News

Seventy nations just completed a day-long summit in France with the aim of “kick-starting peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians” and  maintaining the two state solution (BBC, January 15, 2017). The irony of the meeting is that Israel and the Palestinians did not take part in the meeting! Also sobering was the fact that Britain refused to sign the joint statement at the end of the summit.

A recent study warns that “future crops will face threats… from the massive expansion of cities… By 2030, it’s estimated that urban areas will triple in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems that are already stressed… Roughly 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities—and that’s particularly worrying, the report authors say, because this peripheral habitat is, on average, also twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe” (

A new U.S. intelligence report predicts “[t]he risk of conflicts between and within nations will increase over the next five years to levels not seen since the Cold War as global growth slows, the post-World War Two order erodes and anti-globalization fuels nationalism” (Reuters, January 9, 2017).

Venezuela is descending into chaos! “President Nicolas Maduro announced Sunday that he has decided to raise the monthly minimum wage by 50 percent… the fifth that he has ordered over the past 12 months, for a total annualized increase of 536 percent” (Fox News, January  9, 2017).

In the Bible, in the part known to many as the Old Testament, the ancient patriarch Noah is famous for building the ark to save his family from a great flood that destroyed mankind. The ancient city of Sodom was dramatically destroyed for its wickedness. What do they have in common with today?