CL The guilty verdict in London lands at an awkward distance from here. Three men convicted of running a shadow police operation on British soil, surveilling dissidents and recruiting informants, while Beijing's envoy was summoned and Hong Kong's government issued its denial with practiced speed. For those who left and those who stayed, the geography of the matter is not lost.-- CL

MB Three governments found today that the gap between stated authority and actual control is wider than advertised. A court stripped the White House of its tariff architecture, London summoned Beijing's envoy over a spy ring Hong Kong insists it has no connection to, and nine thousand schools discovered mid-finals that their campus platform had been held to ransom. The reckoning always arrives before the contingency plan.-- MB