Responding to a list of questions published in the paper by Mr Scalfari, who is not a Roman Catholic, Francis wrote: “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.

“Sin, even for those who have no faith, exists when people disobey their conscience.” In a welcoming response to the letter, Mr Scalfari said the Pope’s comments were “further evidence of his ability and desire to overcome barriers in dialogue with all”.

Some of the worst impacts are likely in Africa with food shortages expected to peak in February. Regions including the Caribbean, Central and South America will also be hit in the next six months. This periodic weather event, which tends to drive up global temperatures and disturb weather patterns, has helped push 2015 into the record books as the world's warmest year.

"In a lot of tropical countries we are seeing big reductions in rainfall of the order of 20-30%. Indonesia has experienced a bad drought, the Indian monsoon was about 15% below normal and the forecasts for Brazil and Australia are for reduced monsoons." As both droughts and floods continue, the scale of the potential impacts is worrying aid agencies.

According to the UN around 60 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of conflict. Aid agencies like Oxfam are worried that the impacts of the continuing El Nino in 2016 will add to existing stresses such as the wars in Syria, South Sudan and Yemen.

The El Nino event is likely to tail off into the spring - but that may not be good news either. El Ninos are often followed by La Nina events, which can have opposite but similarly harmful effects. Scientists say during an El Nino there is a huge transfer of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. Normally, as in 1997/98, that heat transfer tends to be followed by a cooling of the ocean, a La Nina event,

"It's possible but far from certain that this time next year we could be talking about the reverse of many of these impacts," said Dr Klingaman. "In places where we are seeing droughts from El Nino we could be seeing flooding from La Nina next year. It's just as disruptive, it's just the other way round."

The Washington Post neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer summed up the “new reality” as follows:

“We have overwheming global power. We are history’s designated custodians of the international system. When the Soviet Union fell, something new was born, something utterly new – a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. Even Rome was no model for what America is today.”

The staggering unipolar power that history has given to Washington has to be protected at all costs. In 1992 top Pentagon official Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which became the basis for Washington’s foreign policy.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine states that the “first objective” of American foreign and military policy is “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat [to US unilateral action] on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” (A “hostile power” is a country sufficiently strong to have a foreign policy independent from Washington’s.)

The European governments, especially Germany and the UK, are complicit in the move toward nuclear war. These two American vassal states enable Washington’s reckless aggression toward Russia by repeating Washington’s propaganda and supporting Washington’s sanctions and interventions against other countries. As long as Europe remains nothing but an extension of Washington, the prospect of Armegeddon will continue to rise.

At this point in time, nuclear war can only be avoided in two ways. One way is for Russia and China to surrender and accept Washington’s hegemony. The other way is for an independent leader in Germany, the UK, or France to rise to office and withdraw from NATO. That would begin a stampede to leave NATO, which is Washington’s prime tool for causing conflict with Russia and, thereby, is the most dangerous force on earth to every European country and to the entire world. If NATO continues to exist, NATO together with the neoconservative ideology of American hegemony will make nuclear war inevitable.

"We will have to spend much more money on common European defense initiatives," Schäuble told BILD am Sonntag. The foreign and security policies of the EU member states should become interconnected step by step, Schäuble stated. He argued that the EU needs one united army instead of 28 separate ones in order to resolve domestic and foreign security problems more efficiently.

Following Schaeuble' statement, head of the foreign-affairs committee in the Moscow State Duma Alexei Pushkov stated that Europe needs a new army because NATO — which is expected to play the role of European armed forces — has only one goal: to deal with the imaginary Russian "threat" and help the US.

"In Berlin, they stated: The EU should create 'a common European army'. And what is NATO for? To fight with a virtual Russian threat and help the United States", the politician posted on his Twitter.

“Since 2011, an unprecedented terrorist war has been waged against the Syrian Arab Republic by armed terrorist groups, the members of which come from more than 100 countries,” Ja'afari, Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, wrote in his letter to the world body, TASS reported. “Those groups are being provided with funding, weapons, materiel and logistical support by states and regimes from the region and beyond.”

While mentioning other players allegedly involved in the spread of Islamist terrorism, Ja'afari accused Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of playing the most active role. “During the crisis, Turkish interference in Syria's internal affairs took many forms, including direct involvement of the regime of Erdogan, the Turkish armed forces in offensive military operations in support of terrorists,” Ja'afari wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN Security Council, as cited by RIA Novosti.

Although Calico formed two years before Alphabet, it had many of the markers Google’s co-founders outlined as their rationale for the holding company. A startup staring down a moonshot issue? Check. A problem with a very long time horizon? Check. Google’s tech savvy applied to a market well outside its domain? Check. A venerated founder at its helm? Calico chief Arthur Levinson — former CEO and board chair of biotech firm Genentech, board chair of Apple — may be the biggest heavy-hitter among Alphabet’s execs.

Levinson did not speak to Time for its story. And he has said basically zilch publicly about his company since. Yet some of the hyperbole accompanying Calico (Google wants to disrupt death!) is just that. It is evident that Levinson’s secretive company is focused on medical solutions that fend off the illnesses that come with old age; it’s not trying to give us immortality.

The three hires, it is hoped, will help avert the artificial intelligence (AI) catastrophe that many believe could be the biggest threat to the human race. The search is a timely one. Those who have warned of the dangers of AI include Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Musk, the inventor-cum-business magnate behind enterprises from Tesla Motors’ electric cars to SpaceX’s reusable rockets, is among the FHI’s recent donors.

Their thinking is that once artificial intelligences are cleverer than humans - which is 80 per cent likely to happen in the next 100 years, according to FHI estimations – we could face a future in which the interests of a machine do not include human well-being.

