explain: the Taliban had attempted an ambush on his friend's squad, but quickly realized they were in a battle they couldn't win and began retreating. While chasing them, the US soldiers were ordered not to engage due to the slight chance the Taliban had laid down their arms as they ran through some type of shack. While arguing with leadership at the JOC (Joint Operations Center) his friend was shot and killed.

However, today's war fighters have the grave misfortune of serving leaders who elevate the virtues of inaction over action. The message? If you dare use your training or your gut instinct, if you have the fortitude to fight for your life, or the desire to kill the enemy, there is a good chance you will be punished. The physiological capacities of a true patriot cannot tolerate the vile stench of injustice, especially when perpetrated against those who defend us. Its wretched aroma permeates the core and demands a response.

The drought, now in its 16th year, has made one fact brutally clear: The Colorado cannot continue to meet the current urban, agricultural, hydroelectric and recreational demands on it — and the point at which the river will fall short could come sooner than anyone thought.

Few rivers are asked to work as hard as the Colorado. Ranchers in western Colorado use the river to water pastures for beef cattle, while Denver and its suburbs channel it east across the mountains to enable city living. Las Vegas and other southern Nevada communities draw up to 90% of their water from the Colorado. Hoover Dam and others convert its flow into power. After Arizona and California take their share, the river exits — evaporates, really — through the dry remnants of a delta leading to the Gulf of California.

Rice was asked about the money Iran will receive under sanctions relief and how they can use it, she answered that the sanctions were only put in place “to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.” She added, “Our best judgment is, first of all, it’s going to take them quite a while to access that money. And it will take — they won’t be able to get it all at once. They won’t get any of it, not one dime of it, Wolf, unless and until they take the steps that they’ve committed to take to dismantle the bulk of their nuclear program.

"So, they have to take out 2/3ds of their centrifuges. They have to get rid of 98% of their uranium stockpile. They have to render inoperative their plutonium facility. They have to let the IAEA do the inspections and the interviews that are necessary to answer the questions that remain about Iran’s past nuclear activities. Among — they have to let the IAEA in and establish this 24/7 monitoring that I described. All of those steps have to be taken.”

She continued, “And then at that point, the sanctions will be suspended. And Iran will begin to be able to access its frozen accounts around the world. What do we think they’ll spend that money on? We think, for the most part, they’re going to need to spend it on the Iranian people and their economy which has tanked. And Rouhani, the president, was really elected on the hope that he would bring economic relief to the Iranian people.

"But yes, it is real, it is possible, and, in fact, we should expect that some portion of that money would go to the Iranian military and could potentially be used for the kinds of bad behavior that we have seen in the region up until now. But the goal here, Wolf, was never, and was not designed to prevent them from engaging in bad behavior in region. They’re doing that today. The goal is to ensure that they don’t have a nuclear weapon, and therefore, when they are engaging in that bad behavior, are that much more dangerous.”

Now, in what can be described as the opening salvo in another round of the war on Christianity, LGBT activist and liberal journalist Felix Salmon has floated the idea of taking away the tax exempt status of any and all churches that do not support gay marriage.

So there you have it, in the new free and equal America if your church does not support a certain political and religious belief they should be forced to effectively PAY the government a portion of their income and donations.

Perhaps the most telling fact in all this that proves without a doubt that the hard left and their LGBT activist allies specifically and wholeheartedly HATE Christians is that they never mention the horrific treatment gays receive at the hands of other religions such as Islam.

This nation is repeating the disastrous evolutionary process that has plagued so many failed countries throughout mankind’s history. This process begins with a society willing to reject the fundamental concept that is necessary for any nation to thrive and prosper: respect for the uniqueness of each individual and self-determination. Recently the revelation that Planned Parenthood is selling, without a second thought, body parts of aborted human beings for profit is a significant indicator of the depth to which this nation has fallen over the past 45 years.

