They’re convinced because they interpret foreign affairs through the prism of Bronze Age biblical prophesy. Without getting bogged down in the colorful details of Christian eschatology, the story runs something like this: In order for Jesus to return and establish his Kingdom, the state of Israel must first be conquered by an invading army (preferably Persian or Arab) – because God says so. The unfortunate part (if you’re Jewish, at least) is that before Christ descends from the clouds, a holocaust of sorts must occur, resulting in the deaths of 2/3 of Israel’s people. For certain Christians, then, Israel must exist as a state (which is why they defend it so passionately), but it must also suffer immensely so that Christians can escape physical death in the form of the Rapture.

This is the rather sordid truth behind the Christian right’s love affair with Israel. In a recent interview on the radio program “Understanding the Times,” Michele Bachmann articulated the raw insanity of this position with perfect clarity. Bachmann called the nuclear agreement with Iran “the most important national security event of my lifetime.”

Not for geopolitical reasons, of course, but because it fulfills God’s prophesy: “All the nations of the world signed an agreement that slams the door against Israel.” Even better, she continued, the agreement prepares the way for Israel’s ruination “with the United States leading that charge.” Which apparently is also part of God’s plan, according to Bachmann’s interviewer, Jan Markell, who expanded on Bachmann’s observation…

“There are consequences to doing things like this against God’s covenant land, there are horrible consequences,” Markell said. “Then you throw in some other things such as the Supreme Court decision back in late June and a lot of other things. Judgment isn’t just coming; judgment is already here.” The prophesy to which Bachmann and Markell refer, as Scott Eric Kaufman noted earlier this month, is Zechariah 12:3, which refers to “all the nations of the earth” gathering against the state of Israel.

And there’s no rules in this free-for-all space race. Rogue, cosmic cowboys reign supreme. While physical damage on Earth would be minimal in a space war, our entire way of living could be at threat. According to Reuters, Earth’s orbit “is looking more and more like the planet’s surface — heavily armed and primed for war”.

At least 1,200 satellites that are orbiting Earth for various uses, including navigation and communication, are also being primed for “planetary surveillance”, Scientific American reports. The satellites circle the globe communicating messages from the likes of the US military, 80 per cent of which is done through civilian satellites.

While the US remains the “undisputed king of the hill” as the “most heavily armed space power”, China and Russia are keen to claim their own territory, working to destroy US satellites and replace them with their own.

“CADA prohibits places of public accommodations from basing their refusal to serve customers on their sexual orientation, and Masterpiece violated Colorado’s public accommodations law by refusing to create a wedding cake for Craig’s and Mullins’ same-sex wedding celebration,” the court wrote. Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases, represented Phillips. They argue that the court is denying their client his fundamental freedoms.

“Jack simply exercised the long-cherished American freedom to decline to use his artistic talents to promote a message with which he disagrees,” ADF attorney Jeremy Tedesco said. “Government has a duty to protect people’s freedom to follow their beliefs personally and professionally rather than force them to adopt the government’s views.”

I spoke to Jack on Thursday just moments after the court ruling was handed down. He remains steadfast in his Christian faith.

“The court’s ruling is not fair,” he said. “It shows that some people have more equal rights than others. When you’re not in line with the same-sex agenda, you don’t have as much equal rights.” As it stands Jack will be required by the government to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples. If he denies anyone service, he will be required to explain why. He is also expected to retrain his staff in the state’s anti-discrimination policies – including his 88-year-old mother.

It sounds like the government wants to round up Phillips and his staff and haul them to a re-education camp – where they can be purged of the religious beliefs that offend the LGBT community. Jack said Christian business owners are under attack – especially those providing goods and services to the wedding industry. “A lot of Christians are under attack – bakers and florists, wedding chapels,” he said.

And when all is said and done Jack Phillips does not answer to the Colorado Court of Appeals. He answers to a Higher Power. “It’s not up to the courts to decide what marriage is,” he said. “It’s up to God to decide that. If we are living in obedience to Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Bible we are on the right side of history – no matter what they say.”

"There is the danger that stones could rain down on areas near the mountain's base, so we are warning residents of those areas to be ready to evacuate if needed," the official added. The agency also said it had raised the warning level on the peak, 990 km southwest of Tokyo, to an unprecedented 4, for prepare to evacuate, from 3.

