Cypriot member of the European Parliament Giorgos Georgiou, of Akel, likened the European Union to Pontius Pilate, as the Strasbourg plenary session discussed preparations for next month’s Cop31 climate summit, which will be held in the Turkish Mediterranean city of Antalya.

“The climate crisis is here. Wildfires, heatwaves, drought, catastrophic floods, a state of constant emergency. It is the European peoples, of course, who pay the price,” he said, before adding that The Left, the European grouping to which he belongs, is “demanding the obvious” from the Cop31 summit.

He said that what must be achieved is “action, not new promises”, as “we have already been burned and drowned by promises”.

“The battle against the climate crisis is, of course, not merely an environmental one. It is a struggle for social justice and equality, free from exclusion, yet, regrettably, Turkey has sought to obstruct the participation of the Republic of Cyprus and to weaponise the conference,” he said.

In this, he said that Turkey is “aiming to politically promote the illegal secessionist entity in the occupied territories” through its hosting of Cop31, and that this alleged aim is “consistent with the illegal Turkish-Libyan memorandum”, the maritime jurisdiction deal which was ratified by the Libyan parliament on Tuesday.

“As for you, shall I say it? I shall. You are acting like Pontius Pilates regarding Turkey, and perhaps even regarding the climate,” he said.

Pontius Pilate was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judea and is best known in the contemporary era for being the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and ordered his crucifixion. His name has become a metaphor for refusing personal accountability for a harmful decision and moral cowardice.

Climate change ‘even more pronounced in Europe’

Diko’s Costas Mavrides also spoke during the Cop31 debate and stressed that “climate change is, in fact, not an ideology”, and that it is “even more pronounced in Europe, and particularly in the Mediterranean”.

He stressed that “such global problems … require global approaches and international cooperation”, and on this front stressed the need for “concrete, measurable targets aimed at closing the gap between stated objectives and their practical implementation”.

In addition, he, too criticised Turkey for what he decried as “weaponising” the summit, saying that this has come “once again to the detriment of the Republic of Cyprus”, and that the Turkish government has “attempted to block the president of Cyprus’ participation”.

As such, he called on the European Union’s institutions to “stand firmly in defence of this member state of the European Union and the United Nations”.

Christodoulides, Erhurman to attend summit in Antalya

Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides had announced last week that he will “of course” attend the summit, adding that, “I am pleased that, thanks to the decisive contribution of our partners, and following our diplomatic and political efforts conducted away from the public eye, we have achieved a result”.

His participation had initially been in doubt as the Republic of Turkey does not recognise him as a head of state.

Asked whether he may also be expecting “unpleasant surprises” during the summit, he said that “we are preparing for any eventuality, and I must tell you that we do not rule one out”.

“At the same time, there will also be reactions from the Republic of Cyprus’ side, a member state of the European Union, of the EU which has 27 member states,” he said.

Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman, too, said he will attend the summit, saying that “we received an invitation from the president of the Republic of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan” and that “we will be in Antalya”.

He added that he has “learned from the press” that President Nikos Christodoulides “has also announced that he will be there, as is customary”.

“As we always say, diplomacy and dialogue are always beneficial,” he said.

Turkey has been designated as a co-host for the summit, alongside Australia, with Turkish Environment Minister Murat Kurum designated as the chairman of Cop31 and Australian Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen set to preside over negotiations between political leaders at the Antalya summit.

While Turkey does not recognise Christodoulides as a head of state, a host country does not have the right to unilaterally exclude any United Nations member state from the negotiations which take place during the 12-day summit.

The organizers of the Future Investment Initiative (FII), a major investment conference held in Saudi Arabia every year, announced on Monday that the event would be postponed from October 26-29 to an unspecified date in 2027.

The post Saudi Arabia Postpones Major Investment Conference After Houthi Attacks appeared first on Breitbart.

Prenderà il via domani all’Allianz MiCo la seconda edizione di NetZero Milan, l’Expo Summit di Fiera Milano, che, fino al 22 ottobre metterà a confronto industria, finanza, istituzioni, ricerca e innovazione sul ruolo dell’elettrificazione dell’economia e del sistema produttivo europeo, approfondendo le implicazioni dei nuovi scenari energetici, tecnologici e geopolitici sulla competitività e mettendo al centro le soluzioni tecnologiche, gli investimenti e le politiche necessarie per coniugare sicurezza energetica e sviluppo industriale. L’edizione del 2026 è patrocinata da Parlamento Europeo, Commissione Europea, Ministero dell’Ambiente e della Sicurezza Economica e Ministero delle Imprese del Made in Italy. Ad aprire i lavori una Opening Session dedicata ai nuovi equilibri energetici e industriali globali e alle loro implicazioni per l’Europa, in uno scenario segnato da un lato dalla rapida espansione delle tecnologie pulite in Cina e dall’altro dalla nuove leadership statunitense nei combustibili fossili. Al centro del confronto, le scelte che l’Europa è chiamata a compiere per sostenere la propria competitività e accelerare l’elettrificazione, insieme alle condizioni economiche, infrastrutturali e di mercato necessarie per sostenerla. 

