And where is the Church? In a nation of tens of millions of self-professed born-again, evangelical Christians, how can we be in so much trouble? And is there any hope of turning this around? These are not normal times. Americans have been gripped by a widespread and deeply rooted pessimism in recent years. They are openly asking whether our nation can survive.... A growing number of Americans fear that this period of our history is different and the crises we face today - and those coming up over the horizon - may be far worse than anything we have experienced in the past.... Many Americans genuinely fear that God is preparing to removed his hand of protection and blessing from our country, or perhaps already has.

The fear that unlike previous dark times in our national history, God may not intend to help us turn things around and get us back on the right track.... We must not kid ourselves. The evidence suggests we may very well be aboard the Titanic, heading for icebergs and inexplicably increasing our speed toward disaster. So many on board are unaware of the dangers fast approaching and not concerned in the slightest. We haven't hit the icebergs yet, but if we don't make a sharp turn fast, we soon will, and we will sink.

Who will serve as our captain and crew going forward? Will they understand the gravity of the threat and have the wisdom, courage and speed to take appropriate action before it is too late? What is our role as passengers? Are we to succumb to decadence...?

A few weeks after European Union (EU) managed to thwart the Greek financial crisis, Spain has sought a bailout of its banks. And while EU leaders want Germany to again use its financial muscle to drag Spain out of this crisis, the terms of this bailout could well change the way the continent functions.

The idea isn’t exactly new. A European state had been predicted by US President George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte in the 18th century. In 1849, Victor Hugo used the term ‘United States of Europe’ in his speech at the International Peace Conference pushing for the creation of a common senate. And of course, The United States of Europe is what Adolf Hitler started World War II for.

Sixty seven years after that war ended, talk of a common European state - or something on the lines of it - is suddenly gathering steam again. With experts giving the eurozone just three months to solve the Euro crisis, its leaders are considering taking the step forward from a common European currency towards common banking system and a common budget. With Greece, Spain and others near bankruptcy and France dealing with an economic crisis of its own, it’s Germany that finds itself charting Europe’s future - again.

All of Europe is looking to Germany to underwrite the debts of Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and others - worth about a trillion dollars. However, they’re not comfortable with the austerity measures Germany wants countries to impose in return. So, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Council leaders are busy hammering out a revised plan: Germany underwrites the debts. In return, eurozone governments surrender control of their budgets and fiscal policies to a central eurozone authority.

The radical steps would involve gradual loss of national sovereignty over budgetary, fiscal, social pensions and labour market policies with the aim of forging a new European political union over five to 10 years.

Underlining the sceptical message, George Osborne hinted at a referendum on Europe following the euro crisis, saying any “reshaped” relationship with the EU might have to be put to British voters. He signalled that Britain was prepared to veto a new EU treaty unless it included safeguards for the City. But Mr Cameron and his Chancellor accepted that the only way to resolve the eurozone crisis was deeper integration between the 17 countries using the single currency, including a new “banking union”.

German calls for political, fiscal and financial union in the eurozone have revived fears of a two-speed Europe, where a core of eurozone members tries to set the rules for the entire European Union. At a joint press conference with Mrs Merkel, Mr Cameron pledged to prevent that, insisting the eurozone members would not be allowed to work against Britain’s economic interests.

“I understand why single currency countries have to look at deeper integration. What I will do is make sure that Britain’s interest, particularly in the single market, is protected,” he said. “I am convinced that as Europe develops, we can protect Britain’s interests in a proper way.” As its price for financial support for weaker southern members, Germany wants a deeper fiscal and political union that would give Berlin greater influence.

In an interview before her meeting with Mr Cameron, Mrs Merkel said: “We need more Europe, a budget union, and we need a political union first and foremost,” she said. “We must, step by step, cede responsibilities to Europe.” She also insisted that countries outside the eurozone, such as Britain, should not be able to block that process.

Output is shrinking, unemployment is 11 percent, and factory orders are down. IMF chief Christine Lagarde believes the European Central Bank (ECB) has room to cut rates, but monetary easing doesn’t address the fundamental problem that caused the debt crisis: countries living beyond their means. Spain is the immediate concern, but Greece is just a step behind, with elections coming up shortly.

It would take around $100 billion to recapitalize Spanish banks enough to restore stability. Already struggling with a large fiscal deficit, Madrid simply cannot shore up the financial sector on its own. The latest desperate plan is to integrate the banks of the various members of the European Union (EU), cutting the governments out. This banking union would mean stronger, better capitalized institutions would keep the weaker banks afloat instead of having national governments provide direct bailouts. The idea has received an icy reception in Germany, which has the healthiest economy in the region.

