We are ruled by out-of-touch careerists who hold the opinions of the people who pay their salaries in utter contempt. The BBC, which is supposed to serve the nation as a whole, delights in giving a megaphone to extremists, Left-wing bigots and pseudo revolutionaries.

Increasingly, it seems we live in two Britains. One, which contains the quiet majority, is solid, self-sufficient, intent on maintaining decent standards and doing the right thing. The other, which is small but more voluble, is selfish, intolerant, attention-seeking and determined to rip up the old order.

For two hours, the demonstrators had peacefully marched down the main thoroughfares of central Brussels to protest government policies that will raise the pension age, contain wages and cut into public services. But violence broke out at the end of the demonstration as police fired tear gas and water cannon in an effort to clear the streets.

'Metal barriers were thrown at the police, together with stones, and then the situation rapidly got worse,' said demonstrator Gilles Broussard.

'Hundreds of riot police were involved in trying to bring the situation under control - it all got very nasty.' A new government was elected in Belgium last month and immediately pledged to raise the retirement age, cancel wage rises and cut social security benefits. This was all in line with strict guidelines from Europe, which views austerity as the key to the trading bloc's future.

The ACV-CSC Christian trade union coalition boss Marc Leemans told Reuters: 'The signal is clear. People are angry, livid. This government's policies are totally unbalanced.' ACV estimated that some 120,000 people had taken to the streets, with the police looking at a figure of more like 100,000.

By late afternoon cars and other vehicles could be seen burning in the centre of Brussels. There were also reports of buildings being set on fire, and other property being damaged. 'There are disturbances in the centre of the centre,' said a Brussels police spokesman. The unexpectedly massive march opens a month-long campaign by the trade unions against the business-friendly governing coalition and is to be capped with a nationwide general strike on December 15.

In making the forecast, the economist cites the case of 90-year-old World War 2 veteran Arnold Abbott, who is being targeted by authorities in Fort Lauderdale for defying a newly passed city ordinance that criminalizes feeding the homeless, an example says Armstrong of how “laws in the USA have simply gone nuts.”

Armstrong, who correctly predicted the 1987 Black Monday crash as well as the 1998 Russian financial collapse, asserts that the downfall of the system will be its inability to gauge the anger that Americans currently feel towards their government.

As young men waved large Israeli flags and blue flags with the inscription “Build the Temple” under a full moon, Yehiel Yisrael explained why the march was so important. “We’re here in solidarity with Yehudah Glick,” he said. “His major leadership is to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount.”

Noting that the Supreme Court allows Jewish prayer at the holy site, yet severely restricts visitation and forbids any form of prayer that can be deemed “incitement” – including Jews merely moving their lips – Yisrael said the status quo must be changed. “The only thing I can compare it to is Nazi Nuremberg laws,” he said. “It’s totally corrupt and totally wrong. We have every right to be there.”

In fact Russia's probing of Nato borders and defences in the Baltic region is nothing new. But the number of alleged incursions by Russian military aircraft has tripled in the last year, and Nato officials say the manoeuvres go deeper into Nato territory and are more provocative. "What we've seen is an increased Russian military presence in the air, on the sea, and now under the sea," says Tomas Ries, senior lecturer at Sweden's National Defence College.

"One could say that this new sort of hybrid warfare is defined by the fact that there is no real distinction between war and peace. This is a signal from the Kremlin to the West that basically the old days are over. Russia is coming back on the scene and saying, 'We are strong and it is time for you to realise that you need to respect us.'"

Clifford Gaddy, from the Brookings Institution in Washington, co-author of a recent profile of President Putin, says the point is he wants people to be afraid of him. "It is a fundamental principle of Russian foreign and security policy in particular that you can't really trust anyone," he says. "You have to have some kind of form of intimidation or hook or blackmail threats that would ensure that they behave the way you want."

But the problem is, in the murky world of hybrid warfare where everything is deniable and nothing is certain, who knows how this crisis will unfold?

About 14.1 million square kilometers of snow blanketed Siberia at the end of October, the second most in records going back to 1967, according to Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab. The record was in 1976, which broke a streak of mild winters in the eastern US. In addition, the speed at which snow has covered the region is the fastest since at least 1998.

Taken together they signal greater chances for frigid air to spill out of the Arctic into the more temperate regions of North America, Europe and Asia, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, who developed the theory linking Siberian snow with winter weather. “A rapid advance of Eurasian snow cover during the month of October favors that the upcoming winter will be cold across the Northern Hemisphere,” Cohen said in an interview yesterday.

Matt Rogers, a commercial forecaster in Bethesda, Maryland, said that while the snow accumulation isn’t a perfect predictor, he does keep an eye on it to help make seasonal calls for energy clients. “I believe it increases the chances of a cold winter, but it does not guarantee it,” said Rogers, president of Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland. “I’ve seen some failures of it before.”

The Temple Mount is Judaism's holiest site, and also houses the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. The entire area is administered by the Jordanian-run Waqf Islamic trust, and despite its holy status to them Jews are forbidden from carrying out any forms of worship there due to pressure and threats of violence by Muslim groups.

Jewish campaigners are fighting for the right to worship on the Temple Mount, with many calling for the site to be split equally between Jews and Muslims - akin to the arrangement currently in place in Hevron's Cave of the Patriarchs.

• The Conservative leader was humiliated at a summit in July when he tried to stop Mr Juncker, a passionate federalist, from becoming president of the commission.

• Mr Cameron was out-voted, after being betrayed by the German Chancellor and Mr Juncker was installed in the commission, taking up his new post this week.

• He was then slapped down by Angela Merkel, again, and left isolated at another summit two weeks ago when angrily refusing a commission demand that Britain paid an extra £1.7 billion surcharge to the EU budget.

• Chancellor Merkel, with French support and backing from a majority of other EU leaders, told him to pay the bill.

“I don't have a problem with David Cameron. He has problem with the other prime ministers,” boasted Mr Juncker on Wednesday. Britain faces humiliation over the budget demand after Mr Cameron told MPs that he would refuse to pay the full amount or meet a December 1 payment deadline. Mr Juncker, the former leader of Luxembourg, has broken with tradition by refusing to appoint officials with links to national governments to his cabinet, which is run by a German federalist civil servant hostile to Britain.

Many of the Left Party's leadership were senior figures in the old SED, which ruled East Germany as a single-party state. And the prospect of the party's return to power has caused alarm in some quarters.

The German President, Joachim Gauck, abandoned the role's traditional political neutrality to speak out against it. "People of my age who lived through the GDR [communist East Germany] find it quite hard to accept this," he said, and questioned whether the Left Party "has really distanced itself from the ideas the SED once had about repression of people, so that we can fully trust it".

Angela Merkel, who grew up in the GDR, has said a government headed by the Left Party would be "bad news" for Thuringia. "Of course the GDR was a rogue state," Mrs Merkel has commented. "A Stasi state has repeatedly trampled human freedom underfoot. What should we call such a state?" She added that it is "sad that even today we still have to have this discussion again and again".

Both of the Globe articles refer to “National Security and Double Government,” a book by Michael J. Glennon, professor of international law at Tufts University. From the description of its contents, the author is talking, with due academic caution, about an out-of-control security/military apparatus. The fact that the Globe thinks this book is important enough to warrant not one but two analytical pieces is significant, because Boston was the scene of the mysterious Boston Marathon Bombing.

In the aftermath of that tragedy, the national security apparatus and its allies in the media, academia and corporate America (including, significantly, the Globe itself) rushed to discourage us from looking deeper at what happened — while at the same time the nat-sec [national-security] folks used the event to further expand their influence at the expense of civil liberties.