The president of the UN General Assembly postponed a financial summit aimed at giving the developing world a bigger voice in tackling the global economic crisis in hopes of attracting more world leaders. To date, he hasn’t succeeded.
Just 14 heads of state and government — out of the total of 192 UN member states — will attend the summit from Wednesday to Friday, most prominently Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, General Assembly spokesman Enrique Yeves said on Friday.
Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a leftist Nicaraguan priest and former foreign minister, also delayed the summit from early this month to give negotiators more time to reach an agreement on the final document to be issued at the end of the meeting.
The first draft was considered too left-leaning by a significant number of UN countries and it had to be rewritten.
Yeves said negotiators were still struggling to reach agreement and would likely meet all weekend.
When d’Escoto announced the summit in April, he said it would ensure that all nations — not just the 20 major economic powers — “have an opportunity to participate equally and fully in the common search for solutions that meet the concerns and needs of all countries, large and small.”
He invited the 192 UN member states to attend at the highest level.
According to the latest figures, 126 of the 192 UN member states will participate in the summit — 14 heads of state and government, four vice-presidents, 31 ministers, three deputy prime ministers, 28 vice-ministers and many ambassadors. Ten of the 14 world leaders coming to New York are from Latin America and the Caribbean, with just two Europeans, one African and one Asian.
Asked whether d’Escoto was disappointed at the low turnout of world leaders, Yeves said: “The president of the General Assembly believes that regardless of who’s coming ... the most important thing is the substance of the agreements.”
“It’s up to states to determine the level” of participation, he said. “All of them knew it was the highest-level possible.”
Yeves said three main elements were being negotiated: an emergency global stimulus plan that will help not only the rich countries but also the weakest countries; ways to sustain a global stimulus plan including possible changes to the current international financial architecture; and the way forward, including a follow-up mechanism and a future UN role.
“Those basic principles are agreed upon by basically most of the member states,” Yeves said.
But “the more we go into the details, the more disagreement there is,” he said.
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
RSS