That frugal nation realizes it will almost certainly end up paying the bills in a banking union. A leading member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition dismissed the notion as a “new, admittedly creative, way to tap German solvency.” That opposition is good news for Teutonic taxpayers. Germany can’t bail out all of its profligate neighbors. Perhaps if this crisis forces European governments to concentrate on the need to balance their books, the heavy price that is being paid will do some good.

Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris flew into a rage during a heated argument with radical left Syriza party member Rena Dourou on a morning TV talk show in Athens. Kasidiaris was already agitated after Dourou made reference to a criminal case pending against the far-right spokesman. Kasidiaris appeared in court on Monday for his alleged role in a 2007 armed robbery which saw a postgraduate student viciously stabbed. His trial was postponed for a week.

Kasidiaris finally snapped after Dourou, 58, animatedly expressed there was a "crisis of democracy when people who will take the country back 500 years have got into the Greek parliament." The 31-year-old Kasidiaris bound out of his seat and doused her with a glass of water from across the table, deriding her as a “a circus act.” Communist Party member Liana Kanelli stood up and swatted him with a piece of paper in protest, to which the brawny former Special Forces soldier unloaded on her with a three slap combo.

Talk show host Giorgos Papadakis jumped into the melee, repeatedly shouting “No!” in a failed bid to restrain the enraged right winger deputy. The channel immediately cut to a commercial break. Afterwards a journalist from the TV station said they had tried to keep Kasidiaris from leaving the premises. Five minutes later when the cameras starting rolling again Kasidiaris had fled the scene. The Athens prosecutor immediately ordered police to hunt him down.

For much of 2010 and 2011, the German economy seemed immune to the euro crisis that was raging around it. Now, however, it looks as though those days are over. Several indicators show that dark clouds are gathering over the country's economic output. The latest of those came on Friday.

According to data released on Friday by Germany's Federal Statistical Office, exports fell by 1.7 percent in April in comparison with March. The fall, while expected, was twice what most economists had forecast and it marks the first time in 2012 that German exports have fallen. In total, Germany exported €81.7 billion ($102 billion) worth of goods in April.

The data revealed that Germany can no long count on the strength of growth in developing countries to offset the euro crisis. Exports to euro-zone countries mired in debt crises fell by 3.6 percent in April. Even though exports to non-European countries actually grew 10.3 percent in the month, demand from China and India has slowed and German companies are worried.

"German companies have the feeling that foreign demand is not as dynamic as before and that the global economy is entering a weak phase," Dekabank economist Andreas Scheuerle told the conservative daily Die Welt. Still, he added, the main problem was more local. "The weakness is coming from the euro zone, where the debt crisis is not only taking the form of budget plans and savings programs, but it is also creating more uncertainty about the economic situation that's being reflected in weaker investment."

Breivik, 33, already known to have a long history with the online role-playing game, was particularly absorbed by it between November 2010 and February 2011, when he played for an average of 6 hours and 50 minutes per day, according to prosecutors. The new evidence in Breivik's ongoing trial was presented in an Oslo court on Wednesday. When asked about his interest in the game by a prosecutor, Breivik angrily dismissed the idea that playing World of Warcraft had any connection to his attacks, according to media reports.

"It is not relevant to this case whatsoever," Breivik said, getting so upset that he threatened to turn off his microphone, according to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang. On July 22, 2011, Breivik detonated a bomb in central Oslo that killed eight people, and then shot and killed 69 people attending a youth summer camp on the nearby island of Utoya. Breivik admitted mounting the attacks after his arrest, and used weapons named after Norse gods to massacre his victims. He has previously stated that he played Warcraft, as well as another "first-person shooter" game called Modern Warfare, for hours daily.

In Warcraft, players assume the identity of an online character to use magic and weapons to battle monsters and other characters and go on quests. According to prosecutors, Breivik played Warcraft under the aliases "Andersnordic" and "Conservatism." Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who was brought in as an expert witness for Breivik's defense earlier this year, said in an interview with the British network ITN that Breivik was apparently unable to separate games from reality.

Now Mali and neighboring Niger are facing swarms of locusts, which were left uncontrolled while Libya and Algeria, which normally keep local locusts from moving south, grappled with conflicts and insecurity of their own. The swarming desert locusts, which can eat their own weight in fresh food every day, threaten to devastate crops in a region where millions of people are already menaced by food shortages. In some stretches of northern Mali and Niger, some people have resorted to eating plant leaves, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program have said.

Locusts are usually managed by spraying chemicals that stop the swarms from spreading. Algeria and Libya ordinarily attack the swarms, preventing them from hitting Mali or Niger. But in the last year, as Libya was wracked by fighting between rival militias in the aftermath of the ouster of Moammar Kadafi and Algeria suffered insecurity along its border, local teams and international experts have been blocked from stopping the swarms, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said. Locusts have reportedly already been spotted in the northern Mali region of Kidal, as well as neighboring northern Niger.

