The economic crisis has made progress in the negotiations of the Doha Development Agenda in the World Trade Organisation even more important.

The WTO framework, to which the EU has always given priority, is increasingly recognised as being fundamental to our prosperity. It helps to anchor the global economy in an open, rules-based system based on international law

New Years' Eve was declared "relatively calm" in Paris, pot-shots are taken at the NYPD - just because, dontcha know.

Head smashing

Le Parisien report -only- 11 injured police officers and 405 arrests on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. The qualifier being that there were significantly less people out there this year, and the head-smashing took place over a 4 hour period.

The same report indicates that Strasbourg "only burned up a little bit," as if this kind of thing is normal.

Carbeques

After a 30% spike last New Years' Eve, last night's events are reported to have yielded a significant drop in vehicular arson. Some of it can be attributed to bad weather, and my sense is the senselessness of past years' chaotic public behavior has blunted much of it this year, even among feral youths.

International broadcaster RFI reports on its' news blog that the drop can be attributed to a committed intervention by police. Clearly, the use of the "broken windows" apprach to policing has been applied to effect.

The French police will be mobilized in large numbers for the traditional New Year festivities. The night of Saint-Sylvestre normally degenerates [in its' safety]. Last year more than thousand cars had been deliberately burned, or 30% more than last year. Update on the mechanisms put in place to fight against this crime.

From east to west across the globe, millions of people thronged the streets of major cities around the world to celebrate 2010 and try to forget within a few hours, the climate of uncertainty surrounding and upheavals of the global economic crisis.

In New York, a huge crowd braved the rain and snow to welcome with enthusiasm the midnight descent of the famous crystal ball in Times Square, symbolizing the transition to the new year.

Draconian security measures surrounding the festivities, six days after the attempt of a young Nigerian to blow up an aircraft from a U.S. company flying from Amsterdam to Detroit.

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary."

--Ernesto "Che" Guevara

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty…

- Thomas Jefferson

I tell ya man, they’re always working for the people! EUvian justice-ocrats finally catch up with corrupt Leftist official, 2 years after his appointment as the head of Eurojust, the über-mega-state's pan-galactic anti-crime agency.

Eurojust will not suffer any image damage because this was a "national matter" which did not involve the EU agency as such, its spokesman Johannes Thuy told this website.

José Luís Lopes da Mota is Vice-President and National Member for Portugal. He has 28 years’ experience in the judiciary as a prosecutor and as an assistant to the Portuguese Prosecutor General where he was responsible for matters related to management of the prosecution services at a national level and for international co-operation.

- Statement which at the time of this writing is still on
the über-mega-state's pan-galactic anti-crime
agency’s website.

Yea, verily, ManBearPig hath spoken, and he makes about as much sense as nuts who can’t decide it cattle mutilations are caused by UFOs or nefarious secret military experiments.

Do you think that’s a stretch? Wheeeell, how cracked do you have to be to want to put a near septagenarian railroad engineer as the center and final judge of all geophysical science?

The perpetual rigamarole surrounding the formation of the EU over the past 4 decades is rather more revealing of the state of the European political mind than one thinks. It’s an accounting of unredacted reactions, expressions of instincts, and the willingness to live with broad, warm-sounding feelings of communatarianism that wants to magnify it’s power around the world for no reason, while all the parties act like they want to take their ball, leave the sandbox, and go home.

Any detailed account of EU history reads like an endless list of failures, dissapointments, backtracking, non-compliance with commitments, unfulfilled expectations, hard bargaining, dull and unimpressive bureacrats, selfish national leaders, egoistic states, ever-growing scepticism, blatant behaviour of large member states, a ridiculous common agricultural policy, etc ., etc.

And what of the dull bureacrats? The European Commission has had 11 presidents since 1958. But who remembers presidents Rey, Malfatti, Ortoli or Thorn? You might remember Santer, but for the wrong reasons. Hallstein and Jenkins are somewhere in the back of the mind, but far from being household names. And only Delors looks impressive, but then many will tell you that he was appointed precisely because no one thought at the time he was a visionary.

