The state of Oklahoma has already set an all-time record for the number of earthquakes that it has experienced in a year, more acres have been burned by wildfires in the US than we have ever seen before, and a “1,000 year rainfall” caused horrific flooding in South Carolina.

Those are just a few examples of what we have been seeing, and many believe that this is just the beginning. So why is this happening? Is there something that connects all of these natural disasters together?

Yes, every year there are natural disasters that we must deal with. They are simply unavoidable. But in 2015 we have seen an extremely strange confluence of disasters that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before. And in particular, this series of natural disasters seems to have intensified greatly since the end of the summer.

So what in the world is going on?

But not all of them will be won during the state-by-state series of caucuses and primaries that will take place during the first half of 2016. Of the total of 2,472 Republican delegates, 437 of them are unpledged delegates – and 168 of those are members of the Republican National Committee. And unless you have been hiding under a rock somewhere, you already know that the Republican National Committee is not a fan of Donald Trump.

In order to win the Republican nomination without any of the unpledged delegates, Trump would need to win 60.78 percent of the delegates that are up for grabs during the caucuses and primaries. And considering that his poll support is hovering around 30 percent right now, that is a very tall order.

The 16-metre-wide machine is the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and it's a type of nuclear fusion device called a stellarator. Scientists have been talking about the enormous potential of stellarators for decades, but this is the first time a team has shown that it can produce and control plasma just as well as other fusion reactor designs.

Nuclear fusion occurs when atoms fuse together at incredibly high temperatures and generate energy, and the reason scientists are so excited about it is because it has the potential to produce an almost-unlimited supply of energy from little more than salt water. This is the same process that's fuelled our Sun for the past 4.5 billion years, and is predicted to continue doing so for another 4 billion years.

Unlike nuclear fission, which powers today's nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion also doesn't produce any radioactive waste, and is a whole lot safer. But it's also been incredibly tricky for scientists to achieve, because it requires them to construct a device that can produce and control a 100-million-degree-Celsius blob of plasma.

Probably the first time in modern Britain that Muslims, so named, became the big headline was in 1989. The Ayatollah Khominei’s fatwa called for the death of Salman Rushdie because of his “blasphemous” novel The Satanic Verses. This made waves in the United States too, but my guess is that the question of Islam did not reach the front of the American mind until 11 September 2001.

Fewer than 15 years later, it is the hottest subject. This week, Donald Trump made it hotter still. He wants a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s elected representatives can work out what is going on”. How have we reached this plight? Until we know the answer, we shall not begin to be able to decide how to get out of it.

Like all skilled populists, Mr Trump is touching (or rather trampling) on a real problem. If, after all, he had replaced the word “Muslims” with the words “Hindus” or “Christians” or “Jews”, everyone would immediately have concluded that he was, as well as nasty, mad. Politically, that would have been the end of him. Alas, there are two true things lying behind his idiotic policy suggestion. The first is that the problem is about Muslims. The second is that our “elected representatives” do not know what to do about it.

The Security Service Act of 1989 allows MI5 to investigate attempts to “undermine parliamentary democracy” by “political” means as well as violent ones. Islamism is, by self-definition, a political attempt to undermine parliamentary democracy, yet is largely unstudied. If our own spies won’t do it, who can? Public bodies dealing with Muslim organisations are, therefore, fighting blind, having few means of telling the good guys from the bad.

Ultimately, the capacity of a civilisation to resist those who hate it depends on its self-belief. In Europe, this was expressed in what was called Christendom, enriched by the ideas of the Enlightenment. The founders of the European Union wanted it to give Christendom modern democratic form, but this is now nearly invisible.

The leader of the union’s largest Christian Democrat party, Angela Merkel, has let more than a million mainly Muslim immigrants into her country this year alone. The East German pastor’s daughter is surely a much nicer person than Donald J Trump, but I wonder if she is not doing more actual harm to the future of the West.

Even before the Paris attacks and the subsequent bomb scare in Hanover, the tide was already turning in terms of public sentiment. Put simply, it’s not clear that Germans understood what the numbers meant until they came face to face with the influx.

On Saturday, we got the latest example of social and political unrest in Germany when an attempt by leftists to disrupt right wing demonstrations turned violent. As RT recounts, “about 150 members of different far-right organizations marched through the southern part of Leipzig. They included the neo-Nazi party Die Rechte (the Right), xenophobic organization Offensive für Deutschland (OfD) (Offensive for Germany), and a division of the PEGIDA movement called Thugida.”