The onslaught is especially alarming in Mali because the unrest has crippled its ability to fight them off. Bloomberg News reported Thursday that the equipment Mali needs to stop the swarms was destroyed during the Tuareg rebellion, quoting an interview with a locust control official broadcast on state radio. Even before it was threatened by locusts, Mali has been facing its worst crisis in 50 years, Amnesty International said last month. Rebels and soldiers alike have violated human rights with executions and rapes. Tens of thousands of people have fled the region.

But new judicial woes and internal upheavals at the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), have raised new hurdles for the Vatican, just as it entered the final stretch after years of efforts to join the international club of financial righteousness. On May 24, in the type of corporate drama rarely seen in the Vatican, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, 67, the Italian president of the IOR, stormed out of the bank's executive offices.

He had spoken for 70 minutes non-stop in the boardroom to defend his management but left in a huff when it became clear that the other four board members were intent on approving a no-confidence motion against him. Gotti Tedeschi, a conservative Catholic who heads the Italian retail unit of Spain's Banco Santander, went to his car in the Sixtus V Courtyard and left the Vatican via the nearby Saint Ann's Gate, receiving a customary crisp salute by a Swiss Guard oblivious to the drama that had just unfolded.

"During the deliberations, at 4:00 pm, you abandoned the premises of the Institute without notice and without waiting to receive notice as to the results of the no-confidence vote," says a memorandum of the meeting seen by Reuters. A day after the astonishing arrest of the pope's butler in an affair of purloined documents, and 30 years after a Vatican-linked financier known as "God's Banker" was found hanged from a bridge in London, the last thing the Holy See needed was more headlines about its bank, housed in the 15th-century Tower of Nicholas V, which Pope Benedict can see from his bedroom window.

For the past two years the Vatican, a 108-acre sovereign city-state surrounded by Rome, has been pulling out all the stops to make the "white list" of states that comply with international standards against tax fraud and money laundering. Gotti Tedeschi's abrupt departure came one day after Pope Benedict's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested in the most clamorous chapter so far of the so-called "Vatileaks" scandal, in which sensitive documents have appeared in the media since January, including some related to the IOR's transparency bid.

Officials, scrambling for solutions, have considered dipping into funds that are supposed to be for Greece’s troubled banks. Some are even suggesting doling out i.o.u.’s. Greek leaders said that despite their latest bailout of €130 billion, or $161.7 billion, they face a shortfall of €1.7 billion because tax revenue and other sources of potential income are drying up. A wrenching recession and harsh budget cuts have left businesses and individuals with less and less to give for taxes — and growing incentive to avoid paying what they owe.

The budget gap is widening as the so-called troika of lenders — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission — withholds €1 billion in bailout money earmarked for government financing while it waits to see whether new leaders elected June 17 will honor Greece’s commitments.

Even if the troika delivers that money, Greece will struggle to cover its obligations. It underscored a harsh reality that is playing out in other troubled euro zone economies. Prolonged austerity is making it harder, not easier, for governments like Greece to become self-reliant again.

A credit rating cut for Madrid forced investors to confront the reality of the euro zone crisis after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke damped recent hopes that the central bank would announce new moves to stimulate the US economy later this month. Top European shares were down 0.6 percent around midday, the euro had retreated to below $1.25 after a two-week high on Thursday, and Brent crude slid $1.62 to $98.25 a barrel. US stock index futures pointed to a lower open on Wall Street on Friday.

"With the negative news on Spain's rating cut, it's back to reality for the market. The recovery we saw in the last few days was not a sustainable one," said Lutz Karpowitz, currency strategist at Commerzbank, who forecast the euro would be around $1.20 by the end of June. The lack of a clear signal on Thursday from Bernanke that the Federal Reserve's June 19-20 meeting would bring in a new round of quantitative easing overshadowed what had been a positive reaction in world markets to a Chinese interest rate cut.

Instead markets worried about how Madrid can solve the crisis at many of its banks caused by a property crash and recession, a job complicated when Fitch cut its sovereign credit rating by three notches to BBB from A on Thursday. EU and German sources said Spain was set to request European aid for its banks this weekend to forestall worsening market turmoil, making it the fourth and largest country to seek assistance since the euro zone debt crisis began.

All eyes are on Spain as the euro crisis seems to deepen by the day. The country's banks are in dire need of capital, which Madrid is unable to easily provide. Yet the government continues to resist outside pressure to accept bailout money from their euro-zone partners. Instead, in an effort to avoid submitting to conditions that would be imposed in exchange for a bailout, Madrid has turned to the financial markets, an approach widely considered to be both unsustainable and a grave risk to the health of the euro zone.

