ATHENS: If the rules of ancient Greece were observed today, drone and missile fire over Ukraine would stop on Friday as guns fall silent in the Olympic tradition.
The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics begin in one week, and the United Nations and organizers are calling for a 7-week pause of all wars worldwide — as they do every time the Olympics take place.
It serves to set a moral baseline at a time when some researchers say there are more armed conflicts than ever before and Earth is at its closest to destruction.
An ancient pause, a modern plea
In ancient Greece, a truce was respected by warring city-states, allowing athletes and spectators to travel safely to Ancient Olympia for competitions and ceremonies of supreme athletic and spiritual significance.
The Olympics were revived in their modern form in 1896. The truce’s resurgence followed nearly a century later, in 1994, as war raged through the former Yugoslavia.
The proposed timeout starts one week before the Winter Games open on Feb. 6 and runs until one week after the March 15 Paralympics’ close. It is backed by a UN General Assembly resolution.
If history is any indication, no sudden worldwide peace is imminent: The truce has a dismal 0-17 record, having failed to halt a single war.
Sarajevo, Korea and the power of sport
The first modern Olympic truce, during the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, did produce a one-day pause in the siege of Sarajevo, allowing aid convoys to deliver food and medicine to the Bosnian capital’s desperate residents. In Sydney six years later, North and South Korea marched together at the opening ceremony.
Governments around the world overwhelmingly agree that sport can unite and heal.
“Wherever possible, we should strive toward creating even a small space for peace,” Constantinos Filis, director of the International Olympic Truce Center, told The Associated Press.
Ceasefire initiatives still count in an era of global disorder and political polarization, as unilateral aggression increasingly threatens international cooperation, argues Filis, who is also director of the Institute of Global Affairs in Athens.
“This may not always be achievable in practice,” he said, “but the message reaches every corner of the globe.”
Arithmetic of a world’s wars
Outside the Swedish capital of Stockholm, a group of academics has tracked global war trends for more than 80 years. It reported that 2024 had the highest number of active armed conflicts in a single year: 61.
“We’ve seen quite a strong increase in the number of conflicts over the past five or six years,” said Shawn Davies, a senior analyst at Uppsala University’s Department of Peace and Conflict Research. And its upcoming annual report will show 2025 had even more conflicts than the prior year, he added.
As the US steps back from multilateralism, Davies said, countries are becoming more likely to test their neighbors, creating a more volatile, fragmented security landscape.
Some major conflicts remain largely unnoticed in the West, he said, pointing to western Africa, where Al-Qaeda and Daesh group affiliates continue to spread across borders.
And the “Doomsday Clock”, a symbolic gauge of Earth’s existential peril, edged closer to midnight this week, according to an announcement from members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Hope versus broken promises
UN truce resolutions typically pass with broad majorities. Yet signatories repeatedly break their own pledge. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 infamously began during a truce period.
“I think the Olympics are an excellent moment to symbolize peace, to symbolize respect for international law, and to symbolize international cooperation,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters Thursday.
Kirsty Coventry, the multi-Olympic swimming champion who last year became the first woman to lead the International Olympic Committee, addressed the General Assembly at the latest vote in November.
Watching peaceful competition, she said, inspired her to begin her gold-medal journey as a young girl in Zimbabwe.
“Even in these dark times of division, it is possible to celebrate our shared humanity and inspire hope for a better future,” Coventry said.
“Sport — and the Olympic Games in particular — can offer a rare space where people meet not as adversaries, but as fellow human beings,” she said. “This is why the Olympic Truce is so important.”
Olympic organizers invoke an ancient pledge to call for the suspension of all wars
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Olympic organizers invoke an ancient pledge to call for the suspension of all wars
- In ancient Greece, a truce was respected by warring city-states, allowing athletes and spectators to travel safely to Ancient Olympia for competitions and ceremonies
Florida braces for frost and possible snow flurries as winter storms hit other parts of the US
- The worst seems to be heading toward the Carolinas, but the Sunshine State’s humans, animals and even plants are preparing for winter weather
MIAMI: Florida won’t be getting hit with massive blankets of snow and ice like the rest of the US, but even frosty windshields and a few flurries can feel like Antarctica to people with permanent sandal tans.