Elsewhere in Germany, anti-migrant sentiment is becoming readily observable. As Deutsche Welle goes on to report, "asylum seekers arriving at a new container-style shelter in Saxony's town of Jahnsdorf were confronted by 30 people including six persons who threw stones and explosive crackers at their bus," on Thursday, the same day that the "children of refugee families were attacked by fellow school pupils in the town of Wurzen near Leipzig."

Because we couldn't imagine a more accurate way to describe the situation (and indeed we've been saying this for months), we'll simply close by quoting Aydan Özoguz, from the German government's commission for the integration of foreigners, who says he fears the country is descending into a "xenophobic abyss."

As a member of the business friendly Free Democrats (FDP), Bahrmann's seat in the regional council is at the very back and the visitors' gallery is just behind him. The pen must have come from somebody in the audience. When Bahrmann turned around, he found himself looking at a sea of hostile faces. Although there were around 80 visitors in the gallery, nobody admitted to having seen who threw the pen. On the contrary: The FDP representative and his colleagues were later insulted as being "traitors to the German people."

Ever since the regional council discussed transforming the former Hotel Weinböhla into a refugee hostel, the established political parties have been confronted with the hate of many locals. One Left Party representative was spat on as he was walking down the street while another was threatened with violence. Meanwhile, representatives from the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the neo-Nazi NPD were celebrated for having voted against the refugees in the regional council.

The pen thrown in Meissen may not have garnered much media attention, but it says a lot about the public mood in Germany, a country in which increasing numbers of people are united against the state, its institutions and its elected officials. It is a country in which antipathy towards democracy is gradually increasing while xenophobia is growing rapidly.

And it is a country where incidents of right-wing violence are on the rise and refugee hostels are set on fire almost daily. The 1 million refugees who have arrived in Germany in 2015 are now acting as a catalyst for this new right-wing movement. The fear of foreigners, of being "swamped" by them, is bonding the New Right together and drawing more "concerned citizens" into their ranks every day.

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service also stressed that taking any pre-emptive measures would be extremely complicated because the radicals outnumber available law enforcement staff. It “takes a lot of people, many of them to track just one,” Maassen said, while it’s impossible to “survey all of them at the same time 24 hours and 7 days a week."

The security chief also warned the number of Salafis who reside in Germany is increasing. “In Germany there are currently around 8,350 Salafis, their numbers have rapidly grown over the past months,” he said, as cited by the Mittelbayerische Zeitung on Friday, adding, “there were 7,900 of them in September.”

A huge number of unknown refugees are coming to Germany,” he told RT. “Nobody knows who are they and where they come from.” “You can’t control millions of people,” Schulze said, adding that the German government “refused to link the high threat level with the number of refugees.” Even though many of them have no links to terrorist organizations from abroad, “they can become radicalized if they cannot integrate successfully into German society,” the professor said.

The minister, who has been tipped as a possible outside candidate for the next Tory leadership race, said he thought freedom of religion was now under threat, citing the case of the advertising company that refused a Church of England cinema commercial promoting the Lord’s Prayer.

In the speech, he claimed the current mood meant “faith gets squeezed further into the margins of public life and religion becomes delegitimised through suspicion, fear or ridicule”. This could have implications for the fight against Islamic extremism, Crabb suggested.

“The answer to the seduction of Isil [Isis] is not a greater dose of secularism that delegitimises their faith in the public space,” he said. “I believe the marginalisation of religion in our national life risks pushing more young Muslims into the arms of Isil.”

In the end, the opposition was as much legal as it was political – indeed diplomats all across Europe have been at pains to stress that they wanted to help the UK de-incentivise our benefits system and remove labour market distortions, but just not that way. There were other methods available – many of which will now be considered – but as recently as two weeks ago Mr Cameron was still demanding the right for Britain to breach the core European principle of equal treatment for all nationalities doing the same job.

Mr Cameron was apparently calculating that a Europe visibly on its knees over the single currency, migration and terrorism would trade away this core principle, rather than risk a British exit and a further unravelling. That was a fundamental miscalculation. ‘No’ said Donald Tusk, the European Council president; ‘No’ said Mark Rutte, the Dutch PM and – when he telephoned to complain and ask for a ruling – ‘no’ said Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor.