Laden with bad loans left over from the collapse of the country's real estate bubble in 2009, the country's most troubled institution, Bankia SA, reportedly needs €19 billion ($24 billion) in fresh capital. In total, the Spanish banking sector is thought to need between €75 billion and €100 billion worth of liquidity. Borrowing costs on 10-year bonds, meanwhile, have crept close to the dangerous 7 percent mark, widely considered to be unsustainable.

Spanish Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro revealed how dire the situation has become on Tuesday. "The risk premium says Spain doesn't have the market door open," he told Onda Cero radio. "The risk premium says that as a state, we have a problem in accessing markets, when we need to refinance our debt."

Spain has asked for euro-zone bailout money to be made available directly to its financial institutions, a strategy to which Germany is strictly opposed. Europe "needs to support those that are in difficulty," Rajoy told a Senate session on Tuesday, calling for a "banking union" to oversee the finanancial industry. While the European Commission and European Central Bank (ECB) are expected to present ideas for creating such banking oversight at a summit in late June, any such plan would be almost certainly be too late to help Spain.

As Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, came under mounting international pressure to accept the eurozone's fourth national bailout in two years, the government in Madrid angrily rejected the demands, insisting that it did not need rescuing. With fears of a euro meltdown having rapidly shifted from Greece to Spain, Rajoy is pleading for a direct eurozone rescue of his country's banks, to avoid the humiliation attached to requesting a national bailout.

Sources familiar with the Spanish government's thinking said its negotiating position was that the fundamental quandary facing the eurozone was not Spain, but a European failure of leadership in persuading the financial markets that the euro would be defended at all costs. A Brussels summit at the end of the month would have to remedy that by agreeing to establish a eurozone banking and fiscal union – major federalising steps certain to be fought over. Without that commitment, Spain fears the single currency would be finished in months.

The Spanish government believes that the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy is too big to rescue and that the consequences of abandoning Spain to the markets without a pledge of major European reform could be so ferocious that the single currency would not survive. The expectation is that any decisions will be delayed until after the Greek election on 17 June. Eurozone finance ministers are to meet on 21 June. The next day Rajoy is due in Rome for a summit with the leaders of Germany, France, and Italy before the Brussels summit a week later.

Speaking in Oslo, where he is holding talks with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, Mr Cameron said "speed is of the essence" in dealing with the crisis. "Every day that the European economies are stagnant are days when opportunities are lost, wealth is lost, jobs can be lost so we need to get our economies moving," he told reporters. "Clearly the eurozone crisis is the biggest threat to the world economy, it the biggest challenge that we face today. Obviously the Americans are concerned about this but the British economy is six times more exposed to the eurozone than the US economy. It is in our interest that we help the eurozone to take the right decision."

The UK is pressing for a series of solutions including a larger bailout fund, euro bonds AND STRUCTURAL REFORM WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION - which could lead to greater fiscal burden-sharing between the poorest and wealthiest countries. The UK has welcomed plans set out by the European Commission to move towards a common "banking union" across the eurozone as a "positive step in tackling the problem of 'too big to fail' in the banking sector".

And speaking in Norway - from where he will travel to Germany - Mr Cameron added: "I don't think we should single out one eurozone leader and put all the responsibility on them. There is a whole series of steps that need to be taken." Our correspondent said Mr Cameron's remarks were a recognition that Germany could not be expected to deal with problems in Spanish banks and the eurozone as a whole needed to decide where its future lay.

The euro crisis began because too many countries, such as Greece, acted on old national impulses under the umbrella of a single currency. They spent too much money – borrowed from other EU countries – with little regard for the new European rules on fiscal discipline. Instead of one for all and all for one, it was more often simply all for one.

Financial markets finally gagged on the red ink and now insist that the euro’s 17 member states create a political authority as strong as their economic union. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, agrees, in large part to justify helping Europe’s wobbly banks. But this would mean that each nation would need to give up a lot more sovereignty, such as control over spending on health and education.

Europe, which invented the nation-state, is faced with diminishing it for the sake of an elusive United States of Europe. Up to now, however, much of the EU’s unity was based on a negative identity. In 1945, Europe didn’t want to be like its fascist past. Then during the cold war, it rallied around not being like the communist Soviet Union. And it has long tried not to be like America. Now it is being forced to assert an affirmative identity in order to persuade a skeptical public into accepting far more centralized governance.

But where is that common belonging? Europe shares no common language and no common media. EVEN THE OLD GLUE OF CHRISTIANITY HAS FADED.