News and Prophecy Staff

The EU has been struggling, and Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic have added insult to injury. European nations are acting independently in their battle against the virus, and some commentators have declared that this could be the end of the EU as we know it.

Over the last two months the world has changed dramatically! Streets and highways in cities around the world—from Paris and London to New York, and from Madrid to Los Angeles—became devoid of traffic almost overnight due to lockdown attempts to control the coronavirus.

The BBC reports that the head of the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley, recently urged world leaders to act quickly and wisely: “We could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months.… The truth is we do not have time on our side” (April 21, 2020). He was referring to the deteriorating food situation in multiple poverty-stricken nations around the globe.

Decades after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the now-shuttered nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, is in the news again. Thirty-four years ago, the plant’s reactor number 4 melted down. Since that time, the surrounding radioactive towns have been almost vacant, and the site has become a tourist attraction. In the last few weeks, a major forest fire burned very close to the now closed but still hot nuclear reactor (BBC, April 13, 2020).

Oil prices are plummeting, and for Middle Eastern nations that rely on oil revenues to support their economies, this is very bad news. Iraq’s 2020 budget assumes that oil’s average price for the year will be $56 (U.S. dollars) per barrel (The Spectator, April 4, 2020), yet oil has dropped to less than $20 per barrel (as of this writing) and continues to show weakness.