What Is This World Coming To?

Only hours after Russia agreed to a cease-fire brokered by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian forces pushed deep into Georgia, capturing the strategic town of Gori, less than an hour from the Georgian capital at Tblisi.

Thick black plumes of smoke rose from Gori as panicked residents — including the doctors and patients of the local hospital — fled to Tbilisi in packed cars and minivans. Most locals had already abandoned Gori after it was heavily bombarded by Russian forces on Tuesday, just before Presidents Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Nicholas Sarkozy of France announced a provisional cease-fire.

With Russian tanks securing Gori, Ossetian militias and Russian cossacks began pillaging stores and homes, fleeing residents and Western eyewitnesses said. Some Georgians attempting to escape said they were told by irregulars to abandon their cars and valuables at gunpoint, and forced to walk toward Tbilisi. At least one vehicle of Western journalists was also seized at gunpoint by Russian-allied irregulars.

The EU and US are in discussions over the best way to ‘punish’ Russia for its invasion of Georgia.

For now, the US has decided to ditch an important NATO naval exercise with Russia that was due to begin on Friday. The annual exercise usually includes Britain, France, Russia and the US.

But the odds-on favorite solution being to kick the Russians out of the G-7 plus Russia. (That would make it the G-7 without Russia. That will teach those crazy Ivans!)

The G-7 plus Russia didn’t fit, anyway. The Bible speaks of the existence in the last days of two different governing authorities, which the Prophet Daniel and the Apostle John each represent as a beast with seven heads and ten horns. The seven heads represent economic authority, the ten horns represent political power.

The EU has absorbed as many as 27 nations, but there remain just ten FULL members of the European Union, which is as close to a revived form of the Roman Empire as has existed since the Fall of Rome to the Goths and Vandals in the 5th century.

The G-7 consists of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.