On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court validated abortion on demand (up to the point of so-called viability) regardless of circumstances. Many of my acquaintances celebrated this decision as a monumental advancement in women’s and societal rights. I, on the other hand, was overcome with a sense of foreboding. I was appalled and openly stated that this nation had embarked on the road of demeaning and devaluing life, which would lead to a society devoid of morality and integrity with the ultimate ascension into power those who would destroy this nation as founded. My warnings fell on deaf ears as I was ridiculed and accused of being an anachronism as these things could never happen in the United States.

As there were few that shared my premonition, I could only watch over the past 42 years as the American people have sanctioned, through legal abortions, the death of over 54.5 million children. Once this disregard of human life took hold, the citizens of this nation were susceptible to wholesale changes within society. Far too many of the American people, flush with prosperity, willfully ignored the infiltration of the education, media and entertainment establishments by the 1960’s radicals, the most narcissistic and radical legion of socialist true-believers on the face of the earth. Through the control of these mediums of indoctrination, an ever increasing percentage of the population has been conditioned to believe there are no moral absolutes and there is a limitless list of rights as granted by the government.

Authorities are investigating whether or not he had any connection to ISIS (which he almost certainly did), but nobody is disputing the fact that he was Muslim. Hopefully this horrific incident will serve as a huge wake up call for millions of Americans. Islamic terrorists are already here – and this is just the beginning of their reign of terror on US soil.

ISIS has made it very clear that they plan to kill as many of us as they possibly can. But most Americans seem very apathetic about this. Perhaps it is because they have been hearing about what a “threat” that “al-Qaeda” was for so many years and yet nothing ever seemed to actually happen.

And of course there are many liberals that have been trained that it is politically incorrect to even use the phrase “Islamic terror”. Following the lead of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other radical leftists, the only “terrorists” that they want to talk about are the “right-wing extremists” that they take great joy in persecuting. Today’s shooting will hopefully shake many Americans out of their politically-induced comas. The threat of Islamic terror inside the United States is greater than it has ever been before.

The statement was tweeted hours after the Chattanooga shooting and after it had been established that the culprit was 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a Kuwaiti Muslim whose blog revealed that Islam played a central role in his ideology. It was only after Obama had lectured Americans about respecting Islam that he paid tribute to the four dead Marines killed by an Islamic terrorist.

Obama has been widely criticized for his refusal to even use the term “Islamic” when referring to Islamist terror attacks, an illustration of the stifling political correctness that surrounds discussion of Islamic-inspired atrocities. In the aftermath of the shootings, the leftist media, which immediately exploited the Charleston attack to collectively demonize all white Americans, is noticeably shy to discuss Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s motivation.

In the coming decade, the deal will reward Iran, the terrorist regime in Tehran, with hundreds of billions of dollars. This cash bonanza will fuel Iran’s terrorism worldwide, its aggression in the region and its efforts to destroy Israel, which are ongoing. Amazingly, this bad deal does not require Iran to cease its aggressive behavior in any way. And just last Friday, that aggression was on display for all to see.

While the negotiators were closing the deal in Vienna, Iran’s supposedly moderate president chose to go to a rally in Tehran and at this rally, a frenzied mob burned American and Israeli flags and chanted ‘Death to America, Death to Israel!’ Now, this didn’t happen four years ago. It happened four days ago. Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, said on March 21 that the deal does not limit Iran’s aggression in any way. He said: ‘Negotiations with the United States are on the nuclear issue and on nothing else.’

And three days ago he made that clear again. ‘The United States’, he said, ’embodies global arrogance, and the battle against it will continue unabated even after the nuclear agreement is concluded.’ Here’s what Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah, said about sanctions relief, which is a key component of the deal. He said: ‘A rich and strong Iran will be able to stand by its allies and friends in the region more than at any time in the past.’ Translation: Iran’s support for terrorism and subversion will actually increase after the deal.

