In death as in life, Margaret Thatcher inspires endless controversy. The former prime minister was buried today at St. Paul's Cathedral, and even the hymns chosen for the service have sparked debate -- never mind the lavish trappings of the ceremony itself. One of the hymns -- "I vow to thee, my country" -- apparently has surprising feminist overtones, which has the good folks at the Economist pondering questions of deep theological import:

As prime minister, Mrs Thatcher pointed out that in the hymn, the kingdom of God's numbers are said to increase "soul by soul"—in other words, through the salvation of individuals and not social classes or communities. 

But she probably did not realise the full import of the line that follows: a form of words that is considered of great significance in feminist readings of the Jewish and Christian tradition. "And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace" is a quote from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, in which Wisdom is personified as a female divine figure. The word "her" does not refer to the heavenly homeland, but to a lady called Wisdom. Jewish and Christian theologians have long wondered how this can be reconciled with monotheistic belief in a Deity who (if He has any gender at all) is usually regarded as masculine.

Let's just say this isn't a question we've spent much time thinking about here at FP. But it did get us wondering what an alternate music selection for Maggie Thatcher's funeral -- one picked by her fiercest critics -- might look like. And you thought "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" was scathing.

Elvis Costello, "Tramp the Dirt Down": A track in which Costello dreams of dancing on Maggie's grave. He may finally get his wish.

Morrissey, "Margaret on the Guillotine": If nothing else, Maggie being led to the guillotine with handbags and all à la Marie Antoinette sounds like a promising movie premise.

Pink Floyd, "Fletcher Memorial Home": In which Floyd imagines Maggie living out her final days in the company of her good friend, Augusto Pinochet.

Robert Wyatt, "Shipbuilding": A Costello cover, this song will probably go down in history as the greatest song written about the Falklands War.

Sinéad O'Connor, "Black Boys on Mopeds": Using the killing of a young black man as a symbol of police violence, O'Connor accuses Thatcher of being no different than the Chinese autocrats who ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre. It is one of the more brutal indictments of Thatcher's England you'll ever hear.

Margaret Thatcher's death on Monday prompted a great deal of reflection on the Iron Lady's many legacies. But one in particular has been less explored: the former British prime minister's recurring appearance in political cartoons.

"She was a great subject for people who really hated her or hated her for what she stood for, which was many of the cartoonists," Anita O'Brien, the curator of the London Cartoon Museum, told Foreign Policy. "She was very distinctive. She had a particular way of speaking, which some [cartoonists] used to their advantage.... She was somebody that somehow couldn't be ignored." 

For that very reason, O'Brien's museum devoted an exhibition to the satirical sketches featuring Thatcher called Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! The exhibit opened in 2009 -- two decades after the divisive British leader had left power. "Because she was such a strong figure and because she continued to try to exert an influence over many of the succeeding prime ministers, both Tory and Labour, she continued to feature in cartoons long after she had ceased to be prime minister," O'Brien explained. "Much much more than probably any figure."

To get a sense of how Thatcher was depicted in political cartoons, check out the image below by American cartoonist Bill DeOre, which appeared after Thatcher dispatched the British Navy to the Falkland Islands in 1982:

DEORE © 1982 Bill DeOre. Courtesy of the artist and Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

And another by DeOre:

DEORE © 1982 Bill DeOre. Courtesy of the artist and Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

The cartoon below was published in the Daily Mirror the day after Thatcher's longest-serving cabinet minister, Geoffrey Howe, delivered a scathing resignation speech, voicing his discontent over her refusal to better integrate the United Kingdom with European economies:

This photograph shows a sketch at the Cartoon Museum drawn by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell in 2000, after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that it was time to "move British politics beyond the time of Margaret Thatcher."

Photograph by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images

"One of the things that came across when we did the exhibition was that she really divided the country," O'Brien told FP, and this doesn't look to be changing any time soon. "Even the whole issue of her funeral is dividing people. I'm sure there will be more cartoons between now and next week and probably after the funeral."

For Maggie's part, "she didn't care about cartoons at all," O'Brien notes. "We know this because one of our trustees was one of her ministers. Whereas some other politicians and previous prime ministers may have been quite hurt or offended by the cartoons, she just completely ignored them so they had no impact on her. I don't imagine she had that much interest in the visual arts."