Dopo l’intervento di Carlo Bonomi, Presidente Fiera Milano, ne parleranno, tra gli altri, Paolo Gentiloni, Presidente del Global Advisory Council della Banca europea per gli investimenti (BEI), Francesco Decarolis, Enel Foundation Chair in Competitiveness and Transition, Università Bocconi e membro Rhine Group, Federico Pasini, Chief Operating Officer della Fondazione Italia Cina, Nicola Pesaresi, Capo Unità presso la Direzione generale della Concorrenza della Commissione Europea, ed Enrico Letta, Rettore di IE University Madrid e Presidente dell’Institut Jacques Delors di Parigi, insieme a rappresentanti delle istituzioni e a operatori del settore energetico.

Al termine della sessione di apertura prenderà il via il programma delle Vertical Conference, che porteranno il confronto sulle sfide più concrete della trasformazione energetica, dalla decarbonizzazione dei settori hard-to-abate, con un focus sul ruolo di idrogeno decarbonizzato e biometano, alla sicurezza e sostenibilità economica dei sistemi elettrici in uno scenario di crescente penetrazione delle rinnovabili, fino alle nuove frontiere dello stoccaggio energetico e del long duration storage. Il pomeriggio ospiterà inoltre l’Annual Event di AIGET – Associazione Italiana di Grossisti di Energia e Trader, dedicato al ruolo dei mercati dell’energia di fronte agli shock esogeni, alla transizione e al processo di integrazione europea.  L’area espositiva e le attività di business matching favoriranno l’incontro tra fornitori di tecnologie, investitori, imprese e operatori internazionali, con l’obiettivo di trasformare il confronto strategico in occasioni concrete di collaborazione e sviluppo.

Fiera Milano: una piattaforma di dialogo tra gli attori della transizione

Con NetZero Milan 2026, Fiera Milano conferma il proprio impegno nel creare una piattaforma di dialogo tra i diversi attori della transizione, mettendo in relazione visione istituzionale, competenze scientifiche, innovazione tecnologica e capacità di investimento. Una prospettiva che riconosce nella decarbonizzazione non soltanto una necessità ambientale, ma anche una leva per rafforzare la competitività del sistema industriale e accompagnare l’economia europea verso nuovi percorsi di crescita. L’appuntamento con NetZero Milan – Expo Summit è dal 20 al 22 ottobre 2026 all’Allianz MiCo. Il programma completo e le modalità di partecipazione sono disponibili sul sito ufficiale.

L'articolo Al via domani NetZero Milan: fino al 22 ottobre più di 140 relatori a confronto sull’elettrificazione dell’economia proviene da Affaritaliani.it.

The Conservative Party Conference was slick and professional, says Ellie Hodges, but Reform's conference, while more chaotic, had the kind of passion that you don't get from a fancy lanyard.

The post You Can’t Put Passion on a Fancy Lanyard appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Jeremy Clarkson has said there is no reason to set up a business in Andy Burnham’s Britain as he made a surprise appearance at the Conservative Party conference.

The post Clarkson: Why Would Anyone Start a Business in Burnham’s Britain? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

On September 20, 2006, Hugo Chávez stepped up to the granite podium of the United Nations General Assembly. A day earlier, from that exact same spot, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, had spoken. Chávez crossed himself, said that the room still smelled of sulphur, and the hall burst into laughter and applause. It was not the speech Chávez had originally intended to give, but rather the direct result of the deep indignation caused by hearing Bush speak as if he owned the world. The major media of the North latched onto the sulphur phrase and have tried to caricature it. But it is the rest of his intervention that remains fully relevant, 20 years later.

Chávez arrived at the General Assembly with a book in hand, “Hegemony or Survival” by Noam Chomsky. His warning was simple yet devastating: the United States’s pretense of dominating the world put the very survival of the human species at risk. At that time, US troops were occupying Iraq. A few weeks earlier, Israel had bombed Lebanon under Washington’s diplomatic protection. In the capitals of the global north, the “end of history” was still being celebrated, the idea that liberal capitalism was humanity’s definitive horizon. Chávez said that this thesis had been proven false in barely a decade, and that now the future of the world had to be defined.

Twenty years later, plunged into an even greater systemic crisis, we can see that every phrase of Chávez’s speech remains relevant.

From hegemony to hyper-imperialism

In 2006, the United States seemed like an empire at the peak of its power. Today it is an empire in relative decline, and therefore more dangerous. The Tricontinental Institute for Social Research has called this new stage hyper-imperialism: imperialism exercised in an exaggerated and agitated manner by a power that compensates for the loss of its economic hegemony by relying on the two areas where it still dominates, war and the control of information.