The Midwest and South have been getting major winter storms for several days, and a giant cyclone forecast in the Atlantic Ocean is expected to pull that cold weather east as a powerful blizzard this weekend. The worst seems to be heading toward the Carolinas, but the Sunshine State’s humans, animals and even plants are preparing for winter weather.
Florida could experience record cold
Ana Torres-Vazquez, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Miami, said a cold front earlier this week has already caused temperatures to dip some, but the region could experience record-setting cold this weekend.
“It looks like temperatures across South Florida are dipping into the 30s (Fahrenheit) for most of the metro area and maybe into the 20s for areas near Lake Okeechobee,” Torres-Vazquez said. “And then the windchill could make those temperatures feel even cooler.”
Residents of South Florida are less likely to have heavy coats and other winter clothes, so Torres-Vazquez said it’s important to layer up lighter clothing and limit time spent outside.
Moving north, Tony Hurt, a National Weather Service forecaster for the Tampa Bay area, said there’s a 10 to 20 percent chance of snowfall in that region this weekend.
“Most likely if there’s any snow that does actually materialize, it’ll be primarily in the form of flurries, no accumulations,” Hurt said.
The last two times the area got snow was flurries in January 2010 and December 1989. The record for snowfall was in January 1977, with 2 inches (5 centimeters) of snow about 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Tampa.
Despite the possibility of snow, Tampa will host the annual Gasparilla Pirate Fest on Saturday. And on Sunday, the Tampa Bay Lightning are set to host the Boston Bruins for an outdoor NHL game at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ home NFL stadium.
Few tourists visiting Florida will be swimming in the ocean or laying out on sunny beaches this weekend, but many attractions will remain open. Most of Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando will operate normally, though their water parks will be closed. Most of the state’s zoos and animal parks will also remain open while keepers take steps to protect the inhabitants.
Zoo keepers working to keep animals safe and warm
Zoo Miami spokesman Ron Magill said keepers have been setting up heaters and moving reptiles and smaller mammals to indoor enclosures, while primates like chimpanzees and orangutans are given blankets to keep themselves warm. Big cats and large hoofed animals generally do well in colder temperatures and don’t require much assistance from keepers.
“It can be invigorating for animals like the tiger, so they’ll actually become more active,” Magill said.
Outside the safety of the zoo, Florida’s native wildlife has evolved and learned to survive occasional cold snaps, though casualties will still occur, Magill said. Manatees, for example, have spent decades congregating at the warm-water outflows of about a dozen power plants around Florida.
But invasive, nonnative animals like iguanas and other exotic reptiles will suffer the most, Magill said. Iguanas in South Florida famously enter a torpid state during cold periods and even fall out of trees. They usually wake up when the temperature increases, but many will die after more than a day of extreme cold.
“At the end of the day, they don’t belong here, and that might be nature’s way of trying to clean that up a little bit,” Magill said. “That is a part of natural selection.”
Protecting crops is a priority for farmers
Florida’s agriculture industry is also bracing for the cold. Farmers are working to safeguard their crops as winter harvest continues and spring planting begins in some areas, Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association spokeswoman Christina Morton said.
“Preparations vary by crop and include harvesting and planting ahead of the freeze, increasing water levels in ditches, using overhead irrigation, and, in some cases, deploying helicopters to protect sensitive fields,” Morton said.
The Florida deep freeze comes as the arctic blast from Canada also spreads into southern states where thousands of people remain without power to heat their homes, and people in mid-Atlantic states prepare for possible blizzard conditions as a new storm is expected to churn along the East Coast.
Temperatures in hard-hit northern Mississippi will feel as cold as minus 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 21 degrees Celsius) when the expected strong winds are factored in, National Weather Service forecasters say. People in a large part of the southeastern US were under a variety of alerts warning of extremely cold weather on the way.
The storm expected to hit the Eastern Seaboard has prompted more warnings in the Carolinas and nearby states. That storm is expected to bring heavy snow and strong winds, which could create “dangerous, near-blizzard conditions,” the weather service warned.
