Lloyd’s of London and Bermuda-based Arch Insurance deny the €400 million claim by Nord Stream AG, arguing their policies do not provide coverage for the 2022 underwater explosions that ruptured the natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea because the damage was inflicted by “a government.” But “the defendants’ argument...
Just 15 years ago, Chinese consumers were flocking to Western brands. Now they prefer Chinese ones. The fate of the Starbucks Group is telling: Sales and profits in its current 7,300 stores in China are declining. The Chinese are not drinking less coffee, but prefer Chinese brands, partly because they...
Millions of people around the world breathed a sigh of relief with the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. election and victory of the Biden-Harris ticket. Joe Biden’s victory speech exuded a feeling of optimism in its call for a new era of bipartisanship and decency in politics. However,...
The at-times fiery protests that raged across Belarus throughout 2020 had largely fizzled out by the time local activist and seeming neo-Nazi Roman Protasevich was dramatically arrested in May this year. Now, the country has been catapulted back to the top of the mainstream news agenda, with new life breathed...
On August 15, 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was sending 1,000 troops to Poland as part of the new defense cooperation agreement signed on the anniversary of the victory of Poland in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. The new troops added to the 4,500 that were previously deployed...
Unable to accept the reality of a growing multipolar world order, U.S. elites are willing to risk nuclear war. In May 2022, Henry Kissinger gave a remarkable speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where he urged the Biden administration to seek a peace agreement in Ukraine...
Mark Brzezinski, the U.S. Ambassador to Poland, is the son of the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, a descendent of Polish aristocrats and mastermind of U.S. foreign policy for decades, whose dream was to use Poland as a base to try to weaken and destroy Russia. Mark is now at the center...
Thousands of Greeks have come out to protest the expansion of U.S. military bases in Greece, arguing this will further destabilize the region and perilously enmesh Greece in endless imperialist wars. Since the arrival of Geoffrey Pyatt as the American ambassador to Greece in October 2016, the government in...
Andrew Fowler’s book Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco That Sank Australia’s Sovereignty (Melbourne University Press, 2024) was not written by a member of the peace movement. That is both a strength and a weakness. A strength, because Andrew Fowler is an award-winning investigative journalist, who has worked in mainstream Australian...
The two-hour December 7th Biden-Putin conversation (via video-conference) focused mainly on the conflict between Ukraine and its breakaway former Donbass region, which is in Ukraine’s far east and borders on Russia. In order to understand the conversation, some basic history that produced the current situation there needs to be stated, because this...