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.

The Federal College for Security Studies (BAKS), for example, accuses Moscow of "neo-imperial aggression" against Eastern Europe and calls for a revival of the "nuclear deterrence" strategy. According to BAKS, the idea of a nuclear weapons-free world should be considered as "unrealistic" - after all, "disarmament is not the primary raison d'être of a nuclear weapon."

The government-affiliated German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) sees it similarly, and opposes particularly a general ban on nuclear weapons, proposed by a United Nations working group. Such a "nuclear arms ban treaty" would be in contradiction to NATO's role as a "nuclear alliance," SWP claims. It would, however, be "conceivable" to strengthen the" linkage between conventional and nuclear capacities" and the "inclusion" of nuclear arms "in exercise scenarios."

The US will continue its push at Pentagon reform with a focus on tech development and ties with Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is keeping an eye on continuing mergers within the defense industry while striving to streamline the foreign military sales process.

In the Mideast, Sunni-Shiite cross-currents will continue to roil the region: The Saudis may send special forces into Syria; a Saudi-led coalition has been battling Houthis in Yemen; Egypt is engaged in Libya and the Sinai; an Islamic counter-terror coalition of Islamic nations was announced in December, but details remain sketchy.

Meanwhile, major weapon acquisitions continue, including Rafale fighter aircraft sales to Egypt and Qatar and a possible Eurofighter Typhoon buy by Kuwait. Across Europe, numerous military programs and industry moves are in progress, driven by strategic and economic forces. In the Asia-Pacific region, China’s aggressive military expansion and territorial claims across the South China Sea and along its border with India continue to set the agenda.

In Taiwan, a new party is expected to win presidential elections in Taiwan this month, unseating a more China-friendly government, while the nation’s Navy is moving ahead on a design program for attack submarines. North Korea, after recently announcing it tested a hydrogen bomb, continues to pursue a nuclear-armed ballistic missile force. India will revive, or make milestone decisions on, procurement of air-independent propulsion submarines, an advanced medium combat aircraft and the indigenous Future Infantry Combat Vehicle.

According to the laws of the States, the military fleet the country needs to have is no less than 11 active aircraft carriers, but in recent years their number was reduced to ten. It happened once in 2013, the US Congress approved a reduction in the number of military ships in this category to 10 after the ship "USS Enterprise" was decommissioned after 50 years of service.

The discrepancy will remain until the final commissioning of the new aircraft carrier "Gerald R Ford". Originally it was planned that the ship will go into service with the US Navy in 2016, but the Commission informed the lower house of Congress last year that the ship will be ready for operation no earlier than 2021. By the way, the cost has already reached $14 billion, 6 years before entry of the ship into operation.

Well, guess what? Now, you suddenly may have a mental disorder, at least according to scientists at the University of Northern Colorado who conducted a case study about the obsession of eating healthy. This new eating disorder is called orthorexia nervosa (ON) and is said to be driven by a fear of being unhealthy and disgust for low-quality food.

The psychologists conducting the study argue that healthy eating can become dangerous if one becomes fixated on the types of ingredients in food, how the food is cooked, and what materials are used to prepare it. Those “suffering” from orthorexia may take extra time to prepare their food and carefully consider what they are willing to eat.

In this day and age, 90% of grocery store shelves, at least in the United States, are filled with processed foods, most of which are scientifically engineered to create physical and psychological dependency. Mega-portion processed meals have lead to spiking rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity. Shouldn’t conscientious effort to prepare and eat healthy foods be called sensible and smart instead of potentially dangerous?