More than 800,000 Americans packed the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Monday to listen to President Obama deliver his second inaugural address, but many more were listening around the world. Here are a few interesting global reactions:

CHINA

In the Chinese media, Obama's promise to "try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully" and argument that "engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear" than military force was taken as a sign that the U.S.-China relationship will be at the top of his foreign policy agenda for the next four years. Of course, as the state-run Global Times notes, there's a bit of skepticism that the president will live up to his words:

"If the president really lives his words, he would agree that for the sake of the world's peace and prosperity, it is important for the United States and China to foster mutual trust, for trust is the cornerstone for every relationship, no matter between people or between nations...The words also show that he agrees that the two nations should properly solve their disputes, either economic or political."

News agency Xinhua was a little more positive, describing the overall approach Obama outlined in his Monday address as "balanced" and "decidedly progressive."

BRITAIN

One Guardian writer described Obama's speech as "urg[ing] Americans to reclaim from conservatives the spirit of the founding fathers" and as "more inspirational than 2009," praising Obama's strong support of climate change and gay rights. Another was more cautious in hispraise, maintaining that Obama's speech was less of a populist manifesto and more of a "to-do list [covering] what he has still to do to make good on the economic promises of his first term."

While Peter Foster of the more conservative Telegraph granted that Obama's speech was well-received by the spectators on the Mall, he reminded readers just how deeply divided the United States still is: "It was apparent," writes Foster, "that only half of the nation had showed up to listen to [Obama's] call...Overwhelmingly, the crowd of 800,000 people was filled with the faces of the young, female, urban, African-American coalition that ensured Mr. Obama's re-election for a second term last November. They were Obama's people, and they were there to celebrate their victory."

AUSTRALIA

In his article for the Australian, Troy Bramston praised Obama's rhetoric, but argued that Obama cannot rank amongst the truly great American presidents until he "translate[s] a presidency of promise into a presidency of action."

That may be hard to do, claims Janet Hook in another article for the Australian, in which she points out that Obama's speech made little effort to readch out to the GOP.

SAUDI ARABIA

After the inaugural address, the headline of Saudi-owned, pan-Arab daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat read "The decade of war is over," referencing a line from Obama's speech. Yet in an op-ed for the same paper, Abdul Rahman Rashed, though praising Obama's experience in Middle Eastern affairs, was not so sure about peace in the coming decade. "Obama's second term will possibly be reconciliatory, particularly after John Kerry and Chuck Hagel join his administration...but who can tell if the region will be in a reconciliatory mood?"

PALESTINE

In his article for Palestinian-run, London based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi (translated into English by the Times of Israel), Abdel Al-Bari Atwan writes that Obama "completely shut the door on any military intervention, stressing that a decade of wars has ended and that the only way to peace is dialogue." "President Obama's message is very clear," the article continued. "In short, he said that he does not intend to militarily intervene in Syria; will not wage a war on Iran, succumbing to Israeli pressure; and will focus on rescuing his country from its crippling economic crisis."

Atwan continues: "Obama disappointed many of his allies in the Middle East by neglecting to mention any of them in his speech." (Obama didn't mention any foreign countries by name in his address.)

MEXICO

Obama's equal opportunity rhetoric made news in Mexico. In its coverage of the inaugural address, El Universal highlighted Obama's commitment to immigrants, women, and gays. The article quoted Obama's statement promising immigration reform:

"Our trip (as a nation) will not be complete until we find a better way to welcome the hopeful, striving immigrants in the U.S. are still the land of opportunity, until the brightest students and engineers are listed on our strengths work instead of being expelled from our country."

The headline of the article read, in Spanish, "Obama calls for welcoming immigrants."

CANADA

The president's inaugural address was a chance for Canadians to pat themselves on the back, the Ottowa Citizen snarkily reports:

"On the key issues that President Barack Obama pledged to dedicate his second term to in his inaugural address, Canada has already made substantive progress: on supporting democracy around the world; on providing equal rights to gays and lesbians; on creating an aspirational immigration system."

