The decadent speech delivered by Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu before the UN General Assembly, which included insults and fallacies against the delegates who left the room in protest, had the sole value of reminding the international community that the genocide in Gaza, and the illegal occupation of the West Bank by Israel's far-right and fundamentalist government, continues its course. The massacre of October 7th and 8th of Israeli citizens by Hamas, an unprecedented attack due to its violence, with about 1,400 civilians killed, was met with an immediate response of a genocide recognized as such by a committee and an independent commission of the United Nations itself, as well as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and a list of the most relevant international entities and organizations. More than 75,000 Palestinians have died there, of whom more than 20,000 are minors. In this case, it cannot be said that the slaughter has no precedent, because the hostilities of the Israeli army, trained with the idea of treating the Palestinian population as subhumans who must be exterminated while young so they do not grow up to be murderous adults, goes back a long way. Of both things, the Hamas massacre and the beginning of Israel's genocidal response, it will be three years in a few days. In Gaza, more than ninety percent of homes have been destroyed, the arrival of international aid has been obstructed, doctors and journalists have been murdered, and the population has been subjected to a health and food crisis (that is, famine and infectious diseases), among other war crimes. In the West Bank, these days we have seen again the images of Zionist bulldozers razing olive groves, thus destroying the main source of income for many Palestinian families.Netanyahu is the most visible face of a coalition government that includes ministers such as the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who toasted with champagne in the Knesset after approving the establishment of the death penalty for Palestinians considered terrorists, and who asks that every night 30 or 40 people be executed in Gaza, until “clearing” the area of its Palestinian population. Or like the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who boasts that the Gaza Strip is “a real estate gold mine” that the government of Israel is sharing with that of the USA. Since Netanyahu referred to the delegates who left the United Nations hall as “moral cowards,” we must understand that his depraved ministers and he himself consider themselves examples of moral strength. Invoking the right to defense, or much worse, the memory of the Shoah, as a justification for these atrocities does nothing but intensify their baseness.We emphasize that in this article we have referred to the crimes of the government of Israel. Not "of Israel", a confusion that our local Zionism always tries to promote, seasoned with the ineffable touch of indecent victimhood that seeks to equate Catalonia and Israel as peoples joined in misfortune. The decrepit, offensive image of Netanyahu at the UN serves as their mirror.

The general debate of the 81st United Nations General Assembly runs the risk of becoming a mere stage for an increasingly unilateral world. But, paradoxically, it is the only stage that continues to exist so that the 193 countries that are part of it can make themselves heard. Even if it is to threaten the "annihilation" of the other, to make warmongering proclamations of "not bowing one's head" or to attempt to whitewash a genocide.

The eviction of Maricarmen, an 87-year-old Madrid resident who uses a wheelchair, has shaken the entire State. The case of this elderly woman has become symbolic due to her vulnerability, and the protests, which this Wednesday gathered in front of her building to try to prevent her from being thrown out of her home, have had political repercussions. The parties to the left of the PSOE have not been slow to demand a new housing decree from the Spanish government. Sumar, the minority partner, is asking for it to be approved at next week's council of ministers and for it to include, among other things, the expropriation of Maricarmen's apartment from its owners, the investment fund Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión S. L. But they are not enough for the package of measures to move forward in Congress. Pedro Sánchez needs the votes of all the parties in the investiture bloc and that includes Junts. After the breakdown of the relationship with the socialists, the residential emergency has brought negotiations back to the playing field.

The United Nations was created by the San Francisco Charter in 1945 with the goal that the international community would have a forum to discuss global security issues without having to resort to armed conflict. The idea was not to repeat the mistakes of the interwar League of Nations and to have a truly representative body where all countries, however small, could have a voice and a vote to preserve the most precious good, peace. Surely, the creation of the Security Council with five permanent members, and therefore with veto power, already perverted the initial objective and has turned the UN into an inoperative entity, but what had never been seen before is the spectacle offered on Tuesday by Donald Trump threatening Iran with annihilation from the speakers' rostrum. This Wednesday, the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, appeared to show defiance and warn that "they have tested the strength and firmness of Iran, and they have learned that they cannot make Iran surrender".

During the United Nations General Assembly, which is taking place in New York, an unprecedented image has occurred: the president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, approached the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, to address the future of her country. According to sources from the Spanish delegation, it was an initiative of the new Venezuelan leader –after the arrest of Nicolás Maduro by the United States–, who asked Sánchez to be able to sit down and talk about the political situation. The same sources add that the Spanish president responded to the offer and reaffirmed his "commitment" to the region.

