Romania's ambassador to Britain has mocked MPs and rightwing newspapers that gathered at airports on New Year's Day to interrogate an expected influx of his countrymen, comparing them to tragicomic characters from Samuel Beckett's masterpiece Waiting for Godot.

Ion Jinga said that politicians and journalists at Luton airport were desperately waiting for the arrival of millions of unemployed Romanians only to be greeted by two new entrants, both of whom already had jobs.

His intervention follows an intense debate in Britain over the expected migration of Romanians and Bulgarians after transitional controls were lifted on 1 January. Anti-immigration politicians, including Ukip's Nigel Farage and several Tories, have claimed that Britain cannot absorb a large number of new migrants from eastern Europe.

MigrationWatch, the pressure group, released a briefing paper on New Year's Eve claiming that 50,000 people from both countries would enter Britain every year for the next five years.

Writing for The Huffington Post, Jinga said: "It seems that a new version of Waiting for Godot is being reinvented by part of the British media and by some politicians who are desperately waiting for the arrival of millions of Romanians after 1 January 2014.

January 1 brings a wide range of changes to areas of day-to-day French life, from tax and motoring to the cost of posting a letter.

The minimum wage, SMIC, goes up 1.1% to €1,113 net per month. Income support, RSA, is up 1.3%.

The top rate of VAT passes from 19.6% to 20% and the old 7% rate becomes 10%. VAT on cinema tickets drops from 7% to 5.5% with under-14s offered a new flat €4 rate to see a film.

An estimated 200,000 low-income households will cease to be taxed on their income as the minimum threshold increases.

However, the thresholds applied when calculating the quotient familial are being recalculated, increasing by €1,500 for each demi-part instead of €2,000. This means an estimated 1.3 million households will see their income tax bill rise by about €800.

Majed al-Majed, the Saudi leader of an al-Qaeda-linked group arrested in connection with recent bombings in Lebanon, has died in hospital, Lebanese sources say.

"Majed al-Majed, who suffered from kidney disease and was in poor health, has died," the source said on condition of anonymity on Saturday.

A Lebanese army general also confirmed the death of the senior al-Qaeda commander.

Majed, who was arrested on Monday, was the ringleader of Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qaeda offshoot that operates throughout the Middle East.

The group is responsible for the twin bomb attacks against the Iranian Embassy in the Lebanese capital on November 19, 2013.

The back-to-back blasts killed at least 25 people, including Iran's Cultural Attaché to Beirut Hojjatoleslam Ebrahim Ansari, and left more than 160 injured.

French mainstream media and politicians are starting off the New Year with a shared resolution for 2014: permanently muzzle a Franco-African comedian who is getting to be too popular among young people.

In between Christmas and New Year's Eve, no less than the President of the Republic, François Hollande, while visiting Saudi Arabia on (very big) business, said his government must find a way to ban performances by the comedian Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, as called for by French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls.

The leader of the conservative opposition party, UMP, Jean-François Copé, immediately chimed in with his "total support" for silencing the unmanageable entertainer.

In the unanimous media chorus, the weekly Nouvel Observateur editorialized that Dieudonné is "already dead", washed up, finished. Editors publicly disputed whether it was a better tactic to try to jail him for "incitement to racial hatred", close his shows on grounds of a potential "threat to public order", or put pressure on municipalities by threatening cultural subsidies with cuts if they allow him to perform.

The US military hopes that drones will be capable of changing their own missions, altering course without a human command, and buzzing through the skies in coordinated groups within the next 25 years, according to a new Defense Department report.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) explained its hopes for the upcoming decades in its Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, released to the public last week. At nearly 150 pages, the report outlines a variety of goals for air, land, and sea vehicles - yet the unmanned aerial systems (as drones are called) are featured prominently throughout.

For all the science fiction fears drones have roused amongst the public, the technology that the military relies so heavily on is still in its relative infancy. The unmanned vehicles rely on GPS systems to determine their course and in some cases bombing routes, which explains in part why thousands of civilians across the Middle East have been killed without cause.

In ancient Rome, money was gold, silver, and various other metals in ingot or struck form. The silver Denarius coin was one of the common currencies of the people for commercial trade. The gold Aureus coin was generally valued at 25 denarii (unequal weights), and was used for large payments and a stable store of value (savings).

By Caesar's time (b.100BC) it was well-understood that a growing empire required a growing economy, and thus, a growing money supply. Much of this money entered the empire in the form of booty through its conquests all around the Mediterranean. By mid-century, Caesar added Gaul (Western Europe) to the conquests, and consequently, more money to the Republic's treasury and economy.