The same cover story was used for all three assassinations. This is why I entitled the article, Will Trump Be Assassinated by a Man With a Diary? The implication of the previous article was made crystal clear. If the establishment murdered three prominent political opponents using the same MO, why wouldn’t they do it for a fourth time?

Well, recently, it has come to my attention that leading consultants and strategists for the GOP are openly advocating for the assassination of Donald Trump. With the fact that the authors of the two threats are still walking in public as free men, tells me that these threats being made against a viable Presidential candidate are going unopposed by this current administration makes me wonder if the following threats are not only being tolerated by this nation’s leadership, but encouraged by their inaction.

Please note that I have performed my due diligence and I have filed a complaint with the Secret Service about the following events. The safety of Donald Trump, is no longer a theoretical concern, Trump’s safety has just become a very serious concern.

Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told the Jerusalem Post that “the sight of a member of the Ukrainian parliament singing a song praising Hitler underscores the extremely deep problem in today’s Ukrainian democracy …to rewrite the narrative of World War II and the Holocaust.” “The fact that the Ukrainian authorities honor groups which actively participated in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust and glorify their leaders sends a message that delegitimizes the accurate historical narrative, and paves the way for disgusting scenes like this one,” he added.

The controversial video was released just days after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko spoke before the Knesset, apologizing for the role Ukrainian collaborators played in the Holocaust. ”We must remember the negative events in history, when collaborators helped the Nazis seek the Final Solution,” Poroshenko said last Wednesday. “Following its establishment, Ukraine asked for forgiveness, and I am doing it now at the Israeli Knesset in front of the children and grandchildren of victims of the Holocaust, who experienced that horror first hand. I am doing this in front of all the citizens of Israel.”

However, not everyone in the Ukrainian Parliament supported such a stance. Oleg Lyashko, the leader of the Radical Party that Vitko belongs to, lashed out at the Ukrainian president for his apologies before Israel, saying that “this kind of humiliation of Ukrainians has not been recorded in our history yet.”

In advance of the British referendum on membership, which must be held by the end of 2017, the Prime Minister has asked for only the most modest package of reforms. Yet the unbending EU leaders have refused to concede any ground. Even a minor change in migrants’ rights to claim welfare has been rejected. Such a defiant stance could be seen as supreme confidence in the European project. British calls for change are dismissed out of hand because nothing is allowed to challenge the drive towards “ever closer union.”

In the dogmatic mindset of the EU’s ruling elite, the ultimate triumph of the federal superstate is inevitability. But this mood of self-assurance is grossly misplaced. The edifice of federalism is crumbling, broken by its own ruinous contradictions and spectacular failures. The creators of the European Union promised to bring peace and prosperity. But through their grandiose folly, they have fuelled only debt, despair and disintegration.

The EU lacks any kind of democratic legitimacy, which means that the end could come sooner than the politicians imagine. After all, the apartheid regime in South Africa collapsed with dramatic suddenness in the early 1990s, as did the Communist governments of Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

2016 could be the year that the EU falls apart, making the British referendum an irrelevance. Economics are certain to play a central part in any process of collapse. Despite endless optimistic propaganda from Brussels and ever greater fiscal control from the centre, the euro’s difficulties have not disappeared. Growth remains anaemic, just 0.3 per cent in the third quarter of the year, while dole queues are as long as ever. Unemployment in Spain, sometimes held up to as a eurozone “miracle”, stands at 23 per cent. In Greece, the figure is above 25 per cent.

But the EU cannot resolve this relentless economic crisis because it is a part of the problem. The single currency was never a really an economic initiative. On the contrary, it was a political instrument to further the federalist agenda. Forcing together economies as disparate as Germany and Greece was always doomed to result in debt and paralysis.

The impending clash on economic policy will be compounded by the continuing migration disaster, which is threatening to tear apart the social fabric of Europe. Instead of defending European civilisation, the EU has been a vehicle for destruction of our heritage and identity through its obsession with open borders and cultural diversity. Just before Christmas, it was reported that more than one million migrants have reached Europe through irregular means in 2015, nearly all of them from across the eastern Mediterranean. Already unsustainable, that influx will continue to grow during 2016.

But anger could turn to open rebellion in 2016 if the migrant crisis leads to a series of Islamist terror attacks. Isil have openly boasted about sending jihadists into Europe through the EU porous borders, while the Lebanese minister has claimed that 1 in every 50 Syrian refugees could be an Isil extremist.

This kind of globalised anxiety is unusual. For the past 30 years and more, there has been at least one world power that was bullishly optimistic. In the late 1980s the Japanese were still enjoying a decades-long boom — and confidently buying up assets all over the world. In the 1990s America basked in victory in the cold war and a long economic expansion. In the early 2000s the EU was in a buoyant mood, launching a single currency and nearly doubling its membership. And for most of the past decade, the growing political and economic power of China has inspired respect all over the world.

The global gloom makes the international political system feel like a patient that is still struggling to recover from a severe illness which began with the financial crisis of 2008. If there are no further bad shocks, recovery should proceed gradually and the worst political symptoms may fade. The patient is vulnerable, however. Another severe shock, such as a major terrorist attack or a serious economic downturn, could spell real trouble.

"We will have to spend a lot more funds for joint European defence initiatives," Wolfgang Schäuble, federal finance minister and vocal conservative politician, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper. “In the end, our goal must be a common European Army,” he said, arguing that national military spending across 28 countries in the EU “could be employed in a far better way together.”

"For Germany, this means that we will have to support our foreign and security policies more strongly than we would perhaps like," he said, mentioning the Middle East and Africa as geographical pivots for Berlin’s prospective engagements. Stronger European engagement is needed to stabilize these regions, he added.