A high profile plan for a high speed rail link between London and England’s rustbelt in the north is running into trouble. The roughly $50 billion line is backed by those who hope it will boost incomes and business in northern English cities like Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.The trouble is that the harder the British […]

Participants in the most famous of the world’s useless gabfests — the G-8 summit at which such global potentates as the prime ministers of Canada and Italy gather to pretend to make decisions and have their pictures taken with their colleagues — agreed on the need to issue anodyne statements that make them all look […]

What with the end of the Bard semester and rushing to prepare for a two week tour of Europe, I haven’t had the time to write about the biggest event on the Mead social calendar in the first half of May: the last night of the 2011-12 season at the Metropolitan Opera.The season closed with […]

London Heathrow still reigns as the busiest airport in Europe, but airlines and airport operators there warn that without expansion plans in place, Heathrow could lose its status as the preeminent European hub in the next 15 years, the Telegraph reports.With just two runways, industry professionals predict, many airlines would likely abandon London for fast-growing […]

The Obama administration may be worried about the domestic economy and unemployment these days, but there is one policy the president can look on as a significant success—the new US approach to Asia. It was scarcely six months ago when the Administration, in a rare display of display of diplomatic finesse, announced a movement of […]

“Crisis in the eurozone” stories are getting boring and this is one two year old soap opera the world would just as soon see disappear. Nevertheless it grinds on; yesterday the German finance minister said it could go on for another two years.  Unfortunately, he’s right.But while the news from Europe is complicated and inconclusive […]

The barefoot, blind lawyer from China is apparently on a flight bound for the US, and there are huge sighs of relief in both the Foreign Ministry in Beijing and at the US Department of State.Although some breathless commentary describes the diplomacy around Chen’s flight to freedom as the worst diplomatic spat between the US […]

With the last class of the semester out of the way, I’m off for two weeks in Europe. I’ll be in Germany at some conferences and events this coming week, and then it’s off to St. Petersburg to give a talk at a conference at the Smolny Institute.With any luck there will be time to […]

It was just a short aside in a speech; the junior member of Russia’s rotating leadership team was talking about how conflicts like the one in Syria could have broader implications for world politics and pointed out that great powers could get involved in unpredictable ways: “At some moment, such actions, which undermine sovereignty, can […]

Armed North Koreans took control of several Chinese fishing vessels on Thursday. They are holding 29 Chinese fishermen hostage and demanding a ransom payment. It is not clear if they were operating on orders from Pyongyang or are just pirates.Whether planned or not, it’s foolish for North Korea to provoke its only friend and benefactor […]