At the height of the Cold War, it was common for American conservatives to label the officially atheist Soviet Union a “godless nation.” More than two decades on, history has come full circle, as the Kremlin and its allies in the Russian Orthodox Church hurl the same allegation at the West. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a recent keynote speech. “Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.”

Mr Putin’s views of the West were echoed this month by Patriarch Kirill I of Moscow, the leader of the Orthodox Church, who accused Western countries of engaging in the “spiritual disarmament” of their people. In particular, Patriarch Kirill criticized laws in several European countries that prevent believers from displaying religious symbols, including crosses on necklaces, at work.

“The general political direction of the [Western political] elite bears, without doubt, an anti-Christian and anti-religious character,” the patriarch said in comments aired on state-controlled television. “We have been through an epoch of atheism, and we know what it is to live without God,” Patriarch Kirill said. “We want to shout to the whole world, ‘Stop!’”

“The separation of the secular and the religious is a fatal mistake by the West. It is a monstrous phenomenon that has occurred only in Western civilization and will kill the West, both politically and morally.”

Giuliani is under fire for comments he made on 'Meet the Press' on Sunday during a heated argument about race and crime in America.

During a discussion about the protests over a white police officer shooting dead an unarmed black teen in Ferguson, Missouri, he told Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson: 'White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.'

Giuliani did not mention the source used, though a study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found in reported crimes from 2005, 93 percent of black murder victims were killed by someone black. The study also found in the same year that 85 percent of white murder victims died at the hands of a white person.

The sentiments expressed at the synod coupled with some of the pope’s own remarks have emboldened some to speculate on “revolutionary” changes in Rome, on these issues and perhaps others. This is doubtful. In his concluding speech, Pope Francis made clear that this synod’s discussion and presumably future ones proceeded “without ever putting into question the fundamental truths of the Sacrament of marriage: the indissolubility, the unity, the faithfulness, the fruitfulness, the openness to life.”

Nevertheless, the question arises: what if a pope pivoted sharply from precedent and proclaimed a truth that appeared to contravene accepted teaching and the opinion of most other bishops? Answer: he has the authority and others would be duty-bound to follow. This authority was first articulated at the First Vatican Council (1869-70) in the Constitution on Infallibility, Pastor aeternus (Eternal Father).

The last line is key: infallible papal definitions are irreformable (ie, cannot be revisited) in and of themselves and do not require the consent of the Church (ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles esse). The authority that the Pope acquired at this time today remains arguably the thorniest of many thorny obstacles to church unity. For complex reasons, some principled, others simply prudential, it is highly unlikely that a pope, whether “conservative” or “liberal,” would act without the consent of the Church, but Pastor aeternus does in fact grant the papal office this authority.

Many possible “new situations” seem possible under the present, seemingly “liberal” pope. One wonders if he, too, will examine the nature of his office in light of the mandate for Christian unity. His preference to be called simply the “bishop of Rome” suggests that he has taken a step in that direction. Eastern Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and many of his own co-religionists would certainly be eager to hear more.

“In recent years, as the EU has expanded, there has been growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful,” he told MEPs. “The great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.” As the first pontiff from the new world, Argentina, and the first non-European to hold the office for almost 1,300 years, Pope Francis has broken with the Roman Catholic Church’s traditionally unconditional support for the EU.

The last Pope to address MEPs was John Paul II in 1988 and speaking in Strasbourg 26 years ago, the Polish pontiff lavished praise on the EU as "a beacon of civilisation” as the Soviet and Cold War order crumbled in Europe. Almost a generation later, the Pope warned that democracy needed to be defended, using words that implied criticism of the unpopular "uniformity" of eurozone policies that override elections to dictate public spending levels for countries in the EU’s single currency, such as Italy.

In a final appeal for the “humanistic spirit”, Pope Francis urged increasingly secular Europeans not to forget the two-thousand-year-old history linking Europe and Christianity. “We see this in the beauty of our cities, and even more in the beauty of the many works of charity and constructive cooperation throughout this continent,” he said. “This history, in large part, must still be written. It is our present and our future. It is our identity. Europe urgently needs to recover its true features in order to grow, as its founders intended, in peace and harmony, since it is not yet free of conflicts.”

St Louis County police chief Jon Belmar said rioters had fired 150 shots. Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, on 9 August, sparking protests. Many in the African American community had called for Mr Wilson to be charged with murder, but following lengthy deliberations a grand jury made no recommendation of charges.

President Barack Obama joined the teenager's family on Monday in appealing for calm, urging Americans to accept the decision was "the grand jury's to make". Hours after the initial violence began, a large blaze at one business in Ferguson continued to burn as fire-fighters battled to bring it under control.

"I didn't see a lot of peaceful protest out there tonight, and I'm disappointed about that," Mr Belmar said. "Unfortunately this spun out of control." The fabric of the community, he said, had been "torn apart" in Ferguson, which is a predominantly black community patrolled by a mainly white police force.

