Amid all this crap, some good news

The US and Russia are shrinking their nuclear arsenal:

The United States and Russia, striving to ease strained relations, announced jointly today that they'll try to put a new nuclear arms reduction deal in place before the existing treaty expires in December.

In advance of their first sit down, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a joint statement saying the “era when our countries viewed each other as enemies is long over.” They pledged to work together to limit the world's two largest nuclear arsenals, and the White House also announced that Mr. Obama was accepting Mr. Medvedev's invitation to visit Moscow this summer.

As for nuclear arms control, the two said in a joint statement that “we are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July.”

Their newly-professed commitment to reinvigorate arms-control initiatives that have lain dormant for years caused a stir at the London site of a G20 summit that seemed otherwise transfixed on a deepening worldwide recession.

From the Globe and Mail.