By not dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, in a decade this deal will give an unreformed, unrepentant and far richer terrorist regime the capacity to produce many nuclear bombs, in fact an entire nuclear arsenal with the means to deliver it. What a stunning historic mistake! Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran and Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran because Iran continues to seek our destruction. We will always defend ourselves.

But in negotiating a new deal this week to bail out Greece, Germany displayed what many Europeans saw as a harder, more selfish edge, demanding painful measures from Athens and resisting any firm commitment to granting Greece relief from its crippling debt. And that perception was fueled on Thursday when the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, suggested that Greece would get its best shot at a substantial cut in its debt only if it was willing to give up membership in the European common currency.

Mr Schäuble stressed that he was not pushing the Greeks to take any particular course and that in any case he was only talking about a temporary exit from the euro. But coming a day before German lawmakers are to give the go-ahead to negotiate the details of the bailout package for Athens, his remarks were evidence of a continuing deep ambivalence among conservatives in Germany about the costs of keeping Greece in the currency zone and a greater willingness to question whether the goal of “ever-closer union” in Europe should be reassessed.

Some analysts said Mr Schäuble’s discussion of a “temporary” exit from the eurozone for Greece was a veiled attempt to push it out of the 19-member currency union for good. Sony Kapoor, an analyst at Re-Define, a research group, recalled Mr Schäuble expressing similar thoughts in 2012. “The idea behind couching it in temporary terms is to make it sound less onerous and a bit more compliant with the legal situation,” Mr Kapoor said. “There is nothing as permanent as a temporary divorce.”

In a speech at a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel", Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities.

An arch conservative with the last word on high matters of state, Khamenei repeatedly used the phrase "whether this text is approved or not", implying the accord has yet to win definitive backing from Iran's factionalized political establishment. "Whether the deal is approved or disapproved, we will never stop supporting our friends in the region and the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon. Even after this deal our policy towards the arrogant US will not change," he said.

Under the agreement reached on Tuesday, sanctions will be gradually removed in return for Iran accepting long-term curbs on a nuclear program that the West has suspected was aimed at creating a nuclear bomb. Iran denies it seeks a nuclear bomb. Khamenei's combative remarks about US policies in the Middle East may sit awkwardly with a diplomatic offensive Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif plans in coming days in the wake of the deal.

The EMP Commission to Congress reported that if the power grid was down for a full year, upwards of 90 percent of the population would die, either from starvation, sickness or civil unrest. The most public action was taken by the Pentagon, which has decided to move its command center for North America into an EMP-proof bunker.

In April it was revealed that the headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the US Northern Command were moving back into an underground facility inside Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. “Because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain is built, it’s EMP-hardened,” NORAD and North Command’s top officer, Admiral William Gortney, told the press. “It wasn’t really designed to be that way, but the way it was constructed makes it that way.”

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex was built in the 1960s to coordinate US and Canadian defenses during the Cold War. The Pentagon will spend $1.5 billion to upgrade the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which was closed in 2004, Defense One reported. Facilities inside the mountain include sleeping quarters, a water supply and a power station. All US military forces presumably would be directed from the facility in the event of an EMP attack or a solar storm (GMD incident) that took out the power grid.

Mr Abe’s party and its allies in the lower house of Parliament approved the package of 11 security-related bills after opposition lawmakers walked out in protest and as demonstrators chanted noisily outside, despite a gathering typhoon. The upper chamber, which Mr Abe’s coalition also controls, is all but certain to endorse the legislation as well.

The vote was the culmination of months of contentious debate in a society that has long embraced pacifism to atone for wartime aggression. It was a significant victory for Mr Abe, a conservative politician who has devoted his career to moving Japan beyond guilt over its militarist past and toward his vision of a “normal country” with a larger role in global affairs.

Mr Abe has pressed this agenda, though, against the wishes of much of the Japanese public, and his moves have generated unease across Asia, especially in countries Japan once occupied and where its troops committed atrocities. Final passage of the bills would represent a break from the strictly defensive stance maintained by the Japanese military in the decades since the war.