16 Jul
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.


World Politics
Finland
Helsinki ‘not neutral ground’ despite its history of hosting key cold war meetings
A protest in Helsinki ahead of the summit meeting. Photograph: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters
The Finns are proud of hosting some of the cold war’s most historic summits. But many in the country will tell you: don’t call Helsinki “neutral ground”.
Protesters came out on Sunday to attack both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin before the controversial summit between the two leaders in the Finnish capital.
“Not welcome,” read one sign, held by Hemmo Siponen, showing a cartoon of Trump and Putin embracing. “Fuck you both,” read another carried by two young women.
“It doesn’t feel good to have them here,” said Anna Bruun, a civil servant who said she was opposed to “great power politics” playing out in her home city.
The country’s largest newspaper has put up English- and Russian-language street adverts saying: “Mr President, welcome to the land of free press.”
Helsinki often served as a crucial bridge between the Soviet Union and the US during the cold war. The city was the venue for the 1975 Helsinki accords in which Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev signed a 35-state declaration that called for respect of sovereign territory and human rights. Other notable summits included George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, and Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in 1997.
“If the result is something in the tradition of those agreements, then it could be very positive, but if it’s something that becomes Munich-Yalta-Helsinki, then that would be catastrophic,” Laura Saarikoski, the US correspondent for the Finland daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, said, referring to talks synonymous with appeasement.
Saarikoski and a colleague published an open letter in the newspaper on Sunday that praised the “spirit of Helsinki” as a summer setting conducive to talks, but showed that the hosts would also have their say.
“Hopefully everyone will nevertheless understand that European matters can no longer be agreed on over the heads of Europeans,” the letter read.
Many here recall the forced Soviet-era neutrality, a policy called Finlandisation, as a dark period in the country’s history.
Finland has established its western credentials in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, with EU membership and an enhanced partnership with Nato.
“Finns don’t view themselves as being neutral between east and west,” said Mika Aaltola of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “Since the end of the cold war, the policy has been that Finland is part of the west. We have built a society that is very solid and unified, world class in terms of many rankings, as a way of getting out of the geographical bind we found ourselves in.”
Russia still maintains some strong ties with Finland. Putin has met regularly with the country’s last two prime ministers, and a close associate, Boris Rotenberg, holds Finnish citizenship and business interests in the country. Russia is also the source of important energy projects in the region, including a nuclear power plant and gas pipeline.
“I support open dialogue,” said Hemmo Siponen, a protester. “But that should be done in the open. I don’t want backdoor talks to be held here.”

Russia
An increase in the retirement age blamed for drop in approval ratings for Russian president
President Vladimir Putin with Croatia’s president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, during the closing ceremony of the World Cup on Sunday. Photograph: Mikhail Tereshchenko/Tass
As France clinched the World Cup at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow on Sunday evening, the cameras panned to Vladimir Putin, looking delighted in the official box together with Fifa president Gianni Infantino.
The Russian president has every reason to be happy: the general consensus is that Russia has hosted a successful World Cup and hundreds of thousands of foreigners are leaving with positive impressions of the country.
But a strange thing is happening, as Russia basks in the glow of a job well done: Putin’s approval ratings are dropping among Russians.
A recent survey by a state-funded polling agency showed that confidence in the Russian president dropped from 77% to 63% since elections in March, with the biggest reason believed to be a controversial rise in the pension age, which was announced on the first day of the World Cup.
The World Cup has passed off with no major incidents off the field, no violence or hooliganism and many positive stories of fans who travelled to Russia. On Friday, Infantino said this year’s World Cup had been the best ever and thanked Russia for the organisation. “It is an incredible, amazing World Cup. From the very beginning of the tournament, we have experienced incredible emotions from being here,” he said.
Having been in power for the best part of two decades, Putin and Russia are often seen as interchangeable concepts: what’s good for one is good for the other. This time, though, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“One of the tasks of the tournament was to further link the concepts of ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ but instead it has started to move them in different directions,” wrote political commentator Andrei Kolesnikov in a recent comment for Vedomosti newspaper.
Putin attended the opening match, but missed Russia’s extraordinary win against Spain in Moscow and their narrow quarter-final defeat to Croatia in Sochi. Those games were instead witnessed by the unpopular and gaffe-prone prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev.
In March, Putin won another six-year term with an overwhelming 77% of the vote in the presidential elections. Despite the impressive figures, the public mood around election time was marked by apathy, with many saying they were voting for Putin because there was no alternative.
The pension change was announced on the opening day of the tournament and Putin himself has attempted to distance himself from the measure, but the polling figures suggest this has not been successful.
There were protests in a number of Russian cities in early July, organised by an unusually broad coalition of political forces, including parliamentary opposition parties that are usually broadly loyal to the Kremlin. The organisers did not hold protests in World Cup host cities.
The retirement age will rise gradually from 55 to 63 for women and from 60 to 65 for men over a number of years. Economists say it is important to raise the age from norms that were set in the era of Joseph Stalin, but the move is extremely unpopular with Putin’s supporters.

United States
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