It doesn't stop there either. The column went to on say that Canada has also beat Obama to the punch in securing a budget deal and repairing its economy.

When Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird hosted a largely American gathering at the Canadian embassy on Monday, he was more tactful. "This is not a time for long speeches," he said. "We have very different systems, so we don't exactly want to be bragging," a Canadian embassy spokesman said.

Fifty years after Kenya's independence, the British high court opened the second part of a case brought by three Kenyan nationals against the British government today. The trial sheds light on Kenya's gulags, a largely forgotten dark corner of England's colonial legacy.

The plaintiffs -- Paulo Muoka Nzili, Wambuga Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara -- were formerly rebels during the Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule.  They allege that they were the victims of torture and brutality at the hands of the British administration during the "Kenya Emergency" that lasted from 1952-1960.

According to the BBC, the "claimants' lawyers allege that Nzili was castrated, Nyingi severely beaten and Mara subjected to appalling sexual abuse in detention camps during the rebellion."

The fourth claimant in the original case, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua, died in the interim between when the test case was ruled arguable in July 2011 and the opening of the trial.

The lawyers for the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) have argued that the case should be struck down because the lapse in time between the end of the insurgency and the current proceedings is too great. However, a new cache of secret British documents unveiled in April 2012 has shed new light on crimescommitted in Kenya, as well as other former colonies -- and the decades-long effort to cover them up.   

The files - which had been purposely withheld from the National Archives and illegally hidden at Hanslope Park, an intelligence station -- were uncovered by historians working on the Kenyans' case.  Subsequently, the Foreign Office released all of the records.

The documents include accounts of British officials "roasting detainees alive" in Kenya. The colony's attorney general in 1953, Eric Griffith-Jones, described the internment camps as "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia" -- yet nevertheless endorsed British policy, claiming that "if we are going to sin, we must sin quietly."

The Kenyans first requested the release of these documents in 1967, according to an internal FCO review from February 2011 that was made public in May.  The review, which explains how the Kenyan request served as a blueprint for refusing such information to all former colonies, details that the files were consciously concealed by the government. They reasoned that releasing any information would set "a dangerous precedent" which would make it "difficult to withhold un-reviewed and potentially sensitive papers from other former colonies."

The Guardian confirmed that the most incriminating of the documents were systematically destroyed. Nevertheless, the remaining incriminating files -- known within the FCO as the 'migrated archives' because they were whisked out of colonial territories before the post-independence administration could take power - total 8,800 files. The Kenyan documents alone total 294 boxes.

As the trial progresses, government fears of "a dangerous precedent" may prove well-founded: this case might very well open up avenues for other colonies to bring legal cases against the former empire.  

Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn't choose his foreign visits lightly. On May 31, Putin makes his first trip abroad since being inaugurated for a third term as president on May 7, to neighboring Belarus. The visit is highly symbolic of Russia's desire to be the leader in the post-Soviet space, as well as Putin's continued support for the authoritarian president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko (also known as "Europe's Last Dictator"). Afterwards, Putin will head to Germany and France, Russia's major trading partners in the EU. After the European visits, Putin will fly to speak with Uzbek ruler Islam Karimov in Tashkent, to Beijing, and finally to Astana, Kazakhstan, to meet with long-time ruler Nursultan Kazarbayev; countries central to Putin's vision of a Eurasian Union.

Earlier in the month, Putin suddenly declined to attend the G8 Summit in Camp David, under pretext that he was too busy forming a new Cabinet of Ministers, sending instead Prime Minister Medvedev. The move was widely seen as a snub to President Obama, as Putin avoided a meeting with the president, and sidestepped making the U.S. his first foreign visit. A few days later, Obama announced he would not be able to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Vladivostok this September, because it conflicted with the Democratic Party convention.

Putin has now also taken the opportunity to snub the UK, by announcing he will not attend the opening of the London 2012 Olympics, even though the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held on Russian territory in Sochi. Likely, Medvedev will once again be sent in his stead. Russian-British relations have been tense since the 2006 poisoning of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London. Moreover the West has been pressuring Russian officials over the 2009 death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky while he was detained in prison. Putin's foreign trip destinations are by no means accidental.