One protester, Charles Miller, told the BBC that while he did not advocate violence, he understood why people were angry. "You can't just go shoot an 18-year-old who's unarmed on the street, despite what the story may have been," he said. "He was unarmed and you are an armed law enforcement officer who's been trained in combat. So I think people are rightfully upset."

As police killings rise, more people are becoming aware and police watchdog groups are saying that it’s time we start treating deadly force by police as a potentially serious public safety problem. The Free Thought Project agrees.

“The numbers reflect that there could be an issue, and it’s going to take a deeper understanding of these shootings,” said Chris Gebhardt to the Salt Lake Tribune, a former police lieutenant and sergeant who served in Washington DC, and in Utah, including six years on SWAT teams and several training duties. “It definitely can’t be written off as citizen groups being upset with law enforcement.”

Those items are sometimes referred to as “little goodies” by those involved in asset forfeitures, which were greatly expanded in the 1980s as a way to go after the luxury goods of drug dealers. Now the programs have become a way for law enforcement agencies to pad their declining budgets by confiscating cash and property from people, often minorities, under the flimsiest of pretexts.

In just over 10 years, the US Department of Justice reported that the total value of property seized by state and local law enforcement from 2001 to 2012 soared from $407 million to $4.3 billion. In Philadelphia, an elderly couple had their home seized by police after their son was caught selling $20 worth of drugs on the porch. The couple’s still trying to get the deed to their house back. Philadelphia authorities are among the most aggressive in seizing homes under civil forfeiture.

Negotiations over the past few days have been tense, with both sides acknowledging a lack of progress in what was supposed to be the final round of negotiations this week over Iran’s contested nuclear program. The parties now claim that last-minute progress in the talks warrant an extension into December — and likely through July 2015 — though the sides have yet to decide upon a location for continued negotiations, according to a Western source cited by the Associated Press.

The impasse between the parties, which has been described by Secretary of State John Kerry as “serious,” appears to center on the eventual size of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Tehran is angling to retain large portions of its program, while the West seeks to limit the number of nuclear centrifuges Iran can operate.

Referring to their campaign of atrocities carried out abroad, Mr Bontinck, 41, told MailOnline: 'It's not the kids who are the principal danger – it's the chiefs whom you never see in the videos. The mature men running this organisation are deeply sinister, and extremely well-funded, and they have European countries such as Britain, France and Belgium in their sights.'

He added: 'Their aim is to take revenge against the west for what they view as an all-out assault on them, and they will strike when they are ready. I've been told by very influential sources that they have sleeper cells over here, and are preparing to unleash their war in Europe.' Mr Bontinck, a Belgian national who is based in Antwerp, has completed seven missions to Syria to help rescue his son, 19-year-old Jejoen, along with other youths in the same position.

The report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei and a team of natural and social scientists, breaks down how and why civilization is, essentially, doomed. The team analyzed five risk factors for societal collapse: water, climate, agriculture, energy, and population. The report explains that over the past 5,000 years societies have collapsed when all of these factors converged to create two important criteria: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity” and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor].”

So basically, this all boils down to the fact that a) we have very limited natural resources that we already use at a rate that is above that at which the earth can produce them and b) of those already strained resources, the rich are hoarding them to their advantage leaving even less for those without money. The elites will be able to hold out longer than the masses, due to their monopoly on resources, allowing them to continue on with business as usual, despite impending catastrophe. The scientists predict that this will all result in the deterioration of society. Ain’t that grand?!

Up until then the received wisdom of how man had come to roam the earth was to be found in the Bible’s book of Genesis. "And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creatures after his kind, cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth after his kind; and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind; and God saw that it was good."

But scientists came to accept Darwin’s theory. The proof of variation, selection, stabilization of selection and chance was too overwhelming to be ignored.

According to Darwin, humans are mammals that walk on two legs. The shocking finding that man is not the image of God but simply a descendant of the ape was something Darwin did not dare to say at this time, although he must have known it having sailed round the world and researched for over five years.

Over his travels Darwin became certain that man was not produced from divine clay but is the provisional final product of a biological line of evolution.

Today, for the first time since I began forming my own opinions, I am truly concerned about the future of the Zionist project. I am concerned about the critical mass of the threats against us on the one hand, and the government’s blindness and political and strategic paralysis on the other.

Although the State of Israel is dependent upon the United States, the relationship between the two countries has reached an unprecedented low point. Europe, our biggest market, has grown tired of us and is heading toward imposing sanctions on us. For China, Israel is an attractive high-tech project, and we are selling them our national assets for the sake of profit. Russia is gradually turning against us and supporting and assisting our enemies.

I am concerned that for the first time, I am seeing haughtiness and arrogance, together with more than a bit of the messianic thinking that rushes to turn the conflict into a holy war. If this has been, so far, a local political conflict that two small nations have been waging over a small and defined piece of territory, major forces in the religious Zionist movement are foolishly doing everything they can to turn it into the most horrific of wars, in which the entire Muslim world will stand against us.