Dioceses across Italy, as well as in countries such as Spain, are increasing the number of priests schooled in administering the rite of exorcism, fabled to rid people of possession by the Devil. The rise in demonic cases is a result of more people dabbling in practices such as black magic, paganism, Satanic rites and Ouija boards, often exploring the dark arts with the help of information readily found on the internet, the Church said.

The increase in the number of priests being trained to tackle the phenomenon is also an effort by the Church to sideline unauthorised, self-proclaimed exorcists, and its tacit recognition that belief in Satan, once regarded by Catholic progressives as an embarrassment, is still very much alive. The trend comes four decades after the 1973 release of The Exorcist, the American horror film based on the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl and attempts to exorcise her by two priests.

Pope Francis has not publicly commented on exorcisms, but many of his sermons and homilies feature references to the Devil. During a Mass in November in the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican residence where he lives, he said that although “God created man to be incorruptible”, the Devil entered the world and there are those “who belong to him”. At a Mass days before, he talked of the dangers of worldliness, warning that: “When we think of our enemies, we really think of the Devil first, because it’s the Devil that harms us. The Devil enjoys the atmosphere, the lifestyle of worldliness.”

According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief US arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman Corp and Honeywell International Inc, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane's radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the F-35 program could have faced further delays.

"It was a pretty big deal and an unusual situation because there's a prohibition on doing defense work in China, even if it's inadvertent," said Frank Kenlon, who recently retired as a senior Pentagon procurement official and now teaches at American University. "I'd never seen this happen before." The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is examining three such cases involving the F-35, the US military's next generation fighter, the documents show.

The GAO report, due March 1, was ordered by US lawmakers, who say they are concerned that American firms are being shut out of the specialty metals market, and that a US weapon system may become dependent on parts made by a potential future adversary. The waivers apply to inexpensive parts, including $2 magnets, installed on 115 F-35 test, training and production aircraft, the last of which are due to be delivered in May 2014. Lawmakers noted that several US companies make similar magnets.

The IMF working paper said debt burdens in developed nations have become extreme by any historical measure and will require a wave of haircuts, either negotiated 1930s-style write-offs or the standard mix of measures used by the IMF in its “toolkit” for emerging market blow-ups. “The size of the problem suggests that restructurings will be needed, for example, in the periphery of Europe, far beyond anything discussed in public to this point,” said the paper, by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

The paper said policy elites in the West are still clinging to the illusion that rich countries are different from poorer regions and can therefore chip away at their debts with a blend of austerity cuts, growth, and tinkering (“forbearance”). The presumption is that advanced economies “do not resort to such gimmicks” such as debt restructuring and repression, which would “give up hard-earned credibility” and throw the economy into a “vicious circle”.

But the paper says this mantra borders on “collective amnesia” of European and US history, and is built on “overly optimistic” assumptions that risk doing far more damage to credibility in the end. It is causing the crisis to drag on, blocking a lasting solution. “This denial has led to policies that in some cases risk exacerbating the final costs,” it said.

The paper says the Western debt burden is now so big that rich states will need the same tonic of debt haircuts, higher inflation and financial repression - defined as an “opaque tax on savers” - as used in countless IMF rescues for emerging markets. “The magnitude of the overall debt problem facing advanced economies today is difficult to overstate. The current central government debt in advanced economies is approaching a two-century high-water mark,” they said.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since December 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming. Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.”

Twenty-two crew members stayed with the ship for the time being, as the scientists and researchers were rescued. According to CNN, the ship has enough supplies for “a very long time.” Three rescue attempts had been thwarted by growing levels of sea ice and weather conditions.

Wal-Mart says it will reimburse customers who bought the "Five Spice" donkey meat and the US firm is also helping local authorities with an investigation into its local supplier. The Shandong Food and Drug Administration said the product contained fox meat. Donkey meat is a popular snack in some parts of China. Food safety is a sensitive issue in the country where recent scares have undermined consumer's confidence in the food supply chain.

The analyst, Ronen Bergman, who has close contacts with Israeli intelligence officials, said Thursday that despite Israel’s undeclared campaign of airstrikes in Syria to stop new deliveries, most of the long-range surface-to-surface missiles given to Hezbollah by its allies Iran and Syria have been disassembled and moved to Lebanon.

American intelligence analysts have also concluded that members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, are smuggling components of advanced Russian-made antiship missile systems piecemeal into Lebanon from war-stricken Syria to avoid an Israeli air campaign, a United States official said Thursday.

As many as 12 Russian-made antiship cruise missile systems may now be in Hezbollah’s possession inside Syria, according to the American official, who said that the organization had smuggled at least some components from those systems into Lebanon within the past year, but that it did not yet have all the parts needed there. The transfers were first reported Thursday night by The Wall Street Journal.

It has been blamed for 16 deaths and the cancellation of more than 5,000 flights since Wednesday. Forecasters say temperatures in the US Mid-West could feel as low as -58F (-50C) with the effect of wind chill. Authorities have warned residents to remain indoors, both for their own safety and to keep roads clear for snow removal. In Canada, tens of thousands of people on the island of Newfoundland remain without power due to a transformer fire linked to heavy snow.

"The coldest weather in years will be making its presence known from the Upper Mid-West to the Mid-Atlantic region," the US National Weather Service said in a statement. The states of Ohio, South Dakota and Illinois are among those set to be hit. The weather service said "an incredibly strong surge of bitterly cold Arctic air" would sweep across the country from Saturday night until Tuesday.

His predecessor, Pope Benedict XIV, attracted just 2.3 million people for the whole of 2012. Pope Francis, named Person of the Year by Time magazine, is the Roman Catholic Church's first Latin American leader. He is also the first Jesuit at the helm of the Church. The Vatican said the new figures were based on the number of tickets issued for papal events, as well as on estimates of crowds attending his weekly appearances at St Peter's Square.

The data was released a day after the pontiff gave his first New Year blessing, calling for the world to unite against violence as a "community of brothers". Addressing pilgrims in St Peter's Square, Pope Francis departed from his prepared text to vent frustration at the level of conflict in the world. "What is happening in the heart of man?" he asked. "It's time to stop."

He has also adopted a markedly less formal tone than previous popes, underlining his reputation for simplicity and humility. Earlier this year, the pontiff raised eyebrows among conservative factions when he said the Catholic Church was too focused on preaching about abortion, gay people and contraception, and needed to become more merciful. He is expected to announce some major reforms in Church organisation for 2014.

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.”