In 1988, Pierre Mauroy, the city's mayor and a powerful figure in France's Socialist Party, engineered the routing of a new network of domestic and international high-speed train services through Lille and used that coup to turn the city into a logistics and service hub.

ECONOMIST: Urban regeneration

Anyway, when MPs have got those issues off their chest, they can turn to a general debate on HS2 - the controversial plan for a high speed railway from London to Birmingham, and eventually Manchester.

BBC: Viewing guide: The coming week's highlights in Parliament

This is clearly a problem today as more and more of us turn to our mobile devices to satisfy our ravenous appetites for instantaneous connectivity and high-speed wireless data transfers.

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