California Governor Jerry Brown’s beloved bullet train project has had a rough go of it lately. As public support for it has plummeted, he has inadvertently antagonized the environmentalists in his base while it gets tossed around by the courts. A pending appellate court review on Brown’s access to $8.6 billion in bond money will decide the next chapter in the bullet train saga, which stands today about where it did two years ago: without a credible source of funding or a good justification for why it’s necessary.

President Obama hopes the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will be a signal to the entire Asia-Pacific region that the United States is committed to the region, not just militarily but economically. But Harry Reid and other Senate Dems aren’t too keen on it.

Western diplomats may at last have woken up and smelled the coffee in the continued stand-off over Ukraine. After failing to appreciate the geopolitics of the Ukrainian issue and insisting on bureaucratic pettifoggery the first time around, let’s hope Europe’s foreign policy makers have finally learned their lesson and come to play hardball.

A group of nine students is heading to court to challenge California’s laws regarding the hiring and firing of teachers, arguing that that the state’s laws put teachers’ interests ahead of those of their students. This is morally right, but will it hold up in court?

A new energy deal between Pakistan and Qatar suggests that Gulf Arabs are moving closer to Pakistan in an attempt to balance a rising Iran.

Abortion rates have fallen steeply since 2008 all across the United States—and not just in states with the toughest new laws. The public appears to be getting increasingly queasy about the practice.

Good evening, readers! We hope you’ve had a restful weekend. Take a break from your Super Bowl preparations to read what you may have missed over the past week:

From Syria to Iran and to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Secretary Kerry’s boosters have managed to cleverly market his moves as genuine achievements.

Wonkblog reports on a new study of wait times in 15 big US cities, which found the average waiting time across five different specialities was 18.5 days. In some areas of the country it’s even higher—in Boston, the average wait time for a first time patient to see a family doctor is 66 days.

Louisiana placed near the top in yet another education report card measuring charter school policies. The state has staked out a place at the front of the reform movement; the question now is whether these reforms actually work.