In his 1961 Farewell Address, Ike delivered one of the most profound and disturbing warnings to the American people that any president has ever given. He told Americans to beware the growing influence and power of what he termed the “military-industrial complex.” He pointed out that this was the first time in its history that the United States was living under an enormous and ever-growing permanent military establishment. While he believed that the Cold War made such a fundamental structural change necessary, he warned Americans that this new apparatus posed a grave threat to America’s democratic processes.

The Egyptian people are now experiencing what Ike was warning Americans about. Egypt’s vast and powerful national-security state establishment, which consists of its vast military, police, and intelligence forces, has reared its ugly head and is now openly displaying all the hallmarks of supreme dictatorial tyranny. It has ousted from power the democratically elected president of the country. It is shooting and killing people who are protesting and demonstrating against its tyranny.

It is declaring opponents to its military dictatorship to be “terrorists.” It is rounding up dissidents, incarcerating them without trial, torturing them, trying them before kangaroo military tribunals, and assassinating them. It says that it is using its brutal dictatorial power to “transition” to a “democratic” system, one that leaves the military establishment in control and one whose candidates are subject to military approval.

In other words, it is doing the precise things that Eisenhower was talking about when he warned Americans of the danger that the military-industrial complex posed to America’s democratic processes.

In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways. "The practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning," the FBI wrote.

"For local law enforcement, it's just to help give them one more piece of information to raise their suspicions," said David Heyman, a terrorism expert for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies "It helps make sure one more bad guy doesn't get away from a traffic stop, maybe gives police a little bit more reason to follow up on this."

"I don't think anyone would consider us a harmful entity," said Kevin Seabrooke, senior editor of the Farmers Almanac. The publisher for The Old Farmers Almanac said Monday terrorists would probably find statistical reference books more useful than the collections of Americana in his famous publication of weather predictions and witticisms.

An extraordinary number of new jobs have been created, and unemployment has fallen to slightly more than seven percent. Over the next few months, I reckon we are going to see a flurry of good news about the economy. All sorts of forecasts are going to be revised positively.

But a note of caution. Pundits – like politicians – often have a herd-like mentality. If every other financial journalist is writing about the End of Days, a reporter will be more likely to make the news story they are writing about fit that narrative. And when the herd collectively tires of one particular narrative, they then tend to fit the facts around a new one.

If there was excessive pessimism in 2013, watch out for undue optimism in 2014.

In a shocking display of brute force, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, railroaded into law a sweeping, vague and hastily drafted secrets protection bill. The tough new law intended to protect state secrets was a victory for Washington, which had long pressured its Asian ally to exert tighter control over classified information.

But the controversial legislation has triggered widespread outrage in Japan and undermined the prime minister's popularity. "If information about our jet fighters or warships were leaked, it would endanger Japan," Abe said later in a televised address. "To protect lives, we must prevent intelligence from reaching terrorists. To secure life and property, we had to enact the secrecy law as quickly as possible."

The penalties for violators are harsh: 10 years in prison for civil servants who leak classified information; five years for citizens convicted of abetting leaks. The law covers defense, diplomacy, counterterrorism and counterintelligence. But it also empowers bureaucrats — not just in defense, but throughout government — to lock away documents for up to 60 years.

The UN said 7,818 civilians died last year. The total including members of the Iraqi security forces surged to 8,868, with 759 people killed in December alone. A report on Wednesday by Iraq Body Count, a British-based NGO, confirmed the trend, predicting that the coming year could be more bloody than the last. The NGO's own figures suggest 9,475 civilians were killed in 2013, compared with 10,130 in 2008.

The group said: "Al-Qaida in Iraq has found fertile ground in all this discontent and has attacked the Iraqi government …by killing members of its army, its police forces, its politicians and journalists, as well as its Shia population. The last six months have seen the massacres of entire families as they sleep or travel to a holy place, sometimes five, sometimes 12 family members at a time." It concludes: "The faults are now as wide and deep as trenches."

