And the Christian community has not been immune. Just look at the current election cycle. Candidates like Donald Trump have fiercely divided faith “tribes,” especially evangelicals. In recent research on the presidential race, Barna found that the five unique personal faith segments in America — evangelicals, non-evangelical born again Christians, notional Christians, people associated with non-Christian faiths, and religious skeptics — hold substantially different attitudes and candidate preferences, causing deep tensions and divides.

This splintering and polarization of American culture has made it more difficult than ever to have a good conversation.

Lenders have secretly been asked to give terms for a loan of up to £5.6 billion and with the option to increase it, according to sources close to the matter. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest crude oil producer and low oil prices have slashed the Arab country's profits.

After years of the royal family living a life of unbelievable luxury and citizens being cushioned with low taxes and bill subsidies, the country is now being brought back down to earth with a bang. At the end of last year, the kingdom unveiled a £66 billion deficit and warned its people of raised taxes.

Flooding along one part of the Sabine River has already broken the previous record by more than five feet, and this crisis is far from over. Of course this just continues a trend that I have been documenting for months now. Never before in US history have we ever seen so many historic floods in such a compressed time frame.

October: Hurricane Joaquin never makes landfall, but it tracks up the east coast of the United States causing nightmarish rainfall and flooding all over the eastern seaboard.

October: Violent storms in southern California caused flash flooding that buried some highways in “rivers of mud” that were up to six feet deep. 

October: Hurricane Patricia was the second most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the entire world, and remnants from that storm caused absolutely horrible flooding in some parts of Texas.

November-December: A “conveyor belt” of violent storms barreled into coastal areas of Oregon and Washington causing nightmarish flooding in many areas. 

January: The middle part of the country experienced record-breaking flooding as the calendar rolled over from 2015 to 2016. For something like this to happen in the middle of the winter was absolutely unprecedented.

January: On January 22nd, one of the worst east coast blizzards in history slammed into Washington DC, New York City and other major metropolitan areas.  More than three feet of snow was dumped on some areas …

March: The area right along the Texas/Louisiana border is a complete and total disaster right now.

Are we looking at the effects of climate change or shifting weather patterns? Could it be possible that what we are watching is actually the judgment of God as some are suggesting? The United States has never seen anything like this before. Clearly something is happening.

Lord King, who steered the Bank through the 2008 financial crisis, refused to take sides in the referendum debate. But he said the launch of the euro had been an unmitigated disaster. 'The attempt to create a monetary union has been damaging economically, and it has been damaging politically,' he said. 'There are no good ways out of it. It's only a question of the least bad way'.

The grim prognosis from the former central banker was seized on by Eurosceptics as evidence it is 'game over' for the eurozone. But Lord King saved his most explosive comments for Europe's biggest economy, saying Germany's dominance has been one of the more damaging consequences of the single currency project.

Perry, who served as defense secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration from 1994 to 1997, said at a Guardian Live event in London on Wednesday that he believes significant improvements were achieved in relations between the US and Russia, including in the sphere of military cooperation, in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, that course eventually came to naught. Perry said that a complete lack of regard for Russia as a power or a dialogue partner from Washington officials played a crucial role in this reversal.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed earlier in March that a policy of confrontation with the West is not something that Moscow wants. “We are not seeking confrontation with the United States, or the European Union, or NATO. On the contrary, Russia is open to the widest possible cooperation with its Western partners. We continue to believe that the best way to ensure the interests of the peoples living in Europe is to form a common economic and humanitarian space from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so that the newly formed Eurasian Economic Union could be an integrating link between Europe and Asia Pacific,” Lavrov said.

But because most of the states so far have apportioned delegates proportionally, Trump only has 44.8 percent of the delegates that have been awarded up to this point.  So Trump is going to have to do significantly better through the rest of the process in order to get to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, especially since not all of the delegates are awarded through the primaries and caucuses.  As Real Clear Politics has detailed, every state “is awarded so-called ‘RNC delegates,’ who are party officials with automatic credentials to the convention”.

Right now, more than 40 percent of all the delegates to the convention have already been awarded, and Trump is sitting at just 458.  To get to 1,237, he is going to have to do really well in the upcoming winner-take-all states.  That is why there is so much focus on Florida and Ohio on March 15th.  If Trump wins both of them, he will have a path to 1,237 delegates.  If he doesn’t, that is where things get tricky.

