Other planned subjects might beckon. However, fresh news can demand a rearrangement of writing priorities. This is especially so when the mainstream media banishes the item to the back page even though the occurrence is of importance. At times such underrated news items are interchangeable. Often such cases are not unique. The same event, albeit with changed details, is likely to emerge in other locations. If this is the case, we might have to do with a duplication that is not accidental. It is likely that we are looking at something that is descriptive of the strength or weaknesses of the civilization which produced the event. Therefore, if an incident happens in many places then it might be significant even if, in itself, the matter appears to be local and therefore trivial. If an underlying base below the small visible peaks of icebergs can be found, then not the little protrusions but the connecting mass below them are the real story. Ultimately, every image on the screen is the sum of small and in themselves obscure dots. The happenings referred to here are comparable to such specs: it is their totality that amount to the picture.

A quote from The Daily Mail, 29 January 2008
 
Tony Blair landed another highly-paid City job yesterday to take his earnings past £10million in the seven months since he left Downing Street. He is well on his way to becoming Britain's richest former Prime Minister after becoming an adviser to the Swiss financial giant Zurich for an estimated £2million a year. Mr Blair, 54, will assist the insurance firm on climate change and "developments and trends in the international political environment". […]

A quote from the French newspaper La Province, 12 January 2008 [English translation here]

For the young computer maintenance technician in Marseilles, it wasn’t his day… Thursday, around noon, while he was driving along de la Viste Avenue, he had his laptop stolen after imprudently leaving it on his passenger seat.

A quote from LifeSite, 28 January 2008

The idea for a worldwide moratorium on abortion originated with Giuliano Ferrara, a non-Christian journalist and former head of the Italian Communist Party in Turin. […] Responding to a recent decision by the United Nations to call for a moratorium on the death penalty, Ferrara urged that the moratorium be extended to a moratorium on the unjust killing of unborn children. […]

A quote from Christopher Orlet in The American Spectator, 28 January 2008

[S]everal far right, anti-immigration parties, including the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang, Alsace First, the Austrian FPOE, and Germany's Pro Koln joined to form a group called Cities Against Islamification.

CAI's purpose is ostensibly to resist the "Islamification of European cities." For obvious reasons, these far right parties do not use the term "Islamofascism," preferring "Islamosocialism." […]

A quote from The Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2008
 
Senior allies of Gordon Brown are plotting to wreck Tony Blair's ambition to become the first permanent President of Europe amid fears that his appointment would reignite old divisions in the Labour Party.
 

A quote from John O’Sullivan in The New Criterion, January 2008

“[M]ainstream” conservative parties in all countries for the last thirty years have shunned nationalist voters and the causes that arouse them from immigration to anti-supra-nationalism. This has resulted in the rise of third parties and political entrepreneurs specializing in such issues. […] In almost all cases, however, such parties have divided the Right, at least temporarily, and allowed the Left to slip into power. […]

This happens at the same time as our countries are flooded with illegal immigrants at an accelerating pace. We give immigrants money through high taxes and welfare goodies and thus fund our own colonization, but we let grandma and grandpa die if they get ill because, well, they're so old and their health care costs too much. Welcome to the European welfare state.

Some British Conservative MPs are, according to the Sunday Telegraph, travelling across the pond to help in the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton to secure her nomination as Democrat candidate for President in the autumn. This astonishing intelligence will cause more than just a few traditional Tories to choke on their cornflake, most of whom would think of Mrs. Clinton’s outlook on politics as being anathema to any British Conservative. To most of us she is, as far as her instincts go, indistinguishable from your average tax hard and spend hard, Statist Socialist.

A quote from Clive Davis at his Spectator blog, 25 January 2008

I second Stephen's remarks about that nasty, pseudo-respectable piece of work known as The Brussels Journal. I dip into its pages now and then, just to see what the conspiracy theorists are up to. Two questions arise from all this: why do so many American conservatives enjoy wallowing in the web site's xenophobic, end-of-Europe drivel? And how on earth did the Journal's editor, Paul Belien, become an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute?