BEIJING – President Hu Jintao hailed a historic trade pact between China and Taiwan on Monday when he met with the chairman of Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party, saying it signals progress on their deepening ties.

Hu told Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung during his visit that the trade deal signed last month is an “important achievement” that helps reach the two sides’ goal of “peaceful development of relations.”

Footage of their meeting was aired on the evening news by national broadcaster China Central Television.

Last month, negotiators for China and Taiwan signed a trade deal that slashes tariffs on a wide range of products, pushing their economies closer together and further easing political hostilities across the Taiwan Strait.

The threat of military conflict has lingered since Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, but in recent years, the tensions have eased under the policy of rapprochement taken by Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou.

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LARNACA, Cyprus – The United States and Russia swapped 14 spies with precision, but one piece of the puzzle remains: The alleged spy who disappeared after posting bail in Cyprus.

Did he flee on his own? Get away with help from the Russians? Trick local residents into unwittingly aiding an escape? Meet some other fate?

The public doesn’t even know his true name.

The alleged paymaster of the Russian spy ring was arrested June 29 in Cyprus on an Interpol warrant while trying to board a flight to Budapest, Hungary, two days after his 10 alleged co-conspirators were arrested in the United States. His companion, a beautiful younger woman, was allowed to fly out.

But the case dissolved into rumor-fueled confusion hours later when the suspect, who called himself Christopher Metsos, vanished after handing over a Canadian passport that claimed he was 54 and got released on bail. Police escorted him to a bank, where he took out euro27,000 ($33,000) to pay the bail. Late that afternoon, he returned to a hotel and was never seen again.

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The Tanjong Pagar railway station sits in the heart of the port district of Singapore, yet the frigid efficiencies of the city-state fell quickly away as I stepped under the 78-year-old station’s Roman-style arches. There was no air-conditioning in the central hall inside, nor were there any boards to signal my train’s arrival or the platform it would depart from. A Muslim woman in a headscarf sat at an entrance to the urinals, collecting coins from every visitor. Backpackers moved in slow circles under the ceiling fans, watching anxiously for the platform’s accordion metal grill to be dragged open. The modernity of Singapore felt far away.

In a way, it was. The Tanjong Pagar station has long been an irritation to Singapore, a physical reminder of Malaysia’s former sovereignty over the island nation. The train station is situated on a narrow bridge of land, which, 45 years after Singapore broke away from Malaysia, is still legally administered by its erstwhile master. It’s a quaint historical oddity that has become a legal quagmire: according to the terms of the station’s lease, signed in 1918 when both Singapore and Malaysia were under British colonial rule, Malaysia enjoys certain sovereign powers over the property so long as the rail service that begins in Singapore and creeps slowly through its rural hinterland up to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, still runs. For years, Singapore tried to curb those powers, suggesting, for instance, that Malaysia process the immigration papers of railway passengers at the border instead of inside the station itself. But past negotiations could not resolve the dispute. (See 10 things to do in 24 hours in Singapore.)

Putting an end to decades of legal wrangling, in late May the governments of Singapore and Malaysia announced the outline of a deal that would return the station to Singapore. In exchange, either the valuable railway land itself or equivalently valued plots elsewhere in the city-state will be developed jointly by the two countries. According to the agreement, by July 2011 the Malaysian trains will halt at the border, requiring passengers to disembark the creaky carriages of the Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) railway and step into Singapore’s modern subway to zip noiselessly into the country.

Before that prosaic handover, I decided to ride the rails up to Tampin, a rural Malaysian town 40 minutes by car from the historic seaport of Malacca. With visions of luxury, I stepped into the first-class carriage. There was no polished brass or wood-paneled private compartment. The carpet and seat cover were frayed and mottled with coin-sized spots of damp, the air smelt like old rainwater, and beneath the grim toilet there was a vertiginous view of the tracks. The food, too, looked perilous: flaming orange-colored fried noodles that tempted nobody, mainly because my co-passengers had packed vast, pungent meals of their own.

I began to dread the six-hour journey to Tampin. Still, there is something about a moving train that invites adventure and allays peevishness, “improving your mood with speed,” as Paul Theroux wrote in The Great Railway Bazaar. Soon, we rattled across the causeway bridge that links Singapore to Malaysia across the Strait of Johor, and our collective adventure began. The train slowed to a halt, as it did with monotonous regularity every 20 minutes or so. This time it was at Kulai, a tiny rubber-plantation town in the southern Malaysian state of Johor. A few minutes later the coach crept forward, stopped, then rolled backwards on its bogey wheels and screeched again to a halt.

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BEIJING – China and Taiwan prepared Tuesday to sign a trade deal that binds their economies closer and that Beijing hopes could lead to political accommodation six decades after the rivals split amid civil war.

Taiwan hopes the tighter economic links will keep the island from being economically marginalized as China’s global clout grows. Beijing is granting Taiwanese products quick tariff reductions to show the benefits of closer ties.

The pact will end tariffs on hundreds of products traded across the strait and allow Taiwanese firms access to 11 service sectors on the mainland, including banking, accounting, insurance and hospitals. It should boost bilateral trade already totaling about $110 billion a year: some $80 billion in goods flowing to China, and $30 billion to Taiwan.

The deal will be signed in the southern Chinese city of Chongqing — a venue with an evocative history. Communist leader Mao Zedong and Nationalist President Chiang Kai-shek tried to negotiate a truce there after World War II — but failed. The two sides then resumed the civil war that ultimately saw Chiang’s government driven from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949.

For decades, relations across the 100-mile- (160-kilometer-) wide Taiwan Strait have been strained and remain a potential military flashpoint. China has 1,300 missiles aimed at Taiwanese targets and, while Taiwan has cut its defense budget as a proportion of GDP in the last two years, it retains a well-equipped air force as a deterrent.

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Istanbul, Turkey –
Iran’s triumphant anti-American rhetoric may have hardly changed.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei declared on Monday that countries around the world “thirst” for Iran’s message of “values, humanity and deliverance of nations from the grip of domineering powers.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently announced, “Iran is the world’s most powerful country, and they [Western powers] themselves admit this.” He routinely proclaims that the US, West, and its capitalist ways have “collapsed.”

But behind the usual high-pitched pokes from Tehran, analysts say several Iranian actions signal a serious desire to resolve the nuclear standoff – and perhaps even to find a limited rapprochement with arch-enemy America.

The Iranian olive branches, they cite:

Iran’s acceptance of a nuclear fuel swap deal.

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