If Donald Trump shows up at the convention with fewer than 1,237 delegates, he will be vulnerable, and it is likely that the Republican establishment will try to steal the nomination away from him.

Not only that, they deliver 90% of the added sugars that Americans eat and drink, according to a study published Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ Open. Government health experts advise Americans to get no more than 10% of their total calories in the form of added sugars. But most us aren’t listening.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said that 71% of American adults exceed that 10% goal, and that added sugars account for 15% of all the calories they consume. All of that added sugar makes people more likely to be overweight or obese. That, in turn, sets them up for serious health problems like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer (not to mention lots of cavities).

The central bank also cut its main interest rate to zero and lowered its deposit rate even further into negative territory at minus 0.4 per cent, in effect charging banks more to hold deposits with it. Four long-term loan schemes were also announced, with banks given incentives to boost credit growth with cheaper rates. Mr Draghi is bidding to lift the inflation rate – currently minus 0.2 per cent – and growth, which was just 0.3 per cent in the latest quarter.

The ECB was determined to avoid the disappointment over its stimulus measures in December, treated as a damp squib by the market. However, although the latest package unveiled by the central bank chief initially sent the euro plunging against other major currencies – with the benefits that implied in terms of boosting eurozone exports and importing inflation – Mr Draghi reversed the sell-off in just one sentence during his press conference.

His comments that “taking into account the support of our measures to growth and inflation, we don’t anticipate that it will be necessary to reduce rates further” sent dealers piling back into the single currency. It ended up gaining ground against the pound and the dollar.

In its latest quarterly report, watched closely by investors, the BIS – which is known as the central bank of central banks – also warned that investors were concerned governments around the world were running out of policy options.

BIS chief Claudio Borio said the “uneasy calm” of previous months has given way to turbulence and a “gathering storm”. “The tension between the markets’ tranquillity and the underlying economic vulnerabilities has to be resolved at some point. In the recent quarter, we may have been witnessing the beginning of its resolution,” he added. “We may not be seeing isolated bolts from the blue, but the signs of a gathering storm that has been building for a long time,” he warned.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal.

“We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of — and headline player in — the imminent end of the world. The Islamic State awaits the army of ‘Rome,’ whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

“When it comes to the big stuff the decisions are made by two, and increasingly one country” Mr Gunnlaugsson told The Telegraph. “Others are called to meetings to approve of what has been decided, if not in the afternoon then during the middle of the night.

“This seems to have become the standard way of doing things in Brussels”, he said. His comments come in a week where German chancellor Angela Merkel has been accused of bouncing fellow member states into accepting a controversial refugee swap scheme with Turkey.

Nationals from at least 51 countries, including the UK, had to give up their most personal information as they joined the terror organisation. Only when the 23-question form was filled in were they inducted into IS. The man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State who calls himself Abu Hamed.

Disillusioned with the Islamic State leadership, he says it has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein. He claims the Islamic rules he believed have totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.

I met him in a secret location in Turkey, and he said IS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the group's birthplace. He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition. Asked if the IS files could bring the network down he nodded and said simply: "God willing".

Trump views US wars of intervention and occupation around the world, all in countries that pose no threat to American citizens, a waste of taxpayer money. He is the only candidate in either party who will question the cost and legitimacy of our commitment to Cold War relics like NATO and continuing to station troops in South Korea; our country’s involvement in religious civil wars in the Middle East and overthrowing and killing secular dictators there it doesn’t like (Hussein and Kaddafi); and our threatening Russia by encouraging its neighboring states of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Georgia to join NATO and giving them weapons and military guarantees to defend them.

US exploits are leading America to the brink of war with Russia — and possibly, given its actions in the South China Sea, to war with China as well. Putin has said, “The US wants to subdue Russia, to solve US problems at Russia’s expense. No one in history ever managed to do this to Russia and no one ever will.” More ominously, in a speech delivered at the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, he states, “Russia does not wish for chaos to spread, does not want war, and has no intention of starting one. However, today Russia sees the outbreak of war as almost inevitable, is prepared for it, and is continuing to prepare for it…” Is World War III inevitable?