A good part of the UK is socked in by the rather beautiful randomness of ‘climate’, and all they can do is whinge.

Oxfordshire was also braced for extreme weather. In North London, Harrow had only four days of grit left.

A spokeswoman said: "We ordered 1,000 tons of extra salt but the supplier has left us high and dry." Yesterday there were claims of people LOOTING roadside supplies of rock salt to sprinkle at their own properties.

Proof enough for the French, I suppose. The success of marketing the idea of the nation beyond all plausibility goes on unfettered.

'The French love little window boxes filled with flowers, tidy gardens, pretty sidewalk cafes, and clean streets. Cities are well tended and with little crime.'

The other thing they “love” as much as tidy streets and window boxes, two things that have a museum-like air of rarity in every French city I’ve been to, is to make any attempt possible to compare their high culture to others’ low culture.

In Eurostan, there are retirees burning books to stay warm instead of the coal we are told that isn’t burned there because of their assumed continental eco-infallibility.

Bear in mind that this is in the UK where they are so thoughtful that their underequipped lives just can’t deal well with real weather, and are given to entertaining the notion that one should put snow tires on ones’ eco-pod transporters in the presence of 6-in. [15 cm] of snow.

For every degree the temperature drops below 18C, deaths in the UK go up by nearly 1.5%.

"In very cold weather it may be best to stay indoors".

Zapatero the hugely irrelevant is looking for new and interesting ways to use the 6 months that his government will “run Europe” for what that line is worth.

Practically, Madrid's overarching challenge will be dealing with the economic crisis. The European Commission will next year present a proposal for a 10 year strategy to bring the bloc to 2020, which it hopes to have a preliminary agreement on by a March meeting of EU leaders.

The treaty leaves plenty of scope for potential turf wars: Spain has said that it would like to host the EU-US and Latin America summits, in a move that will propel Mr Zapatero into the global spotlight alongside Mr Rompuy. The possibility of having Barack Obama on Spanish soil for a summit is already sparking protocol speculation, such as who will be the first to shake the US leader's hand.

AND it was engineered long ago which places the “brilliance” of the Yemeni al Qaida planners of the BVD-bombing on the intellectual par of a high-school chemistry student. The files of the Stasi reveal this interesting use of the stuff by Iraqi “diplomats” to EAST Berlin trying to kill Kurdish students in WEST Berlin prior to reunification.

On August 1, 1980, at about 8:30 A.M., detectives of the West Berlin police special action command watched Jaber and Mahmoud drive through the U.S. Army's Checkpoint Charlie, the diplomatic crossing point through the Berlin Wall. They were in a gray Mercedes limousine bearing East German foreign office diplomatic license plates CD-21-09. The West Berlin officers followed the Iraqis to the district of Wedding, where the Mercedes stopped. Jaber and Mahmoud got out of the car, and the chauffeur retrieved an attaché case from the trunk.

Both men walked a short distance to a street corner, where another man was waiting for the attache case. The third man was the Kurd who had tipped off the Syrians. After he walked away, the two Iraqis returned to their car.

When Jaber and Mahmoud were about to drive away, an unmarked police car stopped alongside the Mercedes and another stopped in front of it. Mahmoud reversed, sideswiped a parked car, and careened across the center strip dividing the road, but was blocked by another police car. Jaber jumped from the car and tried to flee. He was wrestled to the ground by detectives. Still at the wheel and trying to escape, Mahmoud rammed the police car. At that moment, a detective yanked the car door open and dragged the Iraqi secret service station chief out of the seat. A brief struggle ensued during which a loaded Walther PPK 9mm pistol with a silencer attached fell out of Mahmoud's jacket pocket.

The attaché case was taken to a bomb squad laboratory for x-ray examination. It was equipped with a coded numerical lock set on 0. Had another number been set, the bomb would have exploded in 44 minutes. Specialists dismantled the bomb and found that it held 575 grams (1.2 pounds) of pentaerythritoltetranitrate (PETN). Experts describe PETN as one of the most powerful explosives used as a base charge in sea mines, torpedoes, and antiaircraft shells.

- From John O. Koehler’s “Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police”

That they were using cover as diplomats to assassinate and used the DDR as a safe-haven apparently found little opposition among the SED leadership and the Stasi spooks who knew about it.

I guess having a preponderance of the world’s skanks will ultimately reduce the continental carbon footprint by making preserving the species little to no fun. Especially when half the population reduces itself to becoming cheerless, disinterested, booze-addled mere breeding stock.

So mate, ‘ow dga know she ‘ad 'er orgasm?

She dropped her crisps.

The idea of one British journalist to make a Rubik's cube with all the potential candidates for the top jobs was picked up not only by Mr Reinfeldt, who held up the cube in front of photographers at the 19 November summit, but also by the Swedish press team who interviewed Erno Rubik, the Hungarian inventor of the toy.

The problem with ‘our’ new president and foreign minister is not that they are nobodies, but that they are unelected, unaccountable nobodies.

When you go out shopping for your Christmas dinner on December 23, 2020, you will probably opt for grasshoppers, instead of shrimp. You will toss your tried and true turkey in favour of a real delicacy: juicy dragonfly larvae and beetle caviar. This is 2020 after all, and insects are the most environmentally friendly and varied source of animal protein available.

If insects are to be effectively marketed as human grub, they will first need to rehabilitated in the public mind. Their current reputation as dirty, nasty creatures that are to be avoided at all costs can only be changed if society learns more about the cleanliness and beneficial properties of insects.

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