And still the EU is somehow considered a big success. The truth is that the EU has almost always been an institution of dull bureaucrats pushing for incremental measures that mostly fail, and those that become successes are acknowledged as such only ten years later.

The man who tried to blow up a US airliner as it prepared to land at Detroit on Christmas Day had an explosive powder strapped to his leg which he tried to ignite by injecting chemicals with a syringe, Fox News reports.

One US intelligence official said the explosive device was a mix of powder and liquid. It failed when the passenger tried to detonate it.

"It sounded like a firecracker in a pillowcase," said Peter Smith, a traveller from the Netherlands. "First there was a pop, and then [there] was smoke."

Lawmakers are refusing to recognize a Supreme Court decision that would allow Ortega to run again in 2011 by overturning bans on consecutive re-election and serving more than two terms.

Suddenly, David Aaranovich’s observation of the Copenhagen festival of self-hatred started sounding historically familiar.

Suddenly there was the world, spread out in front of us, not like a bookcase full of travel guides, or even as represented in diplomatic simulacrum in New York by UN ambassadors, but in its own messy right.
The image that came to my mind was of some vast biblical trek, in which tribes make their way over various terrains to an uncertain land. Out front, and to the sides, were the little groups of activists and NGOs; some pathfinding in distant hills, some wailing and beating themselves and others with thorn branches, some praying loudly and piously, some shouting to the others to catch up, some predicting doom with an unacknowledged pleasure.

As soon, however, as the Flagellant movement crossed the Alps into Teutonic countries, its whole nature changed. The idea was welcomed with enthusiasm; a ceremonial was rapidly developed, and almost as rapidly a specialized doctrine, that soon degenerated into heresy. The Flagellants became an organized sect, with severe discipline and extravagant claims. They wore a white habit and mantle, on each of which was a red cross, whence in some parts they were called the "Brotherhood of the Cross". Whosoever desired to join this brotherhood was bound to remain in it for thirty-three and a half days, to swear obedience to the "Masters" of the organization...

Twice a day, proceeding slowly to the public square or to the principal church, they put off their shoes, stripped themselves to the waist and prostrated themselves in a large circle. By their posture they indicated the nature of the sins they intended to expiate, the murderer lying on his back, the adulterer on his face, the perjurer on one side holding up three fingers, etc. First they were beaten by the "Master", then, bidden solemnly in a prescribed form to rise, they stood in a circle and scourged themselves severely, crying out that their blood was mingled with the Blood of Christ and that their penance was preserving the whole world from perishing.

Michael Phillips calls out the new authoritarians for what they have become.

The Liberal mantra used to be: 'Capitalism created too much change, inequality and poverty; that we need bigger government to redistribute wealth and control the 'means of production'.

It is an attack on our right to the pursuit of happiness.

The New liberalism tells us what kind of light bulbs we have to use, when we have to use helmets, what weight and size our children must be before they can stop using 5-point auto harnesses, when and where we can smoke, what we can smoke, how we can talk on the phone in a car, what kinds of foods we can't eat at all (horse, whale, dolphin etc),

In the wake of the stench of sulfur that Chavez left in the Bella Center, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla called U.S. President Barack Obama:

an "imperial and arrogant" liar Monday for his conduct at the U.N. climate conference, a reflection of the communist island's increasingly fiery verbal attacks on the U.S. government.

Last week, the elder Castro, who stepped down as head of state in February 2008, wrote that Washington is looking to solidify its control over Latin America and that Obama's "friendly smile and African-American face" hide his government's sinister true intentions for the region.

Raul Castro over the weekend mentioned recent war games Cuba conducted to prepare for a U.S. invasion

Half of the arrogance of the Donkey Show is founded in ignorance. While the lauding of the health care provided outside of the US has diminished with a growing number of people who are familiar with alternate international systems speak up, the delusions are still there. Leftists want “what they have in ___” or more to the point, what Leftists THINK they have in ____, when in fact most western European governments have spent a politically agonizing decade privatizing medicine in spite of their domestic Marxist-Leninist leaning loonies in order to improve the quality and availability of the care.

The American Thinker has the run-down.