Speculations are in the air that US President Barack Obama might be on his way to Iceland.
These speculations come in the wake of a New York Times article about negotiations over a new arms-reduction treaty to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 1991, which expired last Saturday.
The article reads in part, “As recently as this week, officials in Geneva were talking about holding a signing ceremony in Reykjavik, Iceland, the scene of the 1986 summit meeting where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev came close to an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. Other sites under consideration were Geneva and Helsinki, Finland.”
This has set off a torrent of speculation here in Iceland, both in the blog world and in the media. Vísir contacted US embassy spokesperson Urður Gunnarsdóttir for a comment, who told reporters that while the NYT article did get peoples’ attention at the embassy, things had not yet reached the point where the State Department would be preparing for Obama’s arrival in Iceland.
The US president is fairly popular in Iceland, where press coverage of Obama is almost entirely positive.