The US Navy is considering “long-term” deployments in the Mediterranean in addition to the ongoing use of four guided missile destroyers stationed in Rota, Spain, the senior Navy official told Sputnik on Tuesday.

“You could say it’s because of the migrant issue and the tax that that has put on European navies, and then certainly because of the increased Russian naval presence and capability,” he added. Washington is also in touch with its NATO allies to see what amount of naval capacities the Europeans are able to stand up. “The reason for those discussions… at the top of that list, again, is the increased Russian presence and what it means,” the official reiterated.

The Shiveluch volcano released ash plumes throughout 2015, at times releasing enough ash to carpet nearby towns. The new eruption led the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT) to issue an orange warning, meaning that while a major eruption is not imminent, it is nevertheless a danger to aircraft.

In an annual address to diplomats at the Vatican City, the pontiff said the flood of new arrivals, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, was a major burden for Europe and had given rise to "significant" fears over security and international terrorism. "The present wave of migration seems to be undermining the foundations of that 'humanistic spirit' which Europe has always loved and defended," he said.

Despite the "inevitable difficulties" in trying to absorb the migrants, who brought with them different cultures and traditions, the pope said he hoped European nations would prove capable of integrating and accepting the refugees.

The spread of Ebola in West Africa last year shows how poorly-understood diseases can emerge and grow rapidly while researchers race to design and conduct the scientific studies needed to combat them.

Researchers in the journal Nature Microbiology called for a bacterial infection called meliodosis, which is resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, to be given a higher priority by international health organizations and policy makers.

At the same time, scientists at Britain's Oxford University warned that a virus known as Zika, which is carried by mosquitoes and has caused a major outbreak in Brazil, has "the potential of rapid spread to new areas".

Thousands of people in Brazil have been infected by Zika. While the virus is not thought to kill, health authorities there last year linked it to a surge in babies born with microcephaly, restricted head growth that seriously limits a child's mental and physical abilities.

A seven-day losing streak fueled by concerns about a continued supply glut and fragile demand from China, the world's number 2 consumer, wiped out almost a fifth of crude prices this year and 70 percent since mid-2014.

Traders have all but given up attempting to predict where the new-year rout will end, with momentum-driven dealing and overwhelmingly bearish sentiment engulfing the market. Some analysts warned of $20 a barrel; Standard Chartered said fund selling may not relent until it reaches $10.

And more of the world's biggest energy companies are conceding that it may be many years before prices recover. On Tuesday, US crude futures traded below $50 through 2021.

We’ve nipped around the edges for years. We allow 13 and 14 year old girls to get abortions without any police involvement. We’ve enacted “Romeo and Juliet” laws that sexualize young women and give older sexual predators a literal “Get Out of Jail Free” card. We saw GOP women side with the abortion industry in defeating a bill that would have required any woman asking for an abortion based on rape or incest to report the incident to the police. In short, all the ground work has been laid for making pedophilia a legitimate sexual activity.

The unfortunate truth is that pedophiles and their sympathizers are using the homosexual rights playbook. The fact that we already allow 13 and 14 year old girls sufficient agency to decide to take birth control pills or get an abortion without parental consent is a de facto death blow to state age of consent laws.

"They took it too far this time," Rosine Mazeh, the grandmother of 7-year-old Marianna Mazeh, told Al-Jadeed from their village of Tay Filsey in a report broadcast Saturday. She said the photo of her smiling brown-haired, blue-eyed granddaughter was originally posted to Facebook three years ago and had been doctored several times in the past by individuals promoting different causes.

Most recently, the photo was circulated in a side-by-side with images depicting a skeletal figure said to be suffering from malnutrition as a result of a Syrian army siege in the town of Madaya, located several kilometers east of Lebanon's border. Several other photos circulating on social media and picked up by some international news agencies that alleged to show starvation from the town have also been revealed as fakes.

Rising sea levels could force communities to live in underwater or semi-aquatic towns which could change our physiology. Dr Matthew Skinner, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Kent, claims that humans could evolve to have webbed hands and feet and less body hair so they could move quickly through the water.

Our eyes would even become more like cats, so we could see in the murky gloom of seas and rivers and our lungs would shrink as we became used to using artificial tanks to breathe underwater. “Regular underwater foraging would lead to the evolution of longer fingers and toes which would then likely develop ‘webbed’ interconnecting skin to enable easier swimming,” said Dr Skinner.

“We may evolve a tapetum lucidum, an additional layer in the retina, like cat’s eyes, that would improve our vision in low light conditions such as underwater. Due to the cold environment of being submerged in water regularly, we would maintain a layer of ‘baby fat’ into adulthood as an insulator.”

This is the most recent example that shows that the Pope has completely abandoned any notion that a relationship with God is available only through Jesus Christ. As he has done throughout his papacy, he continues to lay the groundwork for the coming one world religion, and yet hardly anyone seems upset by this.

Pope Francis believes that all religions are different paths to the same God, and he is working hard to lay a foundation for the coming one world religion. However, there are some religious people that Pope Francis does not like. Just recently, he referred to Christian fundamentalism as “a sickness”, and he made it clear that there was no room for it in Catholicism.

So precisely what is “fundamentalism”? Google defines it as “a form of a religion, especially Islam or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture.” Does this mean that Pope Francis is against any Christian that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible?

That does appear to be what he is saying, and without a doubt those would be the Christians that would be against the kind of one world religion that he appears to be promoting.

Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, the authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees. That delay has now cost Cologne’s police chief his job. But the German government still seems more concerned about policing restless natives — most recently through a deal with Facebook and Google to restrict anti-immigrant postings — than with policing migration. Just last week Merkel rejected a proposal to cap refugee admissions (which topped one million last year) at 200,000 in 2016.

The underlying controversy here is not a new one. For decades conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have warned that Europe’s generous immigration policies, often pursued in defiance of ordinary Europeans’ wishes, threaten to destabilize the continent. The conservatives have made important points about the difficulty of assimilation, the threat of radicalization, and the likelihood of Paris-style and Cologne-style violence in European cities.

But they have also trafficked in more apocalyptic predictions — fears of a “Eurabia,” of mass Islamification — that are somewhat harder to credit. Until recently, Europe’s assimilation challenge looked unpleasant but not insurmountable, and the likelihood of Yugoslavian-style balkanization relatively remote. With the current migration, though, we’re in uncharted territory.

“The biggest movements are ahead: Africa’s population will double in the coming decades,” he told Bild am Sonntag, adding: “In the Sahara up to one million people have died trying to escape.” The European Commission, he added, has lost a significant amount of authority thanks to the crisis. “The protection of external borders is not working. Schengen has collapsed. A fair distribution of refugees has not taken place,” he said.

He said that in the digital age we live in, more people than ever know about the prosperity of Western nations thus making it more likely they will try to travel here.