Meanwhile, not everyone in Belarus is enthusiastic for Putin's visit to their country. (More here in Russian.)

Masked youth wander the streets armed with Molotov cocktails, families flee as their homes erupt in flames, medics tend to the bloodied and bruised as armored vehicles patrol the streets -- a scene fit for a war zone. The world has been capitaved by the scenes emerging from London, Manchester, and Birmingham in recent days while the British public has searched for explanations for what set off this wave of anarchy. 

But shocking as the violence has been, this isn't the first time England has been paralyzed by riots -- history seems to be repeating itself with terrifying accuracy.

St. Pauls Riot

In April of 1980, the Black and White Café, a famous drug den in Bristol, was raided by officers. High unemployment, poor living conditions and a general feeling of discrimination by the police force proved a deadly combination as over a hundred youth battled with officers, destroying police cars and fire trucks as well as local buildings.

In total twenty-five people were hospitalized, including 19 officers, and 130 were arrested. While the numbers were relatively low compared to later riots, St. Pauls would seen as a turning point.

1981 Summer Riots

The "sus" law -- short for suspected person -- was a police method that allowed individuals to be stopped and searched without just cause, generating a harsh division between the police and minority communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. April marked the introduction of a new tactic, called Operation Swamp, where police patrolled the streets in large groups, arresting thousands of suspected criminals in order to slash the crime rate. 

On the evening of April 10 in Brixton, as officers led a young black man suffering from stab wounds to a police car to take him to a hospital, he broke free, fearing he was actually being arrested. A crowd began to form around the scene, throwing bottles and bricks at the policemen. As the night went on, rumors spread like wildfire throughout Brixton that the injured man had actually been stabbed by the White officers.

Operation Swamp searches ensued and when officers attempt to search a man suspected of carrying drugs, a full-fledged riot broke with Molotov cocktails being thrown for the first time on the mainland in British history. Hundreds of homes and buildings were looted and torched. 300 officers were injured, along with 60 civilians. Riots spread to areas of Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool in the later months.

Read on

But will she be the last to fall on the sword? The knives are still out for Murdoch and his business empire. And focus has shifted to two important people in Rupert's inner sanctum. He might find the need to sacrifice one of them. But who will it be: the son and heir apparent, or one of his closest confidantes who has been with him for 50 years?  

James Murdoch

Given her proximity to the scandal, Brooks sucked up a lot of the media oxygen when it came to blame these past few weeks. But with her gone, that attention could shift to Rupert's heir apparent, James, Brook's boss at News International. British MPs have attacked the 38-year-old executive recently -- saying he has a lot of questions to answer. Chief among them: Why did he authorize payments to hacking victims in exchange for their silence? Critics are saying it smells an awful lot like a cover-up.  

The younger Murdoch has become something of a liability thanks to his response to the scandal -- which many say he was too slow to grasp the severity of.  And by transferring money to victims -- no matter what the reason -- he's only made things worse.

It might seem hard to believe Rupert would dump his own son in order to save his business, but he has had fall-outs with his children in the past that have led to them exiting the company.  And now that Murdoch's empire is under FBI investigation -- in addition to investigations in Britain and possibly soon Australia -- if Rupert believes it's his company or his son, you can bet he'll decide pretty quickly the kid has got to go.

Les Hinton

Few in Murdoch's world are closer to him than Les Hinton, the British news executive who Murdoch put in charge of Dow Jones after he purchased it in 2007. Before that, Hinton headed News International from 1995-2007, when the many dirty tricks were playing out under his watch. Back in 2006, Hinton told Parliament the hacking was limited to a single reporter. Of course, we know now that not only was it not just one reporter, it wasn't even one newspaper. Many of the media properties under his control were engaging in illegal practices. Critics say he either knew about it or he allowed the dirty culture to breed underneath him. He also didn't help himself by publicly backing the former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, who last week was arrested for his involvement in the hacking scandal.

Most problematic for Hinton -- he is the strongest connection between the British scandal and Murdoch's American empire. There are indications Murdoch may sell off his damaged British media properties altogether, but abandoning his stateside operations will never happen. And that means Minton might have to go.  

