In Paris and Brussels there are armed troops needed on the streets, and they still dare not have New Year's Eve fireworks.


DEC. 30, 2015 - PARIS — Officials are investigating accounts of an alcohol-fueled "orgy" at a police station one night last month while Brussels, the Belgian capital, was nearly shut down over fears of a copycat terrorist attack.

According to an article in La Dernière Heure, a local newspaper, the orgy occurred sometime between Nov. 21 — when the federal government's crisis center raised the alert level for the Brussels region to 4, the highest — and Nov. 26, when the alert level was reduced to 3. According to the newspaper, after the police station closed for the night at 10 p.m., two policewomen were invited upstairs to the floor where the soldiers were sleeping and had sex with eight of them.

A spokeswoman for the Brussels-West police agency, one of six police departments that patrol the city, confirmed on Wednesday that it had begun an internal investigation.

American officials reacted cautiously to the reports that Belgian officials had disrupted a New Year's Eve plot. Some said the arrests this week in Belgium and Turkey, as well as the Paris attacks themselves, had stirred a broader debate about Europe's ability to address terrorist threats now and in the future.