Unfortunately, the way things are going soon there won’t be anywhere on the entire planet where Christians are safe from persecution. The United States was supposed to be a refuge for those that love religious freedom, but now things are changing at lightning speed. At this point, our society has become extremely hostile to those that love God and that seek to live according to the Bible, and it won’t be very long before severe persecution of Christians starts happening here too.

At the same time that Christmas and Easter are ostensibly ignored, public education is awash in lessons about Islam during the period of significant holidays in that faith. Despite a multitude of opportunities during one of the most important months in Christianty – Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Lent, and Easter itself, neither a district communication nor spam email (from one of hundreds of woke curriculum companies) in my work inbox indicated Christians around the world were celebrating or renewing their faith.

At the same time, in the midst of Holy Week itself no less, my inbox became inundated with reminders of the impending arrival of Ramadan, a period of significance in the Muslim Faith. Headings of how to better serve my Muslim students or how to incorporate silenced voices in my lessons were the norm. Public education used to value diversity of thought, so the fact that Ramadan enters the curriculum is just another reminder of how good and decent our society is; what other cultures spend time on competing ideologies in their public school system? Now, however, the blatant omission of Christian observances and the intentional reminder of some of the most important dates in the Muslim calendar only reinforces the perniciousness of public education.

That being said, the Jewish High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah, literally “head of the year,” is unknown in elementary and secondary classrooms. The same indifference and general ignorance is true of Yom Kippur. If students know anything of Judaism, it is that they have candles on a menorah. How many candles? Why burn them at all? What does it commemorate? The big picture explanation of this is that if students do not learn about the goodness of these days and religions (ie Chrisitanity and Judaism), then they can more easily ruin them.

We assess, from UN International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] reports and other sources, that Iran probably already has nuclear weapons… prior to 2003, Iran was manufacturing nuclear weapon components, like bridge-wire detonators and neutron initiators, performing non-fissile explosive experiments of an implosion nuclear device, and working on the design of a nuclear warhead for the Shahab-III missile.

When our World War II Manhattan Project reached this stage, the US was only months away from making the first atomic bombs. This was Iran’s status 18 years ago. And the Manhattan Project employed 1940s-era technology to invent and use the first atomic weapons in only three years, beginning from a purely theoretical understanding.

So by 2003, Iran was already a threshold nuclear-missile state. But for at least the last decade, the intelligence community has annually assessed that Iran could build atomic weapons in one year or less. On the other hand, less than a month ago, independent analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security assessed that Iran had a break-out time of as short as three months for its first nuclear weapon and five months for a second.

And there is no reason to believe US and IAEA intelligence capabilities are so perfect that they can assuredly detect Iran’s clandestine efforts to build atomic weapons. Indeed, the US and IAEA did not even know about Iran’s clandestine nuclear-weapons program until Iranian dissidents exposed it in 2002.

On Monday morning, China announced it sent an aircraft carrier group through a location known as the Miyako Strait, an island chain which bridges the gap between the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea. The area largely consists of Japanese waters and has several strategic islands such as Okinawa, the disputed territory of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and bridging down to Taiwan itself. As Beijing sent the Liaoning steaming through this location, Tokyo sent a destroyer to monitor it. The Global Times later posted a triumphant article stating that China intends to do more of these exercises, and that its naval capabilities will only continue to grow.

Military tensions between China and Japan are not new, and anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Asia will be aware that it has a long history. Whilst there have been lots of mini standoffs with coastguard boats around the disputed islands recently, the move of sending an entire aircraft carrier group up near Japanese waters is in fact new and raises the stakes dramatically. Beijing wants to send a strong message to Tokyo, which has recently affirmed its alliance with the United States under Biden and publicly pledged to involve itself, albeit ambiguously, in any Taiwan contingency, with its prime minister also set to visit Washington soon. As a result, China is flexing its muscles in this strategic area. There’s more to come.

Inevitably, this situation means China and Japan’s relations are going to be tense throughout this year. Whilst the two countries are vastly economically integrated and interdependent upon one another, leading them in some way to ‘tiptoe’ when it comes to sensitivities, nonetheless, these military boiling points continue to bubble in the background. Tokyo and Beijing enjoy each other’s money, but they are nonetheless engaged in a very clear strategic competition concerning who militarily dominates the islands and the waters around one another. As Beijing seeks to create a secure presence around itself, close in on the Taiwan problem and aspires to outgun the United States, Japan ultimately has to live with being on the doorstep of it all and navigate these troubled waters.

The primary reason why home prices are soaring into the stratosphere is because of the giant mountains of money that our leaders have pumped into the system over the past 12 months. It took from the founding of the United States all the way to early 2020 for M1 to reach 4 trillion dollars. But from early 2020 to today, M1 has gone from 4 trillion dollars to 18 trillion dollars.

What our leaders have done is nothing short of economic malpractice, and it has pushed home prices to hyperinflationary levels. Home prices are actually going down in many of our core urban areas, and meanwhile they have been absolutely skyrocketing in desirable rural and suburban communities around the nation. Let’s take a look at an example that is somewhere in between. In Sacramento, California a three-bedroom home that was recently listed ended up selling for 37 percent more than it did two years ago…

This is the environment that we live in now, and it is only going to get worse. Our leaders are systematically destroying the value of our currency, and that is extremely bad news for all of us.

This is not the first time Turkey has done this under the ruling AK Party and its leader President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the spring of 2020, Turkey said it wanted reconciliation around the time that France, Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and the UAE were all condemning Turkish threats in the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s attempt to push for a largely mythical reconciliation was underpinned by Ankara’s attempt to block an Israel-Greece-Cyprus deal on a pipeline and to stop Israel from joining the Eastern Mediterranean gas forum.

Turkey again claimed it wanted reconciliation after US President Donald Trump lost his election last year. Turkey’s Erdogan was close to Trump and had gotten the US to allow Turkey to invade and ethnically cleanse Kurds in Syria. Turkey used the Trump administration to threaten NATO allies, harass France, encourage Islamist extremism and send mercenaries to Libya and Syria. Trump’s loss led Turkey to decide that the only way to decrease an emerging Israel-Greece-UAE-Egypt alliance was to try to isolate Israel away from its new friends. Turkey had even threatened to break relations with the UAE if Abu Dhabi normalized relations with Israel.

How can a country pretend to want normalization with Israel at the same time that it tries to isolate Israel and ruin Israel’s friendships with Greece, Cyprus and the UAE? This is why Israel must always be wary of the press reports – usually fed to media from the highest levels in Ankara – about reconciliation. Turkey’s sole goal under Erdogan over the last decade has been to isolate Israel and empower Hamas terrorists and Israel’s enemies.

In return, they called on the Lutheran World Federation to abolish Luther's designation of the pope as the Antichrist — on the grounds that it no longer applies to the current papacy and those who hold the office. "The time for this is ripe," read the appeal. It went on to say that the ecumenical movement had made great contributions to mutual understanding and reconciliation in recent years through constructive theological deliberations.

The ball is now on both sides of the court at once. Both the pope in Rome and the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva must move toward each other. Meanwhile, in Germany, where it all began, the Churches are planning — to the extent that existing dogmatic regulations allow it — to hold a joint open-air service on Sunday, April 18, on the market square in Worms, under the motto "Here I Stand." The service will be led by the chair of the Council of the German Evangelical Church, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, and the head of the German Catholic Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing.

Washington, Gulf allies and the Arab League were quick to stress their support for Abdullah's pro-Western government, seen as an anchor of stability in the Middle East. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called the monarch to affirm Cairo's "full solidarity" with Jordan and express "complete support of the recent decisions (he) has taken to ensure the stability and security of the kingdom", according to a presidency statement.

Hamzah, 41, had Saturday released a video message via the BBC in which he accused Jordan's rulers of nepotism and corruption and charged that he had been placed under house arrest. He lashed out at Jordan's "ruling system", saying several of his friends had been arrested, his security detail removed and his internet and phone lines cut.

A Jordanian analyst, who declined to be named, said Hamzah had recently "stepped up his criticism of what he described as corruption within the government in front of his circle of friends. There is certainly resentment on his part, because he has never digested losing his title of crown prince."

“Get back to normal” means recovering the relative liberty we had in our already overregulated, pre-Covid lives. This is just the latest in a long series of crises that always seem to lead our wise rulers to the same conclusion: we just cannot afford freedom anymore.

Covid-19 certainly wasn’t the beginning. Americans were told “the world changed” after 9/11. Basic pillars of the American system, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, were too antiquated to deal with the “new threat of terrorism.” Warrantless surveillance of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and physical searches of our persons without probable cause of a crime became the norm. A few principled civil libertarians dissented, but the public largely complied without protest. “Keep us safe,” they told the government, no matter the cost in dollars or liberty.

Perhaps seeing how willingly the public rolled over for the political right during the “War on Terror,” authoritarians on the left turbocharged their own war on “climate change.” Previously interested in merely significantly raising taxes and heavily regulating industry, they now wish to ban all sorts of things, including air travel, gasoline-powered cars, and even eating meat.

Since Covid-19, however, even the freedom to assemble and see each other’s faces may be permanently banned to help the government “keep us safe.”