Many of you will remember a story I broke a long time ago – about presidential candidate Barack Obama’s little-noticed announcement that, if elected in 2008, he wanted to create a “civilian national security force” as big, as strong and as well-funded as the Defense Department.

Here’s what he actually said at a campaign stop in Colorado July 2, 2008: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Could what we see happening now in the Department of Homeland Security be the beginning of Obama’s dream and our constitutional nightmare?

Think about it. Why does the civilian Department of Homeland Security need billions of rounds of ammunition? This is the agency that is responsible for policing the border. But it doesn’t. This is the agency that is responsible for catching terrorists. But it doesn’t. So why does Homeland Security need so many weapons and enough hollow-point rounds to plug every American six times?

Maybe this is the “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the Defense Department. Obama has never explained what he meant. He’s never been called to account for that remark. Doesn’t this sound like police-state talk to you? Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? Is this part of his second-term agenda? He has also set up, as I have reported, a new homeland security bureaucracy to operate under his own direction.

If any Republican, conservative, independent journalist, pro-life activist, returning veteran, gun-rights activist, constitutionalist, Bible believer or critic of Obama thinks they will be safe in a second term under this would-be despot, they had better think again – real fast. The “civilian national security force” is not here to protect any of them. It’s here to destroy the opposition. It’s here to destroy liberty. It’s here to destroy the Constitution.

It has become crystal clear that the political and financial oligarchs are quite intentionally attempting to disarm the populace while arming themselves to the teeth in anticipation of some horrible economic event they know is inevitable.

From the Blaze: “The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to acquire 7,000 5.56x45mm NATO “personal defense weapons” (PDW) — also known as “assault weapons” when owned by civilians. The solicitation, originally posted on June 7, 2012, comes to light as the Obama administration is calling for a ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines.”

See the meme being pushed here? These guys want the entire population completely domesticated. They want us to depend on the government for food. For healthcare. For self-defense. Two sets of laws. One for the “rulers” and one for the “ruled.” This is the opposite of how things function in a free society.

I am sorry, but unless you think the DHS is preparing for an invasion by Al Qaeda, it is quite clear these weapons are being bought for future use against the citizenry of the United States. The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer.

The remote-controlled PD-100 PRS aircraft, dubbed the Black Hornet, is produced by Norwegian designer Prox Dynamics. The drone is a traditional single-rotor helicopter, scaled down to the size of a toy. British troops use the drones for reconnaissance missions, sending them ahead to inspect enemy positions.

Each drone is equipped with a tiny tillable camera, a GPS coordinate receiver and an onboard autopilot system complete with gyros, accelerometers and pressure sensors, which keeps it stable in flight against winds as strong as 10 knots, according to reviews. The tiny aircraft is agile enough to fly inside compounds, and is quiet enough not to attract unwanted attention. If detected, the drones are cheap enough to be considered expendable.

The auto-pilot either follows a preprogrammed flight plan or receives commands from a manual control station, which is about the size of a large smartphone. The drone's camera can feed compressed video or still images to an operator up to a kilometer away, and its rechargeable battery provides power for about 30 minutes of flight.

“Markets have been extraordinarily complacent,” said sovereign debt strategist Nicholas Spiro. “The prospects of a stable and reform-minded government in Italy are very slim. We think a nasty surprise is coming.”

In Italy, ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi has upset the political landscape just three weeks before elections, surging back into contention with vows to rip up “German-imposed” austerity policies and cancel a hated property tax. His Right-wing alliance has risen to 28 per cent in the polls, relishing a widening scandal at Banca Monte dei Paschi that has embroiled the Italian left.

“Austerity in countries already in crisis pushes them into a very dangerous recessionary spiral. These policies have left 50 million Europeans unemployed or short of work. We need to get rough with Germany, otherwise reality will force a number of countries to leave the euro,” he said.

A parallel crisis is under way in Spain where the slush fund scandal of Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular has inflicted serious damage on the government’s moral credibility. Mr Rajoy has denied allegations of kick-backs from construction firms, but has yet to clarify leaked documents from a former party treasurer that appear incriminating. “I have never received or shared out illegal payments. These allegations are coming from people who have something to gain,” he said. Polls show that 60 per cent of his own supporters do not believe the official explanation.

The minister said that this was one of the most important issues that the G20 had been dealing with since its first summit. "Decisions have been adopted but only partially fulfilled. Therefore, Russia and its BRICS partners and the G20 co-members, along with other like-minded parties, will seek to implement the decisions on reforming the international monetary and financial system," Lavrov stressed.

He also noted that "the Russian Presidency will pay due attention to the issues of enhancing and broadening investment conditions, introducing measures aimed at new jobs creation and managing sovereign debt without provoking global economic shocks."

Although conflicting voices will attempt to influence the strategy he follows in his first months as Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King’s successor could do worse than listen to the man who infamously almost “broke” the Bank two decades ago.

George Soros – who made £1 billion from betting against sterling in the spring of 1992, pushing the UK out of the European exchange rate mechanism – cautioned that the markets are betting against the pound. Asked at a dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos whether he would once again bet against the pound, he replied: “The markets are.” Mr Soros said the UK was in the perfect position at present as a member of the European Union, but not a member of the eurozone.

