Emmanuel Macron

Thursday April 28, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday April 28, 2022

UN ambassador Bob Rae condemns Security Council veto after historic General Assembly vote

September 29, 2012

Canada joined more than 100 global allies Tuesday in subjecting a paralyzed United Nations Security Council to more public scrutiny, while the Ukrainian government praised a Canadian senator for pushing forward with a new, tougher sanctions law.

Bob Rae, the Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, denounced as undemocratic the Security Council’s veto power as the General Assembly voted to subject the world’s most powerful body to more public scrutiny.

The General Assembly adopted a consensus motion that would require any of the five permanent veto-wielding members of the council — Russia, the United States, China, France and Britain — to appear before the 193-country assembly to justify its decision.

The move doesn’t get rid of the council’s controversial veto power, but with Russia threatening to continue using it to prevent action against its war on Ukraine, Rae said the historic vote sends a signal that the world will be watching.

March 4, 2020

“The veto power that is held by the five permanent members of the Security Council is as anachronistic as it is undemocratic,” Rae said in explaining Canada’s support.

At the UN, Tuesday’s unprecedented motion seeks to hold Russia to account politically if it uses its veto. The new motion requires the General Assembly “to hold a debate on the situation” that gives rise to any council veto within 10 working days and for the country that uses it to be among the first to speak.

Representatives from Russia and Belarus spoke against the motion, but they were countered by the envoys of dozens of countries that sponsored the motion, which was led by tiny Lichtenstein and included Canada.

From the floor of the assembly, Rae delivered a blistering condemnation of a broken UN system that he said was enabling what he called a shameful and illegal act of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.

April 24, 2002

Rae said the recent deadlock over Ukraine has happened when the world most needs the Security Council.

“We’re watching the destruction of cities. We’re watching the killing of women and children. We’re seeing the destruction of an entire infrastructure of a country and we’re seeing a country fight back. The Security Council may not be able to act. That doesn’t prevent us from having an ability to act,” Rae said.

Rae and the world’s diplomats were speaking as Russian bombs continued pounding the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, large swaths of which have been reduced to rubble in a war that has killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians and forced millions to flee their homes.

April 12, 2022

“The use and threat of the veto in situations where atrocity crimes are being perpetrated in Syria and Myanmar, and Mariupol, for example, or in situations where a permanent member of the Security Council has launched a war of aggression against another UN member state, as the Russian Federation is now doing in Ukraine, are not only shameful, they are also contrary to obligations under the UN Charter and to international law.” (The Globe & Mail) 

 

Tuesday April 12, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday April 12, 2022

Zelenskyy says Ukraine is defending its basic human rights

“We are defending the ability for a person to live in the modern world,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

March 1, 2022

In an interview taped Wednesday in Kyiv, Zelenskyy told Pelley his country remains united because it has no other choice.

“We united as a nation” Zelenskyy said to Pelley, speaking through an interpreter. “The weakest people became strong. The strong people became the strongest, most powerful, so powerful that nobody could have outdone them. In this way, our nation of strong and weak people has transformed into one solid, strong force. And one strong community.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 with 73% of the vote. He told Pelley he was urged by multiple people leave the country at the start of the war but chose to stay.

“Before I do something, I analyze the situation. I’ve always done it calmly, without any chaos,” Zelenskyy said through an interpreter. “I might not be the strongest warrior. But not I’m willing to betray anyone.”

Thursday February 17, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday February 17, 2022

Putin’s Long Tables Explained

January 22, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s every move is dissected as fears escalate that he’ll soon order an invasion of Ukraine, but attention has recently turned to why Putin sits across from a comically large table during meetings with other world leaders, the most recent instance of which came Tuesday during a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. 

The issue took global spotlight last week after Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron sat at opposite ends of a table pegged by Reuters to be 20 feet long during their meeting in Moscow.

The extreme social distance came after Macron refused to take a Russian-administered Covid-19 PCR test, and Reuters reported Thursday it was because France didn’t want Russia to have access to Macron’s DNA, citing two anonymous sources close to Macron.

Another French official told Reuters the protocols were due to Putin living a “strict health bubble,” and the Kremlin confirmed the extreme distance is to protect Putin.

Scholz met the same distanced fate as Macron during his Tuesday meeting in Moscow, sparking memes and providing comic relief during otherwise tense negotiations.

