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The Guardian offers an analysis of the Biden-Putin summit which says the meeting went as well as could be expected as both leaders spoke the language of diplomacy but hardly one of affection.
Little left to chance in carefully-curated Geneva summit
Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin hadn’t even sat down before tensions boiled over at the 18th-century Villa La Grange, a fine Swiss manor house besieged on Wednesday by a 21st-century press pool. The two men looked cordial enough as they shook hands for the first time as leaders. But the sun-struck journalists behind them pushed and shouted, some knocked to the floor, as they fought to get in to the leaders’ only joint appearance of the day.
“The media scuffle was the most chaotic your pooler has seen at a presidential event in nine years,” wrote a US reporter from inside the melee, which erupted as the press pack tried to follow the two leaders into the villa. “Russian security yelled at journalists to get out and began pushing journalists. Journalists and White House officials screamed back that the Russian security should stop touching us.”
The conflict felt tribal, as did the allegiances. “Of course the Americans can’t do without a scandal,” scoffed one Russian state news journalist as she filmed the battle from a distance.
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The independent Moscow Times wrote on the eve of the Biden-Putin summit that the high-profile meeting will not constrain the Russian president, and risks legitimizing his ongoing domestic crackdown.
History Shows Summit Will Embolden Putin
In the long and troubled history of U.S.-Russia relations, few summits have been as ill-conceived as the upcoming meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva.
Both sides have already announced that they have very low expectations of the summit and that no breakthroughs are in sight. It begs the question: Why meet at all?
We are told it is important to maintain open channels of communication with the Kremlin, to stabilize the relationship — which is at its worst point in decades — and so untie Biden’s hands to deal with the far greater priority of China.
But the rationale is flawed. Instead of restraining Putin, the summit will only serve to embolden him and bolster his domestic standing. It comes as an unexpected gift to the Russian President, who — as even his fiercest critics will have to admit — has played his hand remarkably well.
The Russian leadership craves nothing quite as much as international recognition. The regime cannot rely on domestic sources of legitimacy — only arrived at through free and fair elections, which Russia has not seen in a very long time — but can secure external recognition through the manner of its interaction with the West.
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Al Jazeera observes that the future of the landmark 2015 nuclear pact is hanging in the balance as Iranians prepare to elect a new president.
Iranians head to the polls on Friday to elect a successor to President Hassan Rouhani, the reformist leader whose second term in office is coming to a close.
Rouhani was one of the key architects of the 2015 nuclear deal which saw Iran consent to limiting its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.
The vote comes at a moment of tension over the accord.
Then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.
Iran responded by steadily lowering its compliance with the agreement, of which it remains a signatory.
The other current signatories are the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and China.
The European parties to the deal, which is officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have scrambled to restore it since Washington’s withdrawal.
They have sought to mitigate the effect of the reapplied sanctions on Tehran, but with limited success.
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The Japan Times reports on the latest effort to quell dissent in Hong Kong — the arrest of five executives of the pro-dermocracy Apple Daily newspaper.
Hong Kong’s national security police arrested five executives of the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper for suspected breaches of the national security law, local news outlets reported Thursday, as the government escalated its campaign against well-known activist and media tycoon Jimmy Lai.
Those arrested included Apple Daily Editor-in-Chief Ryan Law and Next Digital Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Cheung Kim-hung, as hundreds of police officers descended on the newspaper’s Hong Kong headquarters, the South China Morning Post reported. More than 100 officers were sent to Apple Daily’s headquarters, it said.
Lai, who founded Next Digital, has been the most high profile target of the government’s push against democracy advocates in the former British colony and is currently serving more than a year in prison for attending unauthorized protests. On Thursday morning, trading of Next Digital shares was halted, without any reason being given.
The government said in a statement that four men and one woman between the ages of 47 and 63 have been arrested “for collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security,” without naming the people or the company. A separate statement said police raided “a media company” with a warrant issued under a statute that allows “searching and seizure of journalistic materials.”
The move is the latest effort by Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to quell any form of dissent in the city, which was rocked by sometimes violent anti-China protests in 2019.
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From the BBC:
The three men - Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo - are to spend three months aboard the Tianhe module some 380km (236 miles) above the Earth.
It will be China's longest crewed space mission to date and the first in nearly five years.
On Thursday, their Shenzhou-12 capsule successfully took off atop its Long March 2F rocket.
Lift-off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre in the Gobi desert was at 09:22 Beijing time (01:22 GMT).
The launch and subsequent mission are another demonstration of China's growing confidence and capability in the space domain.
In the past six months, the country has returned rock and soil samples to Earth from the surface of the Moon, and landed a six-wheeled robot on Mars - both highly complex and challenging endeavours.
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