NAFTA's birth was bi-partisan - conceived by Ronald Reagan, negotiated by George Bush I, and pushed through the US Congress by Bill Clinton in alliance with Congressional Republicans and corporate lobbyists. Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring "good-paying American jobs," a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Instead, NAFTA directly cost the US a net loss of 700,000 jobs. The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the flow of undocumented workers into the US.

Nevertheless, Clinton and his Republican successor, George Bush II, then used the NAFTA template to design the World Trade Organization, more than a dozen bilateral trade treaties, and the deal that opened the American market to China - which alone has cost the US another net 2.7 million jobs. The result has been 20 years of relentless outsourcing of jobs and technology.

By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today - channelling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton - the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe.

Like his predecessors, he repeats the mantra that more such trade deals will create "millions of American jobs" because we excel at high technology. But today the US surplus in hi-tech industries has turned into a deficit - including a deficit with China. In the global trade system initiated by NAFTA, any job that can be done with a computer can be out-sourced, unless American workers are willing to work at the wages of Mexico, India or China.

The Prince’s Trust said 40 percent of jobless young people have experienced symptoms of mental illness such as suicidal thoughts, feelings of self-loathing and panic attacks. The study is based on interviews with over 2,100 people aged between 16 and 25.

Young people who have been unemployed in the long-term are also more than twice as likely as their peers to believe they have nothing to live for, the study said. The charity called for urgent support from the government, health agencies and employers.

Martina Milburn, chief executive of The Prince’s Trust, said: “Unemployment is proven to cause devastating, long-lasting mental health problems among young people. Thousands wake up every day believing that life isn’t worth living, after struggling for years in the dole queue.”

"Tensions are getting very high in this part of the world," the official said. "The security position is extremely severe. There are huge arms sales from Russia, the US and Europe. China's defence spending has seen double-digit growth each year since 1989. They [Beijing] are not a responsible partner. US influence in the region is receding."

Bad blood between Japan and China runs deep and, in the modern era, dates from the 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Following its defeat in 1945 and its adoption of a pacifist constitution, Japan became wholly dependent on the US for its defence. Some analysts claim it has long been in Tokyo's interests to play up the China "threat". But objectively speaking, the threat is real, and it becomes tangibly more worrying by the day.

But aware of the perception that US regional influence is receding, and that the smallest spark could cause a conflagration, Obama has shifted his approach. His so-called "pivot" to Asia, giving the area a higher foreign policy priority, is principally aimed (despite denials) at countering Chinese blue-water navy ambitions in the Pacific and other unsettling manifestations of Chinese power projection.

Regional observers question how serious Obama is about the China "threat" and whether, for example, he would really come to Japan's defence if the Senkaku dispute degenerated into a shooting war. Perhaps 2014 will provide the answer.

The Met Office has warned of flooding in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Environment Secretary Owen Paterson is to chair a meeting of the government's emergencies committee Cobra on Friday to discuss the weather situation. He warned on Thursday that "exceptional weather" would hit the UK on Friday and over the weekend.

Many of the severe flood warnings relate to the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, the River Severn in Gloucestershire and south and west Wales. Waves more than 30ft (10m) high are expected to hit Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly later, and a "major incident" has been declared by local authorities. The Environment Agency and Coastguard have asked people to stay away from coastal areas due to the risk of being swept out to sea.

The New York and New Jersey governors have declared a state of emergency, urging people to stay indoors. Many schools and businesses have closed amid warnings the storm will worsen overnight and into Friday morning.

"We're going to see a lot of snow and a lot of wind," said Jason Tuell, of the US National Weather Service. "We're concerned about whiteout conditions possibly tonight with the blowing and drifting snow." More than 2,200 flights were cancelled on Thursday, and by the early hours of Friday a further 1,000 flights scheduled for later in the day had already been cancelled, according to FlightAware.com.

Weather officials have issued a blizzard warning for the Long Island region of New York, where up to 10in of snow is expected.

Italy's Jewish communities have hit back at the spokesman of the anti-austerity Pitchfork movement, who described Italy as being "enslaved by wealthy Jewish bankers". The Pitchfork protestors' spokesman, Andrea Zunino, who made the anti-Semitic comments, represents thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets in towns and cities across Italy to voice anger at austerity measures.

