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To: maceng2 who wrote (400)	8/27/2003 2:54:36 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1417

It would be interesting to read these articles.. news.ft.com ------------------------------ Sharing jobs as well as goods More people would suffer from a backlash against globalisation than from an increase in free trade and foreign competition, writes Brad Delong of the University of California at Berkeley. -------------------------------- and ---------------------------------- Civil service is far from neutral British mandarins are serial monogamists, loyal to their ministerial spouses, writes Colin Talbot, professor of public policy at the University of Nottingham. ------------------------------------ but that means I will have to buy a subscription. I'm being tempted. Up till now I have not seen much subscription story lines worth buying.

To: maceng2 who wrote (400)	9/27/2003 8:26:17 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1417

186mph Eurostar ends British humiliation By Michael Williams 28 September 2003 news.independent.co.uk It may not compare with the feats of Stevenson or Brunel, but passengers on the 8.01 from Waterloo to Paris this morning will be ensured a small part in the railway history books as they ride on the first train on the first new main line to be built in Britain for 104 years. Today sees the launch of scheduled services on the £1.9bn first stage of the high-speed link to the Channel tunnel - 46 miles of brand new track from Southfleet in Kent, to Dollonds Moor, near Folkestone, cutting 20 minutes off the journey time to Paris. It will ease some of our national humiliation since Margaret Thatcher signed the treaty with François Mitterrand to build the tunnel in 1987, but failed to push ahead with a high-speed line on this side of the Channel. Now there will be no more grinding of brakes as the Eurostar emerges into Britain. Instead, it will swoosh through at speeds of up to 186mph, allowing a fastest time of two hours and 35 minutes to Paris and two hours and 20 minutes to Brussels. A test run in July broke the British rail speed record with a run at 208mph. And yesterday, a train carrying VIPs from London to Paris achieved a record time of two hours and 19 minutes. But it's not green signals all the way. Though the construction of the first section has been on time and on budget, there is the more daunting job of completing the £3.3bn section two, which involves bridging the Thames, boring a long tunnel through east London and rebuilding the Grade I-listed St Pancras station. When the line is finished - in 2007, if everything goes to plan - journey times will reduce by a further 15 minutes. There is also a £35m revamp under way in which everything from the train interiors to uniforms and crockery are being made over by Philippe Starck. It is a fillip that Eurostar desperately needs. Although it has carried 48 million passengers since it started in 1994, it has carried an even greater number of empty seats, suffering from the inroads of the low-cost airlines. Passenger numbers and revenues continue to decline. After a peak of 7.6 million in 2000, passengers were down last year to 7.1 million. Revenues dropped from £429m to £412m. Eurostar executives must hope that the new service will not go the same way as the last new main line, the Great Central Railway, which was extravagantly extended south from Lancashire and south Yorkshire to London's Marylebone in 1899. It was part of a great scheme by the "railway king", Sir Edward Watkin, to run trains under the Channel from Manchester to Paris, using what is now the Metropolitan Line beneath the capital. But it came too late - the Railway Age was over, the line never made money and was forced to close in the Sixties.