The United Nations looks at the world with the bewilderment that can only be had when one has passed the age of 80. A world that is disconcerting, but not for that reason any newer. The organization that was born with the will to prevent the ravages of the great wars of the 20th century from repeating themselves faces the general debate of the 81st session of the General Assembly marked by the shadow of war. In the last three years, the UN podium has seen how different conflicts have passed a baton that has proven cumulative and inconclusive: Ukraine, Gaza and, now, Iran. The military campaign initiated by Donald Trump will be the great protagonist of a more divided summit where alliances are being restructured and old friends are becoming known hostiles. The speed with which the old international order is unraveling seems to have surpassed that of the Arctic thaw, now seen more as a geopolitical advantage than as a climate emergency.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has called on states and companies to govern artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that offers many benefits to society but which, in his view, also puts human rights at risk. "All human rights are at risk," he asserted.

Imagine discovering that the map with which you studied state borders and understood the distribution of the oceans and continents is built upon an intentional lie. This has been the reality that half the world encountered last Friday following the historic decision by the UN General Assembly to abandon the classic Mercator cartographic projection in favor of other models that provide an accurate representation of the actual size of countries and continents, such as Equal Earth.The map by cartographer Gerardus Mercator was born in 1569, with a Eurocentric bias that has been justified by the logic of its utility for navigation, despite the excessive oversizing of territories as they move away from the Equator. Conceived in a context of the expansion of European imperialism over the global south, this cartographic manipulation has stood the test of time and has proven to be a propagandistic configuration in favor of Western and Euro-descendant regions. Its design of our world influences our perception of the greatness of the Old Continent, to the detriment of territories in the southern hemisphere such as South America or Africa, a continent fourteen times larger than Greenland and which the Flemish geographer chose to represent in a size comparable to that of the northern territory.This distortion of reality perfectly portrays white fragility, a concept coined by whiteness scholar Robin DiAngelo that describes the defensive response to the slightest challenge to the white racial position. Intolerance towards the questioning of white supremacy seeks to maintain and/or restore the white privilege inherited from a colonial past favorable to Euro-descendant regions. The persistence of a fictitious map over half a millennium and the neutralization of any alternative proposal—such as the Gall-Peters projection, championed for more than 50 years by entities and international organizations like UNESCO—seek to preserve an imperialist representation of the world, maintaining the illusion of naturalized greatness from which the dominance over the Global South, which has already lasted more than 500 years, has been sustained.

The Catalan psychiatrist and researcher Pau Pérez Sales was appointed this Wednesday as the UN's special rapporteur on torture. He will thus become the world's leading authority on torture and other ill-treatment, with the responsibility of ensuring compliance with the Istanbul Protocol, which obliges governments to investigate and document cases of torture. Pérez Sales will therefore have to visit and engage with states, national and international institutions, and civil society organizations in order to formulate recommendations and present reports to the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly. His appointment is exceptional due to his profile and comes at a critical time of questioning international law and multilateralism.

Peacekeeping missions are facing an unprecedented crisis. The number of international personnel deployed has fallen to 78,633, the lowest figure since 2000 and a 49% decrease from 2016. This is the main conclusion of a report by the prestigious Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which warns that the viability of multilateral peacekeeping is at risk. While the number of deployed personnel has been decreasing throughout the decade, 2025 saw the steepest year-on-year drop (17%), coinciding with the start of Donald Trump's second term in the United States. Last year, there were a total of 58 active operations in 34 countries, three fewer than in 2024.

The Italian Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has called this Friday from Barcelona for an investigation into the role of the Greek authorities in the Israeli assault on the Global Sumud Flotilla last week. "How is it possible that the Greek authorities, instead of intervening to prevent Israel from committing a crime, participated in the operation? They picked up all participants except two," she said, referring to Palestinian-Catalan Saif Abukeshek and Brazilian Thiago Ávila, who are detained and prosecuted in Israel and who have reported torture through their lawyers.

At the end of this year, the mandate of António Guterres, current Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), expires. And the race to succeed him has begun with a very present question: will the organization be led by a woman for the first time in its 80-year history?

Today we're talking about the Iran-Iraq War, but more and more countries are becoming involved, more civilians are falling victim, and more places on the world map have been marked by acts of war, making the conflict less regional and more global. And it's all likely to get worse, because Russia and China have, for the moment, remained in the declaration phase.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, is one of the voices that have most forcefully denounced the genocide in GazaHis reports have served to highlight not only the atrocities committed in recent years in the Gaza Strip, but also the complicity of third countries and companies that profit from the situation in the Middle East. He publishes When the world sleeps (Galaxia Gutenberg), a journey through 10 conversations that move between intimate and political discourse, and attempt to answer key questions about impunity, resistance, war, and peace.

