Brussels is going to fine you for speeding in all countries now.

I've always thrown away my speeding tickets in other countries, because they've never followed up on them, but now Brussels is going to fix that for us, under the guise of safety with this little piece of utter bullshit.

The executive body of the European Union has launched a proposal for a law that aims to improve road safety, it said, by enabling cross-border prosecution of traffic offenses. "Road safety is everyone's business and a priority for the Commission," said Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot in a statement.

As things stand today, a driver committing an offence under the highway code in a car registered in another country of the European Union evades prosecution, with very few exceptions, because of the difficulty of identifying them or of being able to check the address to which the vehicle is registered.
The proposed Directive will cover four types of road traffic offence: speeding, drink-driving, not wearing a seat belt and failing to stop at a red light. These four offences are the leading causes of accidents and road deaths: they are involved in almost 75% of all road deaths, according to the commission.

I'm sure it's just a huge coincidence that those offenses are huge revenue generators for said countries.

They will find a way to get your money

The European Union agreed Tuesday to sweeping changes to the way electronic services are taxed after Luxembourg finally agreed to a deal to end the perks enjoyed by its e-commerce industry - but not until 2015.
Plans to apply sales tax in the country in which services are consumed, rather than the location of the company that sells them, are the latest assault on Luxembourg's ability to act as a tax haven.

But the dispute also raised issues about how the EU should adapt its tax regime to a world in which more services are bought and sold in cyberspace.
With its low rates of sales tax, or value added tax, Luxembourg has attracted many of the biggest names in online sales, including companies like Amazon.com, Skype and PayPal.

READ HERALD TRIBUNE

MEDICAL TOURISM This will be fun!

Europeans travelling abroad for health care, ranging from dental work to open heart surgery, will have their treatment funded by their insurance.
They will simply have to pay their travel and accommodation costs, plus any top-up fees if charges in the foreign hospital are higher than local costs.
Because, of course, any such rights in the EU apply to everyone.
The plans say that patients should not be given drugs or treatments that their own state system does not fund, and that where there are waiting lists, domestic patients should have priority over foreign patients. Beyond that, EU residents would be free to travel for non-emergency care in any of its 27 countries.
But I would assume that it would be only people who would be eligible in the home country for care who would be eligible in another for care. And it isn’t true that all EU health care systems are in fact universal ones..... not at all.

Look at the withdrawal of French health care from early retirees for example (I think the reason is that they’re not of an age to get pensioners’ care an also have no income which is subject to the health care tax).
So the first necessity will be for each and every hospital in the EU to become expert in the eligibility standards of 27 different health care systems. Plus, of course, in the treatments and drugs available.

So an English woman treated in France for breast cancer would be denied Herceptin, as she would at home, while a Scot or French one, in the same hospital, under the same oncologist, might get it.

What a tangled web we weave.. READ TELEGRAPH

Privacy? What privacy? You don't need no stinkin privacy.

American travelers' personal data would for the first time be exported to all European Union states by airline carriers flying to Europe under a proposal to be announced this week.The data, including names, telephone numbers, credit card information and travel itinerary, would be sent to E.U. member states so they could assess passenger risk for counterterrorism purposes, according to a draft copy obtained by The Washington Post.

The European Commission proposal would allow the data to be kept for 13 years or longer if used in criminal investigations and intelligence operations. It would cover all passengers flying into and out of Europe, not just Americans. READ THE POST

Belgium is failing because there are no real Belgians, just as there are no real Europeans.

Belgium has now gone for 144 days without a government and you know what?… everything seems normal.
Eurocrats are booking their tables at Comme Chez Soi, Moroccan boys are breakdancing in the metro stations, civil servants (there are lots of these) are lingering over their Speculoos biscuits and coffee with gloopy vitamin-enhanced milk substitute.

Historically, Belgiums government has had to buy people's loyalty though massive public works schemes. Every state institution was dragged into the racket: the trade unions, the nationalised enterprises, the social security networks.
Belgium, in short, became a microcosm of what the EU is becoming: a mechanism for the arbitrary reallocation of money. READ THE TIMES

First USA baby boomer applies for Social Security

The Silver Tsunami has started!

The nation's first baby boomer applied for Social Security Monday, the start of an avalanche of applications from the post-World War II generation.
Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, a former teacher from New Jersey, applied for benefits over the Internet. Casey-Kirschling was born one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946, making her the first baby boomer -- a generation of nearly 80 million born from 1946 to 1964.

She'll apply — online — for Social Security at a public ceremony. When Kirschling turns 62, she'll be able to celebrate with that first monthly check. Celebrating may be short lived. Paying for 80 million retirees is not going to be cheap.

Belgium: Europe's canary in a coal mine?

You probably don't realize it, but we are living in an unprecedented historical moment. For the first time, Belgium has managed to be interesting without getting invaded by Germany or abusing an African colony. What's so interesting? In short: Belgium is coming apart at the seams.

One is tempted to joke that it's an Iraq with better weather and waffles. But it isn't a mini-Iraq, and not just because they're not killing one another. It's more like a mini-European Union. In fact, that's the one thing everyone can agree on. No country is more invested in the EU experiment than Belgium, whose capital, Brussels, is also the capital of the EU. If Belgium falls to sectarianism, what does that say about prospects for making Europe into a super-Belgium?

But what I really like about the Belgian crisis is that it puts a dent in the myth that Europe represents some enlightened new model exportable to the rest of the globe. After World War II and the Holocaust, a generation of diplomats and intellectuals predicted that nationality, religion and culture would matter less in the New Europe. But wishing didn't make it so. Read Los Angeles Times

EU pours £3.8bn into 'brainwashing campaign'

The European Union is spending £3.8 billion a year on "propaganda" to win over its sceptical citizens.

According to Lee Rotherham, the author of a new book which examines the EU's spending on its image, such initiatives are an "outrageous and cynical attempt to brainwash the young". The Europa Diary, a gift from the EU to schoolchildren, is one example cited by Mr Rotherham in Hearts & Minds: the Tax-funded PR Campaign to Make us Love Brussels.