An empire’s hegemony is usually lost in three stages: first in production, then in finance, and finally in the military. The United States has already lost productive primacy: China is today the world’s largest economy measured by purchasing power parity. The reign of the dollar is beginning to be questioned, and many countries are opting for transactions in their own currencies. But military supremacy remains intact. The bloc led by Washington groups around 50 countries and concentrates about three-quarters of global military spending. The United States maintains around 900 military bases abroad. More than one in four countries on the planet lives under its sanctions.

An empire that declines economically while retaining its weapons is tempted to resolve its decline by force. The dilemma that Chávez borrowed from Chomsky, hegemony or survival, has become literal. Permanent war and climate catastrophe today threaten the very conditions of life.

The veto and the UN that doesn’t work

The least-cited part of the speech was perhaps the most prophetic. Chávez stated that the United Nations system born after World War II had collapsed. The General Assembly had become a merely deliberative space, without the capacity to change the terrible reality of the world. Back then, Chávez made four concrete proposals:

First, expand the Security Council to include Third World countries as permanent members. Second, create transparent methods for conflict resolution. Third, eliminate the veto, and fourth, strengthen the General Secretariat.

His example was Lebanon: a US veto had allowed the country to be torn apart before the eyes of the world. Unfortunately, over two decades, the UN’s strength to prevent wars and genocides has progressively diminished. That same mechanism criticized by Chávez has allowed a new genocide in Gaza. That inaction of multilateralism permitted the kidnapping of the sitting Venezuelan president. However, the conclusion is not to abandon the UN, but to contest it.

The debate on a “multipolarity” that reproduces rivalry between great powers is insufficient. What the South needs is true multilateralism, defending the United Nations Charter as the common heritage of the world’s peoples. It is the same Charter upon which, in 1955, the ten principles of the Bandung Conference were built.

“We are men and women of the South”

Chávez did not arrive in New York alone. He came from Havana, where more than fifty heads of state had just relaunched the Non-Aligned Movement. “Havana was the capital of the South for a week,” he said. And then he added a phrase that sums up a political identity: “we are men and women of the South.”

The Global South is not a cardinal point. Australia is in the southern hemisphere and belongs to the North; Cuba, Vietnam, or Burkina Faso are in the northern hemisphere and belong to the South. It is a historical category: they are the peoples of former colonies and semi-colonies and socialist projects, whose struggle for sovereignty has not yet concluded. Their weight has changed. By 2007, the economies of the South surpassed those of the North in purchasing power parity, and in recent years they came to represent nearly 60 percent of world product. BRICS and the Belt and Road Initiative have begun to create something that did not exist in Bandung’s time: material conditions for cooperation among the peoples of the South.

But, although there is a new mood in the Global South today, the spirit of Bandung is not yet there. In 1955, the strength of those governments came from organized masses that prevented them from abandoning the liberation program. Chávez’s speech was precisely that: the voice of Latin American twenty-first-century socialism, of peoples pushing their governments. It was, for Latin America, a kind of Bandung from below. Today, that spirit faces an “angry tide” and needs to be rebuilt.

Peoples, not governments

There is a fundamental element in that 2006 speech that we cannot forget. Chávez distinguished between the US government and its people. He said that if one walked through the Bronx or San Francisco, one would find people who want peace. The working class of the North, impoverished and battered by deindustrialization, is not the enemy of the peoples of the South. It is a possible ally. Specially today when it is persecuted by a renewed McCarthyism that sees terrorism in those who raise their voices for social justice.

When Bush accused those who opposed his war of being extremists, Chávez replied that it was not about extremism: the world was awakening and peoples were rising everywhere. Today, aggression takes multiple forms. It takes the face of military actions, lawfare, unilateral coercive measures, or the confiscation of national resources. But its objective remains the same: to discipline anyone attempting a sovereign path.

The future doesn’t just arrive; we must organize it

The speech closed on a note of optimism. Chávez said that there was a dawn on the planet, visible in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Twenty years later, that optimism requires precision. The future is not a date on the calendar, but a rupture that must be built. Hope is not passive expectation, but a practice that requires organization, discipline, and internationalism.

The sulphur that Chávez smelled in 2006 has not dissipated; it has grown denser and spread beyond the diplomatic corridors of New York. That is why that speech does not belong to a record of the past, but to our current agenda. It reminds us that the South has a voice, that the UN can and must be contested, and that the North’s hegemony is not a natural law. What is missing, as in Bandung, is what has always made the difference: the peoples must organize.

Carlos Ron is Co-coordinator of the Nuestra America office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He was a Venezuelan diplomat and served as Vice Minister for North America (2018-2025).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.