Toma nota.../Take note...

Este Foro Político se celebró en línea del 7 al 16 de julio de 2020, bajo el auspicio del Consejo Económico y Social."

Naciones Unidas, Jul.22.– El tema de este año fue "Acción acelerada y vías de transformación: realización del decenio de la acción y la actuación para el desarrollo sostenible". A la luz de la actual crisis de COVID-19, todos los eventos se celebraron virtualmente en lugar de en la ciudad de Nueva York, como estaba previsto.

El Presidente de CGLU, Mohamed Boudra, intervino en la apertura oficial del FPAN el 7 de julio en nombre de las organizaciones no-miembros de los Estados representados. La delegación de los gobiernos locales y regionales estaba compuesta por más de 100 delegados, de los cuales 40 son representantes políticos. Puede ver la transmisión completa en directo en el siguiente video:

The window of opportunity for understanding in the Middle East was opened by President Donald Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, which envisions Israel incorporating hundreds of Jewish settlements alongside and within an independent Palestinian state in exchange for some other border territories. However, Netanyahu’s rushed push for annexation so far has deepened the chasm in Israel's relations with its neighbors. Gulf Arab officials and observers accuse Mr. Netanyahu of jeopardizing a careful and unprecedented thawing of ties that Gulf leaders pursued with Israel at the expense of their own domestic politics.

The Real chance of promoting an Arab-Israeli Peace Plan
by Gerardo E. Martínez-Solanas

The Palestinian Authority, from the time of Arafat to the present day, has lost the opportunity to establish an independent State due to the intransigent way it has refused to include the recognition of the State of Israel in a Peace Treaty and to accept –while it was still possible to do so– the West Bank borders established after the 1967 six-days war.

In fact, since the time of the partition sanctioned by the United Nations, the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states refused to accept the existence of the State of Israel and attacked once and again since the 1948 war through several other subsequent wars with the intention to erase the Jewish state from the map. However, the Israelis won every one of those wars, sometimes fighting on three fronts. 

These wars of aggression against the Jewish state have provoked in the population of Israel a feeling of extreme urgency that prompts them to establish secure borders that guarantee their safety and survival. Even during times of truce between wars, Israel has been subjected to constant harassment at its borders and repeated missile bombardments of its populations from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. This violence has only served to exacerbate Jewish extremism, which is now reflected in its own rulers.

The current Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) shows that Democracy is under threat worldwide. 60 of the 137 states surveyed have undermined their democracy in the last 10 years. 58 states have restricted their rights to demonstrate, freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, and the right of assembly. The BTI analyzes transformation processes toward democracy and a market economy in an international comparison method and identifies successful strategies for peaceful change in their WEB pages.

The Corona virus is putting our democracies to the test.

Democracy International (DI), an NGO based and registered in Cologne, Germany, reports that «the Corona pandemic is reinforcing this trend». The crisis that is afflicting the world right now is very disturbing and the organizations and institutions (such as the DI, our PDCI and many others) that promote democracy and defend human rights must coordinate their efforts to counter this revolutionary trend towards anarchy, the precursor of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

Energy systems have important and often hamful environmental impacts. Historical and current energy systems producing carbon dioxide are dominated by fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). They produce as well other greenhouse gases affecting climate change and accelerating exponentially global warming. Up to 2018, Solar, Wind, Hydropower, Nuclear and other minor renewable energy sources barely managed to satisfy 4% of global energy consumption, while production using polluting resources grew close to 50% during the first 18 years of this century. The visible reduction in air pollution due to the paralysis caused by the pandemic, demonstrates the need for a radical transformation of energy sources.

The world’s energy system must be transformed completely

It has been changed before, but never as fast or fully as must happen now.  

For more than 100,000 years humans derived all their energy from what they hunted, gathered and grazed on or grew for themselves. Their own energy for moving things came from what they ate. Energy for light and heat came from burning the rest. In recent millennia they added energy from the flow of water and, later, air to the repertoire.