Week In The News: 2013 In Review

Our weekly news roundtable --live and lively--in the studio looks back over a whole year, 2013.

And so, the year 2013 is about to make its exit. Not a banner year. Not a bust, either. Most Fridays we take on a week and its news. Today, we take on the year, from the Super Bowl blackout and Obama's second inaugural to typhoon, twerk, Twitter and a "Duck Dynasty" dust-up. We've seen Edward Snowden light up the N.S.A.'s secret work. Obamacare stumble to life. George Zimmerman walk. A a marathon booming. A new Pope making new waves. And American trying to figure out what feels like the beginning of some new age. This hour On Point: Our weekly news roundtable takes on 2013.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Karen Tumulty, national political correspondent for The Washington Post. (@ktumulty)

David Sanger, national security correspondent for the New York Times. (@SangerNYT)

New York Times: White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts --"The government said that despite recent leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the agency."

Washington Post: Republicans reassess after shutdown debacle — "The GOP establishment has embarked, once again, on a round of soul-searching. But this time, the question is: What will it take to save the Republicans from the self-destructive impulses of the tea party movement? That the government shutdown was a political disaster for the party that engineered it is widely acknowledged, except by the most ardent tea partners. And that near-unanimity presents an opportunity for the establishment to strike back — and maybe regain some control from the insurgent wing."

Boston Globe: The Fall of the House of Tsarnaev — "Federal investigators have suspected that Tamerlan, the 26-year-old boxer from southern Russia who is believed, along with his brother, to have set off the deadly Boston Marathon bombs in April, was motivated, if not deliberately directed, by real life jihadist revolutionaries on the other side of the globe. But an investigation by the Boston Globe suggests that Tamerlan was in the perilous grip of someone far more menacing: himself."