Renzo Gattegna, representing the Jewish community, said the words were "delirious"."Those words shamelessly recall a historical period characterised by death, violence and denial of the most elementary rights," he told daily La Repubblica.

Conspiracy theories regarding Jews and banking were popular during the rise of National Socialism and the Nazis. Earlier, Zunino had claimed: "We want government resignation. We want sovereignty over Italy which is now the slave of bankers, like the Rothschilds: it is odd that five or six among the world's richest people are Jews."

The comments were published in conservative daily Sankei Shimbun on Wednesday, and said the constitution will have been revised after Tokyo hosts the Olympic Games in 2020. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution forbids the use of war to settle international disputes and calls for peace to be found using justice and order. The article was added to the Japanese constitution following WWII.

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” states the article. Prime Minister Abe said that the constitution needs to be rethought to deal with the changing times, given that it was laid down over six decades ago.

In addition, Abe spoke of the importance of defending Japanese territory from the growing assertiveness of the Chinese in the region. China raised tensions in the area in November when it created an air defense zone that encroached on the territories of neighboring countries.

Japanese lawmakers reacted angrily and accused the Chinese government of being “reckless and risky” and attempting to alter the “status quo” in the region. China, for its part, has called on Japan to desist from provocative actions and repair diplomatic ties between the Asian nations.

"Never, I don't think, in recent history have you had unemployment this chronically high for so long with the market having done this well," Roben Farzad, an economics writer and contributor to Bloomberg's Businessweek, said on PBS Newshour Tuesday. As Huffington Post reporter Mark Gongloff points out, "Corporate profits are soaring largely because companies have been squeezing costs — especially labor costs."

However, for the half of Americans who avoid or cannot afford to dally in the stock market, these gains are inconsequential. With the unemployment rate currently near 7 percent, it's clear that many of these corporate gains have not had any positive impact on working people. And for the "man on the street," the New Year will bring changes of another measure. On Saturday, emergency federal unemployment benefits were allowed to expire for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed more than six months.

"These are precisely the jobless who will suffer most from a cutoff, since they have been scraping by on unemployment checks for so long that their financial situations are already precarious, if not dire," writes Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. Compounding these "dire" financial straits, 2013 also saw the gutting of essential social safety nets. In November, food stamp benefits were slashed for an estimated 48 million people, including 22 million children, by an average of 7%.

Across the country, however, state lawmakers were busy getting more than 40,000 bills passed, ones that tackle everything from drones to food stamp benefits.

In Illinois for example, teenagers will no longer get to use tanning beds without a doctor's note. If you live in Delaware, visit the shark fin buffet while you can, a new law will make it illegal to own, sell, or distribute the controversial delicacy. And in California, new laws take effect that will let students take part in school sports, or use bathrooms based on their gender identity, regardless of the gender noted in their birth certificates.

Thousands celebrated as midnight passed and Colorado’s Prohibition on Marijuana officially came to an end. Retail sales weren't to begin until 8 am, but marijuana fans didn't wait to celebrate the industry. In downtown Denver close to 600 supporters of Amendment 64 did so with an ‘End of Prohibition Party’ - one of several that took place across the city - echoing scenes of the 1933 festivities that marked the end of alcohol prohibition in America.

Flapper girls danced, a swing band played and hundreds of balloons tumbled from the ceiling as, at midnight, a banner declaring: ‘Cannabis Prohibition is Over!' unfurled to roars from the crowd. Smoking marijuana in public remains illegal but, according to organizers David Maddenka, Executive Editor of The Hemp Connoisseur magazine and Brett Mouser, Founder and CEO of Mahatma Extreme Concentrates, this was a private party.

Back in 1933 the once forbidden liquor was consumed hungrily and excessively in newly legitimate Speak Easys. It may be harder to raise a toast with a spliff, bong or vaporizer but all were in evidence and the party balloons, and some of the guests, floated in air thick with the scent of weed.