In the midst of an open battle—currently a war of words—with his European and NATO allies over Greenland, Donald Trump took another step toward international isolation on Thursday, ordering the United States to withdraw from 66 international organizations and treaties, 31 of which are UN agencies. The list of entities in which Washington will cease to participate and contribute financially includes the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and UN Energy. The country is also withdrawing from the International Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the scientific platform of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and from organizations such as the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the International Energy Forum, the Atlantic Partnership for Cooperation, and the UN Science and Technology Centre. The White House announced this early this morning in a statement regarding the "withdrawal of the United States from organizations, conventions, and treaties that are contrary to the interests of the United States." After having already left UNESCO, the WHO, the UN Human Rights Council, and the Paris AgreementThis new step culminates the process of retreating from and dismantling multilateralism that he has championed since his first term. He breaks off dialogue with the international community at a moment of maximum confrontation, after launching a military operation against Venezuela to seize its oil and when he threatens to do the same to annex Greenland and its minerals.

"I will create two roadmaps, one to halt and reverse deforestation, and another for a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels." The president of the UN climate summit, COP30, Brazilian André Correa do Lago, drew a standing ovation during the summit's final plenary session when he made this announcement. But not everyone was happy. This was the solution Correa himself found to get the final COP30 text approved, the so-called Mutirão (collective effort in Brazilian Portuguese), without mentioning that 82 countries were demanding a "roadmap" to end the fossil fuels that have generated the climate crisis we are experiencing.

A group of protesters, many of them indigenous, invaded the restricted area of the convention center on Tuesday night (early morning in Catalonia) where the Brazil hosts the UN climate summit, COP30. for demanding a "tax on billionaires" to finance the fight against the climate crisis. Climate activists managed to breach the security checkpoints at the entrance to Parque da Cidade, which had been closed for the past few weeks for use as a summit venue, and entered the lobby of the large tent managed by the UN, where they clashed with police, who formed a cordon to prevent them from proceeding. Clashes and scenes of chaos ensued until the protesters were finally expelled.

Hugs, cheers and applause greeted the birth of the Paris Agreement ten years ago. Years of painstaking negotiations had gone into its delivery during the COP21 climate summit in the French capital. Yet on 12 December 2015, every government in the world formally committed to preventing global warming from exceeding 2°C, and ideally keeping it below 1.5°C. The deal was far from perfect –not least because it was not legally binding– but that historic milestone of uniting 197 disparate governments was a Herculean task that unleashed widespread optimism: the fight against the climate crisis had finally become an inescapable global goal.

"That will be the COP of truth, where we will see if we heed the warnings of science and turn them into change." That is how he defined the COP30, the UN climate summit The summit, which kicks off next Monday in Belém, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, will be opened by Brazilian President and host Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. This year, the speeches by political leaders have been moved up a few days from the start of the summit due to the logistical challenges of accommodating so many government delegations in a small Amazonian town. In their speeches, both Lula and UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that this summit—which comes exactly ten years after the Paris Agreement—must finally launch the implementation of that agreement, after a decade of negotiating its rules and fine print. Lula acknowledged that the fight against the climate crisis is currently threatened by "an international scenario in which mutual distrust prevails and private interests take precedence over the common good of the world." A scenario, he said, in which "extremist forces fabricate fake news for political gain." The Brazilian president didn't mention Donald Trump by name, but it was clear who he was referring to. The next speaker, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, was more explicit and directly denounced Donald Trump's "lies" when he says the climate crisis is a hoax, as he did at the UN General Assembly in September. The intervention of Colombian President Gustavo Petro followed the same line, and he was the harshest critic of the US president. In fact, Petro used his climate speech to also denounceTrump administration's actions in the Caribbean and the Pacific "with extrajudicial killings" against alleged drug traffickers. "Donald Trump is against humanity, and his absence today is proof of that," he said. The Colombian president stressed that the world is on the verge of "climate collapse" and that part of the responsibility for this lies with "Trump's conduct," with his "denial of science, which is leading his society, with its eyes fixed on the abyss, and with it, all of humanity."

The UN has analyzed all the political commitments it has received from governments before the start of the climate summit next week in Brazil, COP30With the new climate plans officially presented, the world is heading towards global warming of between 2.3°C and 2.5°C, still above the Paris Agreement target, but 0.1°C below what was projected last year with the commitments then on the table. Climate diplomacy is progressing, but very slowly. The report also calculates the warming that would result from current climate policies (if these commitments are not ultimately met), which would amount to an additional 2.8°C, also an improvement compared to the 3.1°C projected last year.