The end of the year is a good time to reflect on your business’s progress over the past year and plan how you want your business to develop. Do you want increased success in 2010 or the chance to enjoy the success you’ve achieved more? These top 10 New Year’s resolutions are designed to help you strike a better work-life balance, so you can achieve a truly satisfying success in the New Year.

1) Learn how to delegate and do more of it.

2) Promote your business regularly and consistently.

Too often the task of promoting a small business slips to the bottom of the to-do list in the press of urgent tasks. If you want to attract new customers, you have to make promotion a priority.

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STRASBOURG, France – France and Germany agreed on Thursday to stop arguing in public over whether the European Central Bank should do more to rescue the euro zone from a deepening sovereign debt crisis.

President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel said after talks with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti that they trusted the independent central bank and would not touch its inflation-fighting mandate when they propose changes of the European Union’s treaty to achieve closer fiscal union.

They also demonstrated their backing for Monti, an unelected technocrat, to surmount Italy’s daunting economic challenges, in contrast to the barely concealed disdain they showed for his predecessor, media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi.

“We all stated our confidence in the ECB and its leaders and stated that in respect of the independence of this essential institution we must refrain from making positive or negative demands of it,” Sarkozy told a joint news conference in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.

French ministers have called for the central bank to intervene massively to counter a market stampede out of euro zone government bonds, while Merkel and her ministers have said the EU treaty bars it from acting as a lender of last resort.

The Netherlands however moved closer to endorsing the ECB as lender of last resort, apparently breaking ranks with Germany.

Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager said he would prefer that the European Financial Stability Facility, the euro zone bailout fund, should be strengthened.

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Meriden can see light at tunnel’s end as it eagerly awaits station and track upgrades to raise its profile to more than just a stopover on Connecticut’s vaunted $647 million expansion of high-speed rail service linking New Haven, Hartford and Springfield.

The central-region community also has “The Hub,’’ 14 center-city acres across from its existing Civil War-era station — plus state and federal dollars to develop it — into a floodless town green that would perhaps eventually be hugged by housing, shops and cultural attractions.

“The question isn’t whether we’re going to succeed,’’ Town Manager Lawrence Kendzior boasts. “The question is to wha

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MADRID Spain’s opposition conservatives swept commandingly into power and into the hot seat Sunday as voters enduring a 21.5 percent jobless rate and stagnant economy dumped the Socialists the third time in as many weeks Europe’s debt crisis has claimed a government.

Awaiting words from victorious party leader and future prime minister Mariano Rajoy, thousands of jubilant, cheering supporters waving red-and-yellow Spanish flags and blue-and-white party ones gathered outside Popular Party headquarters in downtown Madrid as pop music boomed over loudspeakers.

Conservative Popular Party supporters wave flags while waiting for the results of the general elections, in Madrid, Sunday Nov, 20, 2011. Read more…

Many in the federal community fear the word “sequestration.”

That’s the technical term for the across-the-board cuts — half from defense, half from civilian agencies — that would be triggered if the Congressional supercommittee fails to come up with a deficit-cutting plan by next week.

But at least one budget expert says sequestration’s bark is worse than its bite.

For one thing, the cuts wouldn’t even go into effect until Jan. 2, 2013, notes Stan Collender, a budget expert and partner at Qorvis Communications.

“So, they’re not immediate. And

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