Britain and France are to sign a civil nuclear energy deal on Friday, as UK Prime Minister David Cameron meets President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris. The British government claims the deal will create thousands of jobs. READ MORE

For Xi, the itinerary was carefully negotiated to convey high-level significance and minimize the chance of making news or, worse, any gaffe. READ MORE

As the carnage in Syria worsened, Russia signaled a new-found willingness Monday to consider international intervention while the world’s nations planned a United Nations vote aimed at exposing the inaction of the great powers. READ MORE

European bureaucrats are clearly not keeping pace with the geopolitical dynamics of the modern world. While the U.S. and China are expanding their spheres of influence in the Pacific, and Russia is working to create a Eurasian bloc, the EU actually fell out of big geopolitical games, limiting the expansion of its own influence and being fully concentrated on the internal redistribution of political and economic powers. Ignoring the European aspirations and foreign policy ambitions of Turkey and Ukraine, the EU shows geopolitical improvidence, limiting its own ability to conduct more effective policy in the Middle East and former Soviet space. READ MORE

Russian Foreign Policy in the New Putin Era READ MORE

MPs in Athens approve severe budget cuts imposed by the EU after rallies against the bill erupt in street violence READ MORE

Outsiders find the polish-lithuanian spat the most incomprehensible in europe. How come two countries with so much common history and so many common interests get on so badly? Is it just the appalling personal chemistry between some senior officials? Or is it, absurdly, about spelling? Poles in Lithuania want to spell their names using letters like ł and ę in official documents. (We can't use them, or most other diacritics, in the print edition of the Economist because our typeface doesn't have those characters). READ MORE

Presidential elections, which were held in Turkmenistan on Sunday, will not affect policy of pragmatism in the energy issues chosen by the government in recent years and multipolarity of sale markets, local experts in Ashgabat and international observers believe. READ MORE

While the Arctic region represents a seminal opportunity to move closer to a Euro-Atlantic Security Community, other aspects of the energy equation are more open-ended. Given the elaborate interdependence of European gas and oil consumers and Russian and Caspian gas and oil suppliers, if these issues are addressed constructively, a basis should exist for cooperation here as well. Still, in contrast to the four decades before, over the last ten years, the tension stirred by gas cutoffs and the jousting over pipeline routes demonstrate energy’s potential role to impede efforts to draw the countries of the Euro-Atlantic region together. Hence, in contemplating  a path to the larger goal, a minimum, first-order objective must be to minimize the possibility of energy relations adding obstacles to what inevitably will be a difficult road. READ MORE

Will it be the next geopolitical battleground or remain the common heritage of humankind? READ MORE