Good late morning, afternoon from Washington DC.  Before I make my way out to the airport to fly back home to London, I thought I would catch up on some of the weekend’s news.

Speaking of travel, over the years our correspondent in Russia, Grigory Pasko, has done an inordinate amount of reporting on this blog about the unfortunate conditions of the roads in so many parts of the regions.  Though perhaps peculiar to an outsider, anyone who has traveled to Russia and bothered to get outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, would understand our fixation on this routine minutae of transportation infrastructure.