Japan on Tuesday restarted a reactor at the Sendai nuclear plant, some 50 km from Sakurajima. It is the first reactor to be restarted under new safety standards put in place after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Two years ago, Sakurajima shot ash some 5,000 meters into the air. Japan lies on the "Ring of Fire" - a horseshoe-shaped band of fault lines and volcanoes around the edges of the Pacific Ocean - and is home to more than 100 active volcanoes.

According to Feeding America spokesman Ross Fraser, 46 million Americans got food from a food bank at least one time during 2014. Because the demand has become so overwhelming, some food banks are cutting back on the number of days they operate and the amount of food that is given to each family. Many impoverished Americans are lining up at food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning just so that they can be sure to get something before the food runs out. And yet there are still many people out there that have the audacity to say that everything is just fine in America.

Shame on them for ignoring the pain of millions upon millions of their fellow citizens. Poverty in America is getting worse, not better. And no amount of spin from Barack Obama or his apologists can change that fact. This year, it is being projected that food banks in the United States will give away an all-time record 4 billion pounds of food. Over the past decade, that number has more than doubled. And that number would be even higher if food banks had more food to give away. The demand has become so crushing that some food banks have actually reduced the amount of food each family gets…

All of the ingredients are there for civil unrest to erupt in cities all over the United States. When the next major economic downturn happens, anger and frustration are going to flare to extremely dangerous levels. At this point, it will not take much to set things off. Desperate people do desperate things, and desperation is rising even now in this country. So how did things get so bad? Stupid decisions lead to stupid results, and very soon we will start to pay a very great price for decades of incredibly stupid decisions.

Some of the objectionable perceived anti-Christian policies Obama’s pushed include same-sex marriage and homosexual rights, as well as funding for Planned Parenthood and abortion in his signature Obamacare, the newspaper said. “There is an anti-Christian bias that is now in our government,” said Christian evangelist and missionary Franklin Graham, citing Obama’s views as infecting America’s political and cultural systems, Christian Today reported. “It has permeated our government.”

And Obama’s to blame because he’s imposing a “new morality” on Americans that flies in the face of biblical teachings, Graham said. “It’s a morality that does not include God or His standards,” he said. “That’s what we’re facing today. It is an Antichrist movement that we’re seeing taking place.”

In return, they make somewhere between $1.45 and $3.90 per day, according to the CDCR. They also have two days knocked off of their sentences for every day they work. Speaking with KQED, inmate Cory Sills said that, despite sometimes having to work 24-hour shifts, he generally feels like the camps are a good thing, especially since prisoners are treated better than they are behind bars.

“There’s an assembly where we have a formation in the mornings and it was like my second or third day and the lieutenant comes out and he goes, ‘Look, we’ll treat you like men first, firefighters second, and prisoners if we have to,’” he said last July. “That right there, that stuck in my head for two years now because now I have a chance to be treated like a man.”

Another inmate, Michael Dignan, is now close to being released after four years of working as a firefighter. He said there are upsides to the job besides not having to sleep in prisons, which no inmate has to do after being accepted into the program. Prisoners, instead, sleep in barracks-style lodges that are guarded by correctional officials and even get better food.

For California taxpayers, the cheap labor amounts to more than $80 million in savings per year. Still, not everyone thinks the program is ideal, especially since the work can potentially be very dangerous. When wildfires are fought by inmates, the prisoners are putting themselves at risk against huge flames. “When the inmates volunteer, we don’t try to hide that fact [that it’s dangerous],” CDCR spokesman Bill Cessa told ThinkProgress. “When you’re actually in a fire — this is not a small grass fire, these are fires with flames 100 feet tall.”

But its wrecking-ball approach doesn't stop there. This week, a new study has outlined yet another potentially detrimental effect of the cured meat – and this time, bacon's hitting below the belt. The new report suggests that consumption of meat products such as bacon, sausages and canned favourites such as Spam could be leading to infertility among men.

Devised by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, the paper, published in the Journal for Fertility & Sterility, followed the eating habits of 141 men who were attempting to conceive with their partners using in vitro fertilisation (IVF). These men were required to complete dietary questionnaires, noting down the processed and unprocessed foods they ate. The data showed that the men who ate less than 1.5 servings of processed meat every week had a 28 per cent better chance of conceiving using IVF than men who ate upwards of four servings each week.

However, the excessive consumption of some meats – such as poultry – could be seen to have beneficial effects on fertility. "There was a positive association between poultry intake and fertilisation rate," the study authors wrote, "with a 13 percent higher fertilisation rate among men in the highest quartile of poultry intake compared with those in the lowest quartile."