On the upside, Mr Cameron’s vault-face now opens the door to a full agreement in February followed by referendum in June that will - one way or the other - end the corrosive uncertainty that currently hangs over Britain’s position in Europe, and indeed, the world. So now, at a dinner with his fellow European leaders in Brussels on Thursday night, the Prime Minister will lay out his vision for a flexible, a la carte Europe that - he will argue – simply reflects today’s ground-realities, not tomorrow’s European pipe-dream.

The success of the Front National in last Sunday’s first round of the French regional elections was not just down to anger at the government’s handling of Islamic extremism. It was also because of disillusion with the old French political class over what is seen as the Brussels-imposed austerity. In truth, France’s economic morass has less to do with Brussels than with the insane socialist policies of François Hollande – though France would greatly benefit from leaving the euro, reinstituting the franc, and devaluing to put its economy back on track. However, Marine Le Pen’s souverainiste message – promising to regain French sovereignty – has proved powerful.

The EU is also responsible for the open borders immigration policy that made it so easy for Islamic extremists to move back and forth from Belgium, and allows relatively easy passage of firearms across the continent. To be fair to the EU, though, France’s historic neglect and ill-treatment of its Muslim population has contributed greatly to tensions in that community. But the EU has scarcely made things better.

On this side of the Channel, things are going so badly with the alleged renegotiation – which has become the modern political equivalent of fairies at the bottom of the garden – that Mr Cameron’s friends are saying he may join the Brexit campaign. It is a thought that fills that campaign with horror, given the baggage Mr Cameron would bring with him, but it is highly unlikely it will ever happen. But if this “threat” was designed to shake our European partners into compliance with British wishes, it hasn’t worked.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron must face the realities of his dismal relationship with Europe. There will be no deal on benefits, let alone on anything that really matters to the British public, such as border controls or sovereignty. The longer he postpones his referendum, the more chance that some other destructive, anti-democratic or ruinous aspect of EU policy will lead to Britain’s leaving Europe. But it no longer seems to be a question of whether Britain can survive outside the EU, as whether widespread public discontent with the anti-democratic EU will allow it to survive very long after a British exit.

A scheme pioneered by Mr Juncker’s office to address the influx by flying migrants by charter jets from Greece and Italy to new homes around the European Union has ground to a halt, moving just 184 people since it was launched in September, out of a target of 160,000. According to official figures, EU states have volunteered some 3,827 reception places for migrants, with some 156,000 left to find.

The feeble response is a source of embarrassment for the European Commission - and of quiet satisfaction to eastern European states which insisted the plans would not work and protested they were an unacceptable infringement of sovereignty. The relocation policy was announced in Mr Juncker’s ‘State of the Union’ address in September, and driven through the European Council by a majority vote against the wishes of Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania.

Since then, several states – among them Austria, Estonia and Slovenia – have effectively boycotted the scheme by not making available places. The migration crisis is top of the agenda at this week’s European Council summit in Brussels, at which Britain’s renegotiation will also be discussed. Leaked papers hint at forcing migrants to take part in the scheme, saying progress has been "insufficient" and that leaders will discuss how they can “discourage refusal of registration”.

Leaders are due to agree to "implement relocation decisions more rapidly", and will consider whether the scheme should be expanded to evacuate migrants from other overwhelmed countries, such as Sweden. Some credit Mr Juncker with showing leadership by pushing the scheme through at a time of chaos. But many national diplomats point out that they repeatedly warned the complicated scheme was doomed to failure, because the majority of the refugees from the Middle East are intent on reaching only Germany, Sweden or Britain, and have no desire to be “relocated” to Tallinn, Poznan or Bucharest. Those that did agree to be moved, the argument goes, would be on the first coach to Frankfurt.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin said recently the Vatican was considering whether to ramp up security. He said: "The Vatican could be a target because of its religious significance. We are capable of increasing the level of security in the Vatican and the surrounding area. But we will not let ourselves be paralysed by fear." Rome has been the subject of a number of threatening terror films released by the extremists in recent weeks.

It is thought the focus on Rome, and specifically the Vatican City, may be in response to the Pope's recent condemnation of the deadly terror attacks in Paris, as well as its status of the capital of the Catholic world. The latest, and most ominous video, shows CGI ISIS tanks advancing on a crumbling Colosseum, promises a final battle between "believers" and "crusaders."

It also shows an eerie St Peter's Basilica, the papal enclave within the Vatican City, bathed in an orange light and accompanied by chilling music. The video's narrator then apparently claims that ISIS will take over Rome, destroying crucifixes and taking Christian women as slaves.