Update: Hinton resigned from News Corp. late today. A memo from Murdoch after the jump:

Read on

It's reaching all the way to 10 Downing Street, where Prime Minister David Cameron is facing a crisis of leadership like none he's experienced so far.

After all, Cameron has ties to some of the most vilified people in the scandal. He courted Rupert Murdoch in the run-up to last year's election (which helped to ensure his victory). He's friends with Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the tabloid and current News International chief executive who has become a focal point of criticism for the mess. And he hired Andy Coulson, another former editor of the paper, as his communications director at 10 Downing. This morning, Coulson (who stepped down from his job in January) was arrested for his involvement with the paper's illegal activities.

Those are bad associations to have these days, as the public's anger grows and demands for penance mount.

So how badly damaged is the Cameron brand after this week?

"Permanently and irrevocably," writes political analyst Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph.

"Until now it has been easy to argue that Mr. Cameron was properly grounded with a decent set of values," he writes. "Unfortunately, it is impossible to make that assertion any longer. He has made not one, but a long succession of chronic personal misjudgments."

In other words, he's forever tarred with turning a blind eye to some of the press's shadier tactics, while cozying up to media executives in order to win political backing.

Read on

We're a long way from Streep's inevitable Oscar nomination for her performance as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -- the film doesn't even open until early next year -- but it's never too early to start grading her performance. Always the professional, Streep prepared for the role with a ton of research -- she attended a session of parliament to get a sense of how the prime minister question time works and found "every bit of footage" on YouTube she could, according to the film's producer.

Yesterday, a slip of a teaser trailer was released online.

So how does she do? Granted, there's only one line to judge, but Foreign Policy wanted to get an early jump on critiquing her. We contacted someone who knows Thatcher and has covered her for years -- Peter Riddell, a former political commentator for the Times of London and the author of two books on Thatcher's government.

Overall, Riddell says Streep is 85 percent there.

"If anything, she underplays Thatcher who was far more assertive and argumentative," he told FP by email. "Also the girlish half-giggle after her comments is wrong. That is not Thatcher. Physically the resemblance is good."

In terms of style, Riddell gives Streep a score of 80 percent.

All in all, not bad. Perhaps even more telling, Riddell says he can't wait to see the film.

Late today, the DailyTelegraph reported Scotland Yard detectives were contacting the families of victims of the July 7 bombings in London back in 2005, who might also have been victims of journalists' phone hacking attempts. "It is thought that journalists were seeking to access voice messages left on family members' phones as they desperately waited for information about their loved ones in the aftermath of the bombings," The Telegraph reported.

Labor party leader Ed Miliband summed it up, calling the episode a "stain on the character of British journalism" and parliament will hold public hearings tomorrow on the matter.

What happened? After 13-year-old Milly Dowler went missing, a private investigator hired by the News of the World allegedly hacked into her phone in an effort to get some scoops on the case. He listened to her messages, but then -- in order hear more incoming calls without the voicemail filling up -- he deleted some of the messages. Dowler's family concluded it was Milly who deleted the messages and so she must be alive. The police investigation was stymied by the confusion, and it's still not known if any vital evidence was lost.

For background into the case against the paper and its hacking attempts against Princes William and Harry -- as well as other celebrities -- check out this riveting account in the New York Times Magazine from 2010.

It described the News of the World as "a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors...one former reporter called it a ‘do whatever it takes' mentality."

[The] News of the World was hardly alone in accessing messages to obtain salacious gossip. ‘It was an industrywide thing,' said Sharon Marshall, who witnessed hacking while working at News of the World and other tabloids. ‘Talk to any tabloid journalist in the United Kingdom, and they can tell you each phone company's four-digit codes. Every hack on every newspaper knew this was done.'

BBC political editor Nick Robinson points out that in some ways the story is a political and media tsunami, touching on multiple fronts:

For a long time the hacking story united those who'd always been hostile to the Murdoch empire with those angered by its switch from backing New Labour to supporting the Tories, and those who saw it as a way to damage David Cameron (who hired the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his spin doctor).

Now Murdoch ... and Cameron will be aware that for the first time the hacking story may be engaging and horrifying readers, viewers and voters.