He added austerity was the “wrong policy at this time”, but quantitative easing (QE) was the right policy: “You can only grow your way out of excessive debt. You can’t shrink your way out of it.”

The United States can step back from international conflicts, but that won’t make them disappear. Fortunately, there is another power that shares our economic and political values, that possesses sophisticated military technology and is also very interested in stopping the progress of fanatical movements, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. That power is Europe.

If America is to enjoy “peace in our time” — an expression now deployed by both Barack Obama and Neville Chamberlain — while the rest of the world remains at war, then someone else will fill the vacuum. A glance at the other candidates — China, Russia, perhaps Qatar or another Gulf nation — ought to make us all stop giggling about cheese-eating surrender monkeys and start offering logistical and moral support. Europe may not be the best superpower. But it’s the only one we’ve got.

To Syria’s south, Jordan – which has just finished holding elections – faces a near unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees. To the east in Iraq, tens of thousands of Sunni demonstrators – many of whom identify with the largely Sunni uprising next door, and cheered on by an Al Qaida-linked group – blocked a major road in western Iraq in protest against the Shia-dominated government. To the north, today’s bombing at the US embassy in Ankara has been blamed on a banned Left-wing group, the DHKP-C, but most early lists of suspects included Jabhat-al-Nusra, Al Qaida’s Syrian front, while relations between Turkey and Syria are their lowest ebb.

The most volatile of all issues, however, may be Israel’s intervention into the Syrian crisis this week. It appears that Israeli jets bombed not just a convoy of Russian-supplied SA-17 anti-aircraft batteries, located at a military base northwest of Damascus, but other targets also, including a biological weapons research centre. It remains unclear whether the missiles were stationary or were being moved, but in the preceding days the Israeli cabinet had been meeting feverishly and shouting, to anyone who would listen, that chemical weapons were not the only thing that they were worried about. Since the base was less than five miles from Syria’s border with Lebanon, Israel might have been concerned that the missiles would be transferred to Hezbollah, challenging Israel’s hitherto absolute air superiority over the militant group.

There remain a few puzzling aspects to this story. Syria only received these missiles from Russia over the last couple of years (ironically, they were purchased after Israel destroyed a half-built Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007). Why would the regime hand over something so advanced to Hezbollah just when it most needs its air defences to deter a no-fly zone or other foreign intervention? One possible answer is that the missiles were in fact being moved within Syria for safekeeping, and Israel, unable to tell where they were headed, pounced. That is speculation for now. But, if there was such confusion, it highlights how easily one side might misperceive the red lines of another, and how easily a broader war could be sparked...

Ernest Rutherford, the chemist and nuclear physicist, wanted to conduct massive experiments in his laboratories in Britain. He had won the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry and would go on to become one of the legends in his field. But he often simply didn't have the funds. Legend has it that he gathered together his team and said: "Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It's time to start thinking."

These words attributed to Rutherford have become world-famous - also in the realm of politics. And they could hardly be more applicable than to United States Vice President Joe Biden's upcoming trip to Germany. On Friday afternoon, Biden will hold a powwow with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. On Saturday, he is scheduled to deliver a speech at the annual Munich Security Conference.

The reason is clear: Biden might still speak eloquently in public about trans-Atlantic cooperation. But, behind closed doors, his main message will be that America and its allies need to come up with a new way of divvying up responsibilities in this uncertain world.

Leaders of the 27 nations in the EU meet in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to thrash out a deal on the trillion-euro budget for 2014 to 2020, after talks collapsed in November. Speaking in her weekly podcast, Ms Merkel said she expected the negotiations would be very difficult.

“Germany will try to contribute to a result. We can't say yet whether the talks will succeed. I only know that the negotiations will be very difficult” she said. "But it is worth trying.” She said the budget must be used to make sure the EU increases its competitiveness and that member states' economies become gradually more aligned.

In November, Herman Van Rompuy, EU president proposed a budget of €973 billion (£845 billion), which is just over 1 per cent of EU GDP. However, talks collapsed and David Cameron was accused of “blackmailing” other EU leaders. “Our position is very simple, we cannot increase spending in the EU when we're cutting it at home,” Mr Cameron said after the November talks collapsed. “We argued for a cut, or, at the very least, a freeze in spending.”

Dr Williams offered a counter argument, saying that religion undoubtedly had a place in the 21st century and that the issue was not whether it should exist, but what our attitude towards it should be. He added that modern attitudes towards human rights had their foundations in religious traditions.

The pair were part of a debate on the proposition "religion has no place in the 21st Century" in front of an audience of about 800, who packed the famous 200-year-old university debating club's chambers. In his address, Lord Williams said: "Religion has always been a matter of community building, a matter of building relations of compassion, fellow-feeling and, dare I say it, inclusion."

"The notion that religious commitment can be purely a private matter is one that runs against the grain of religious history." Lord Williams added that respect for human life and equality was inherent in all organised religion. "The very concept of human rights has profound religious roots," he added.

At the end of the debate the house voted to reject the proposition, stating that they do believe religion has a place in the 21st century.