The Populares and the Optimates

But there was also an artificial way to increase the money supply in the form of paper debt. The moneyed oligarchs (Optimates) of the Roman Republic often engaged in money lending to increase their wealth via interest (usury). The paper debts they created could also be traded for metal money and could act as a form of fiat currency. This debt-money creation works fine so long as economic growth provides the means to pay the interest on the debt. When the debt burden in Rome became excessive, the economy would slow, and the risk of mass default would climb. This is why debt cancellation/reduction was often a "hot" political topic among candidates for high office where the struggle would often manifest between leaders in the Populares (of the people) camp versus the Optimates camp in the Roman Senate. Caesar was solidly in the Populares camp from start to finish.

The Optimates in the Senate and the Roman oligarchs knew much about boom/bust economic cycles and how debt could be used to vastly increase their wealth at the expense of the people. A debt default would allow the capture of much property at low cost - and after the economy improved - net wealth increased dramatically and far beyond what would have been gained in interest on the debt. This is why the Optimates in the Senate very much hated any talk of legislation directed toward debt cancellation/reduction. Debt cancellation/reduction cut their legs out from under them in direct favor of the Populares. And this struggle between the Populares and the Optimates is what led to the murder of Caesar on the Senate floor [and apparently Brutus was particularly vile among the big moneylenders].

Does any of this sound familiar with respect to the situation we find our collective selves (the Populares) in today? Paper debt instruments are completely out of control and real money (gold and silver) have been relegated to the status of "barbaric relic". We are in the middle of a vast transfer of wealth from the Populares to the Optimates/oligarchs of today. Has there been any serious legislative talk of debt reduction/cancellation? No. Instead we have experienced the legislative groundwork for "bail-in" of the people's assets to service the debt. The Optimates of today want everything.

A political analyst says the "confession" by a former Israeli envoy that Tel Aviv has killed most perpetrators of the AMIA attack in Argentina shows that the regime has "no accountability under international law."

"The history shows us that from Argentina to Zambia, from the USA to Uganda, these rogue hit teams of Mossad have been wandering the globe. No accountability so far under international law," Franklin Lamb, an international lawyer, said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

On Thursday, Itzhak Aviran, who was the Israeli ambassador to Argentina from 1993 to 2000, said most of the people behind the deadly attacks on its embassy and a Jewish center in Argentina in the 1990s were mostly killed by Israeli security agents operating abroad.

Aviran also accused the Argentinean government of not doing enough "to get to the bottom" of the incident.

Lamb said that the confession was "remarkable" and proves that Israel has "no interest in a judicial process, just the fact in a sort of boasting fashion that the Mossad eliminated them, murdered them in fact."

France's constitutional watchdog has given approval to President Hollande's signature policy introducing a 75% income tax rate for France's highest earners.

The measure, which applies to salaries over €1million and has proved particularly controversial among French football clubs, features in the 2014 finance law which parliament approved before the Christmas break.

In its revised form, the 75% levy will be paid by employers - after the first draft of the law was struck down because it applied to individuals' tax returns and was considered unfair.

Out of the 236 clauses included in this year's finance bill, 24 have been thrown out by the conseil constitutionnel, which checks that French laws comply with the constitution.

A powerful car bomb exploded near a Hezbollah security zone in southern Beirut on Thursday, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more in the fifth such attack on the militant group's heartland since July.

The blast came a week after another bomb killed a senior opposition figure and seven other civilians in the downtown area of the Lebanese capital. The explosions have marked a deterioration in security across the country widely believed to stem from the war in neighbouring Syria, which has kindled long-standing regional rivalries.

Thursday's attack hit the Haret Hreik district of the suburb of Dahiyeh, which has long been an operations hub for Hezbollah. The organisation said none of its people or sites had been affected.

The increasing frequency of the attacks has, however, instilled widespread fear among the group's supporters and those who live in areas protected by Hezbollah and other Shia militias. Four of the attacks have been in civilian neighbourhoods.

A blast in July that wounded at least 50 people was followed on 15 August by an attack that killed at least 20. In November, twin suicide bombers targeted the Iranian embassy, killing another 23 people, including an Iranian diplomat.

Last month, a senior Hezbollah figure, Hassan Laqqis, who directed logistics for the organisation, was assassinated by gunmen using silenced weapons outside his Beirut apartment.

In Tripoli, at the other end of the country, two explosions in August outside Sunni mosques killed more than 40 people.

This nonsense makes my blood boil.

District Judge Edward Korman, a US federal judge, has reaffirmed an Obama administration policy granting officials the authority to search Americans' laptops, citing a controversial premise that makes citizens within 100 miles of the border eligible for a police check.