The ‘spirit of Anchorage’ risks becoming a ghost After last August’s meeting between the Russian and American presidents in Alaska, a new phrase entered diplomatic circulation: the “spirit of Anchorage.” The substance of the talks was never officially disclosed and can only be reconstructed from selective leaks. The form, however, was striking: a personal greeting, an honor guard, a shared limousine. Symbolism mattered. It was meant to signal seriousness. Yet the question remains: what exactly was born in Anchorage? And does it belong in the lineage of earlier diplomatic “spirits” that once defined entire eras? The term itself is not new. Before Anchorage, there was the “spirit of Yalta,” the “spirit of Helsinki,” and, briefly, the “spirit of Malta.” All three marked turning points in relations between the great powers during the second half of the twentieth century. Yalta in 1945 laid the foundations of the post-war world order, recognizing the USSR and the United States as it...
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Chief adviser of the interim government Muhammad Yunus has pledged a peaceful transfer of power in Dhaka Bangladesh is voting in its 13th general elections today, a year and a half after an uprising led to the ouster of the Awami League government led by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. A referendum on constitutional and institutional reforms is also being held in the South Asian country. There are 127.7 million registered voters in Bangladesh; about 56 million, roughly 44% of the electorate, are between 18 and 37. Nearly 5 million are heading to the polls for the first time. The 15-year reign of Hasina’s party ended in a violent uprising in August 2024, reportedly led by Generation Z protestors . Hasina, who fled to neighboring India, has since been sentenced to death by a court in absentia. The Awami League, which ruled Bangladesh for a quarter century, has been barred from contesting the polls by the interim administration, led by Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus. Muhammad Yu...
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has urged Jim Ratcliffe to apologize for his “offensive and wrong” remarks British chemical industry tycoon Jim Ratcliffe has blamed the rapid influx of foreigners for the country’s economic problems, saying the UK “is being colonized by immigrants.” The 73-year-old drew criticism from Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the remarks. In a Sky News interview on Wednesday, the founder and CEO of INEOS chemicals group, who also co-owns English football giants Manchester United, argued that “you can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in.” “The UK is being colonized by immigrants, really, isn’t it? The population of the UK is 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people,” Ratcliffe added. Government data shows the UK population surpassed 58 million in 1995 and was over 66 million in 2020. "The UK has been colonised by immigrants," Man Utd co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe. “You c...
Washington has pulled out troops from the Al-Tanf garrison after improving ties with the new government, according to the outlet US forces have withdrawn from the Al-Tanf military base in southeastern Syria, relocating to Jordan and handing over control of the facility to the country’s new authorities, AP reported on Wednesday, citing sources. One source told the agency that American forces “withdrew entirely from Al-Tanf base today,” adding that Syrian forces were being deployed to replace them. A second source confirmed the withdrawal, noting that US troops had been moving equipment out for the past 15 days. He added that US forces would “continue to coordinate with the base in Al-Tanf from Jordan.” The Al-Tanf garrison, established in 2016, sits at the strategic tri-border junction of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq along the M2 Baghdad-Damascus Highway. The base served as a key hub for operations by the US-led coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists and was used ...
Brussels is devising a list of conditions on ending the Ukraine conflict, the foreign policy chief has said The EU intends to demand restrictions on the size of the Russian armed forces as part of any settlement of the Ukraine conflict, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, indicated on Tuesday. The EU is not part of US-mediated Russia-Ukraine peace talks and has long refused diplomatic engagement with Moscow. Kallas, however, told reporters that she is drafting a list of demands and believes Brussels will shape the conflict’s outcome. “Everybody around the table, including the Russians and the Americans, needs to understand that you need Europeans to agree,” she said, as quoted by news agencies. “And for that, we also have conditions. And we should put the conditions not on Ukrainians… but on the Russians.” “The Ukrainian army is not the issue. It’s the Russian army. It’s the Russian military expenditure. If they spend so much on the military they will have to use it agai...
Why we should stop obsessing over the Doomsday Clock When people talk about the threat of nuclear war, American popular culture inevitably creeps in. More than in almost any other field, the language, imagery and mythology surrounding nuclear apocalypse were created in the United States. Along with the weapons themselves. One immediately thinks of Billy Joel’s song We Didn’t Start the Fire. In fact, we didn’t start the arms race either. We didn’t invent the logic of global instability, nor did we build the cult that surrounds it. That entire worldview was born in the United States. It was there, after all, that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded, and it was its editors who invented the Doomsday Clock: the now-famous symbol showing how close humanity supposedly is to nuclear annihilation. They created it immediately after the United States developed the atomic bomb and dropped two of them, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is less often mentioned is that when the Doomsd...