According to RT.com on August 15, these campsites book up months in advance so the people holding reservations for next week at the 304-site Tuolumne Meadows Campground will be out of luck. The Yosemite officials said that those folks with reservations on the days the campsite will be closed are being contacted and their reservations canceled, according to MSN News.

This is the second Yosemite National Park campground to shut down for five days. The first campsite shut-down last week and it reopened on Friday. The Crane Flat Campground was closed after a child was found to have contracted the plague while camping at that site.

According to MSN, "The case marked the first time a human was known to be infected with the centuries-old scourge, which is carried by rodents and the fleas that live on them, in California since 2006." The child is still in the hospital recovering.

What they discovered was “key receptors that mediate taste in humans," Vinnedge explained in an interview for this article. “Senomyx doesn’t mention that they used human embryonic kidney cells (HEK 293) from an aborted baby in product testing.” The name HEK 293 means it came from the 293rd experiment, after 292 other experiments. Vinnedge said that she discovered the situation after a pro-life consumer reported it to her. “I thought, it couldn’t be true,” she said, “so I researched it and found out it was true.” Vinnedge noted that Senomyx uses baby parts in research and development but not in the products themselves.

When Vinnedge began investigating Senomyx, she found they had 77 patents using aborted fetal cells. “They named all the other cell lines they could be using but they chose to use fetal cells instead.” Vinnedge wrote and asked them to stop using cells lines from aborted fetuses. They refused, so she contacted their customers. “Cocoa-Cola, Campbell Soup, Kraft, Cadbury Adams — all from the original boycott, ended their contract with no product from Senomyx,” Vinnedge said.

When it comes to non-food products, the Food and Drug Administration does not require full disclosure so unless a company openly admits using aborted baby tissue, there’s no way of knowing. Unbelievably, Neocutis Cosmetics proudly announces they used it in the development of their anti-aging cream.

The company’s key trademarked ingredient, “Processed Skin Proteins,” was developed from a 14-week-old boy. Neocutis states on their website: “A dedicated cell bank was established for developing new skin treatments using a single biopsy of fetal skin.” Since they claim “no additional fetal biopsies will ever be required,” Neocutis President Mark J Lemko told Vinnedge in an email, “We feel we are in complete compliance with the laws of God and the laws of man.” The cream was initially developed to treat dermatology problems but led to a cosmetic line. Vinnedge said it’s pricey because it’s expensive to keep cell lines refrigerated and in working order. A 1-ounce bottle of Journee Bio-Restorative Day Cream goes for $120 an ounce.

Unemployment is ticking up; the stock market is down by almost 8 per cent since April; China’s previously unassailable economy is faltering, forcing Beijing to devalue its currency twice in two days; the price of oil is subdued and fear and loathing is on the rise across the financial markets. Add to all of that the prospect of higher interest rates in the US and the UK – even if monetary tightening is now delayed slightly because of all this bad news – and it is clear that the economic seatbelt signs should be flashing bright red.

It’s not time to panic; but this is the first major global bump since the recovery began and therefore an important moment for all of us. Companies, investors and workers will all need to readjust, and the Bank of England and the Government will need to keep their cool.

Part of the challenge is that China is nursing huge amounts of bad debt and mis-allocated capital, all of which will require liquidation; it has the capacity and the international reserves to pull this off, but it will take time. Its decision to devalue its currency makes sense, but could yet trigger a devastating currency war if other economies decide to join in, launching tit-for-tat devaluations.

The UK, as well as much of the rest of the developed and emerging world, will find the going much tougher over the next few months. The most important lesson from the present burst of turbulence is that we should never forget that economies move in cycles, and plan accordingly.

Although the technical details of a third bailout were agreed between Greece and its lenders earlier this week, national parliaments in the euro zone, including Germany, need to approve the 85 billion euro deal before it can be implemented and the money released.

On Wednesday, there were signs of tension in Germany over developments in the Greek bailout plan, saying it was "insufficient." Germany's finance ministry outlined its concerns in a paper circulated to its euro zone counterparts just hours before the Greek parliament was due to debate the deal, according to a Financial Times report.

These include delays in planned reforms, debt sustainability and the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the latest bailout, which has participated in the past two Greece aid packages. The minsters from the 19 countries that use the euro are due to discuss whether to approve the deal - or potentially grant Greece more bridge financing to give negotiations more time – an option looking increasingly likely given German misgivings over the deal.