In Afghanistan today, David Cameron called the charges "really appalling" if true. But he might be in an awkward position, according to the Daily Telegraph. He is a friend of Rebekah Brooks, the News Corp executive who was editor at the time the hacking occurred (she's denied knowing about it).

For David Cameron, the News of the World scandal is tremendously difficult. His close friendship with Rebekah Brooks...[is] bound to be mentioned in tomorrow's emergency debate in the Commons on the subject. For Ed Miliband, it has provided a rare triumph -- even the most spectical have praised his well-balanced attack on News International. For once, Miliband was not just delivering a line -- he was expressing a deeply held Left-wing skepticism of the tabloid press, and this resonated with the public.

The Telegraph said that one consequence of the case could be increased attempts at regulating the press in the country.

Many commentators give at least partial credit for India's economic success to the political institutions left in place by British colonialism. Fareed Zakaria, for instance, believes India "got very lucky" in that its first generation of post-independence leaders "nurture the best traditions of the British" including "courts, universities [and] administrative agencies."

But a new study by Lakshmi Iyer of the Harvard Business School casts some doubt on whether British governing institutions really has a postivie economic impact in the long run. Here's the abstract:

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period has a significant and persistent effect on postcolonial outcomes.

The finding is particularly interesting given that Iyer also shows that the areas directly annexed by the British tended be those with higher agricultural productivity. Despite their potential, these areas "did not invest as much as native states in physical and human capital."

Iyer's paper provides an interesting companion to another recent study by Alexander Lee and Kenneth Schultz of Stanford, which compared economic outcomes of formerly British and formerly French districts of Cameroon:

[W]e focus on the West African nation of Cameroon, which includes regions colonized by both Britain and France. Taking advantage of the artificial nature of the former colonial boundary, we use it as a discontinuity within a national demographic survey. We show that rural areas on the British side of the discontinuity have higher levels of wealth and local public provision of improved water sources. Results for urban areas and centrally-provided public goods show no such effect, suggesting that post-independence policies also play a role in shaping outcomes. 

Taken together, the moral of these studies could be that colonalism isn't great for a country's future political and economic wellbeing, but if a country is going to be colonized, they're better off with the British than the French. It's also very possible that the legacy of colonialism -- whether positive or negative -- manifests differently in national rather than local governance. Although on a purely anecdotal level, the French vs. British distinction seems to hold there as well. 

Hat tip: Chris Blattman

The inevitable international pushback against the United States' snowballing airport security regime seems to have begun, with British Airways Chairman Martin Broughton leading the charge:

In remarks at the annual conference of the UK Airport Operators Association in London on Tuesday, he said the practice of forcing people to take off their shoes and have their laptops checked separately in security lines should be ditched.

Mr. Broughton said there was no need to "kowtow to the Americans every time they wanted something done" to beef up security on U.S.-bound flights, especially when this involved checks the U.S. did not impose on its domestic routes.

"America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do," he said. "We shouldn't stand for that. We should say, 'We'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential'." [...]

Mr. Broughton said no one wanted weak security, but added: "We all know there's quite a number of elements in the security programme which are completely redundant and they should be sorted out."

In the wake of 9/11, the shoe bomber, the transatlantic plot, and the underwear bomber, the TSA responded by adding procedures that might have prevented the last attack -- removing shoes, banning liquids, full-body imaging scanners. Once these new measures are in place, they are almost never removed. Broughton is acting in his own airline's interests of course, but if he can help start a public discussion on which of these measures are actually useful or worth the delays and indignities associated with them, he will have done U.S. travelers a service. 

Britain's deep cuts in defense spending mean it's far less likely that Her Majesty's armed forces will participate in future military interventions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it will also reduce Britain's footprint in another part of the world, Germany:

Britain is to pull the last of its troops out of Germany 15 years ahead of schedule as part of a wide-ranging program of defense cuts.

Some 20,000 British service personnel are set to leave Germany in the next decade. The troops, originally stationed in the aftermath of the Second World War, had previously been set to remain until 2035.

Between this and Germany settling up its World War I debt, it does appear that Europe's 20th century wars may actually be over now.