Saturday October 30, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 30, 2021

COP26 climate talks off to an ominous start after weak G20 leaders’ meeting

It was in the city of Glasgow that Scottish engineer James Watt improved the workings of the steam engine and, unwittingly, kicked off the Industrial Revolution. Never could he have imagined that humans would burn so much coal, oil and gas over the next two centuries that they would imperil the very climate that has allowed for their existence.

June 6, 2007

More than 120 leaders will speak Monday in the very same city to begin the COP26 climate talks, where they will set the tone for two weeks of negotiations that can either end with a plan to rapidly decarbonize the planet, or make watery statements to delay what the science shows is needed, possibly pushing it off until it’s too late. Climate leaders and experts are calling it the world’s last best chance to address the climate crisis.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government is hosting the talks, will warn Monday that humanity has run down the clock on climate change.

“It’s one minute to midnight, and we need to act now,” he will say in an opening speech, according to remarks sent to journalists.

“We have to move from talk and debate and discussion to concerted, real-world action on coal, cars, cash and trees. Not more hopes and targets and aspirations, valuable though they are, but clear commitments and concrete timetables for change.”

The G20 leaders’ meeting that ended in Rome on Sunday suggests that leaders are finally listening to the science, but they still lack the political unity to make the ambitious decisions required to meet the moment.

August 13, 2021

The latest UN climate science report published in August made clear what needs to happen — deep, sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions over this decade to have any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above levels before industrialization. Even with all the newly announced pledges, the world is still on track for 2.7 degrees of heating.

Global warming beyond 1.5 degrees will bring worsening impacts of the climate crisis. But the positive news is that the 1.5 limit is entirely in our reach. The UN report showed that by mid-century, the world needs to reach net zero — where greenhouse gas emissions are no greater than the amount removed from the atmosphere — and warming can be stopped in its tracks.

All of this scientific language was in the G20 leaders’ communiqué, including an acknowledgment that to meet net zero by mid-century, many member nations will need to lift their emissions-reductions pledges, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), over this decade. (CNN) 

 

Tuesday June 15, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 15, 2021

The Wreckage Donald Trump Left Behind

January 16, 2020

Somewhere in China, a company recently received an order for boxes and boxes of reusable face masks with g7 uk 2021 embroidered on them. Over the weekend in Cornwall, in southwest England, these little bits of protective cloth were handed to journalists covering the 2021 summit of some of the world’s most powerful industrial economies—so they could write in safety about these leaders’ efforts to contain China.

August 24, 2019

The irony of the situation neatly summed up the trouble with this year’s G7 summit. The gathering was supposed to mark a turning point, a physical meeting symbolizing not only the beginning of the end of the coronavirus pandemic but also a return to something approaching normalcy after the years of Donald Trump and Brexit. And in certain senses it was. With Joe Biden—the walking embodiment of the traditional American paterfamilias that Trump was not—no one feared a sudden explosion or American walkout as before. Biden is not the sort of person to hurl Starbursts at another leader in a fit of pique. And yet, the reality was that the leaders in attendance were playing their diplomatic games within tram lines graffitied on the floor largely by the former U.S. president, not the incumbent one.

January 12, 2021

Emerging from a weekend of summitry last night, it was hard to avoid the reality that the great questions hanging over the gathering were ones shaped either by Trump or by the years of Trump: Europe’s frustration with American vaccine protectionism (which began under Trump but has been maintained by Biden), ongoing disputes over Brexit, the future of NATO, worries over Russian interference, and, ultimately, China, the great other at this event. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her closing remarks: “Look, the election of Joe Biden as U.S. president doesn’t mean that the world no longer has problems.”

June 9, 2018

Everywhere you looked—whether in the communiqué itself, or the press conferences and summaries of leaders’ meetings—you could see the unresolved questions of the past few years, as presidents and prime ministers reacted to the problems thrown up, exacerbated, or actively caused by Trump. All agreed that they wanted to move on from the instability of his tenure, but they seemed divided and unclear about how, never mind what the new era should look like. With Biden’s congressional majority in doubt and Trump’s future intentions uncertain, Europe retains a latent fear that the U.S. is merely between eruptions, not recovering from one.

May 24, 2017

The leaders seemed to embody this sense of time being paused. Merkel has been chancellor so long, she attended her first G7 summit with George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Italy’s Mario Draghi might be a new prime minister, but he is no stranger to the world’s global establishment—a representative of the old order if ever there was one. Even Biden himself, hailed as a “breath of fresh air” by the summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is hardly a new face on the world stage.

Ultimately, this G7 summit seemed to be stuck somewhere between the past and the future—between the era of Trump and the world some of these politicians hope to create. (The Atlantic)