The United Nations Forum on Forests concluded its tenth session in Istanbul in the early hours of Saturday after agreeing on a series of measures to improve the sustainable management of forests, and deciding to consider setting up a voluntary global fund to support this endeavour.
The Forum, which met for the first time away from UN Headquarters in New York, adopted two resolutions as it wrapped up its two-week session, one on forests and economic development – the main theme of the session – and the other on financing.
Recognizing the vital role of forests to lives and livelihoods, the 197 member countries of the Forum called on national governments to take a range of actions to improve sustainable forest management, from substantive data collection to addressing the causes of deforestation and forests degradation.

Global economic activity is picking up, but the continuing crisis in the euro area is delaying a meaningful recovery, the OECD said in its latest Interim Economic Assessment.
The Assessment, presented in Paris by Chief Economist Pier Carlo Padoan, says that the G7 economies are expected to grow at an annualised 2.4 per cent rate in the first quarter of 2013 and at a 1.8 percent rate in the second.

Organizers: Culturelink / Institute for International Relations and Centre for Democracy and Law Miko Tripalo / in cooperation with the Croatian Commission for UNESCO and the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe (Venice)

Cultural diversity has possibly never been so much in the forefront as in the first and the beginnings of the second decade of the 21st century. Owing to the rapid growth of multicultural societies and countries, ever stronger international migration flows, and the accelerated development of digital technologies, cultural diversity is becoming the principal challenge of our times. Thus, in its latest report on the protection and the promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, the European Commission emphasizes: "The diversity of cultural expressions lies at the heart of the European project” (SWD/2012/129 final). The issues that arise from cultural diversity cannot be solved by political voluntarism; they require knowledge and an intense international cooperation and exchange of experiences.

According to a widely accepted great interpretation, globalization is a field of the most extensive problems, each of which concerns everyone, and humanity in general as well, in new, qualitative, and in their tendencies existential ways. In this sense, the legitimate fields of globalization are e.g. the issues of ecology, raw materials, migration, the global health problems of the world, the global positive or negative tendencies of population, energy, arms trading, the drug crisis, or dilemmas of integration and world economy. There is another huge interpretation as well – and that's what we follow in our present work –, which doesn't bind the problems and phenomena of globalization to concrete and singularly appearing 'global' issues, but examines structural and functional connections of the whole new global situation.

Au début des années 1980, le Mexique ne peut plus payer sa dette. Les marchés financiers internationaux réagissent de manière très brutale : les pays latino-américains, ainsi que plusieurs pays asiatiques, ne peuvent désormais plus accéder aux crédits internationaux, sauf s'ils signent une « lettre d'intention » avec le Fonds Monétaire International (FMI). Ils doivent dorénavant financer une partie substantielle du service de leur dette à partir de leurs ressources intérieures tout en négociant le report d'une autre partie, l'amortissement du principal, avec le FMI. Pour cela, ils doivent exporter plus et obtenir un solde net positif de leur balance commerciale, donc promouvoir une politique d'austérité (réduction drastique des dépenses publiques, maxi-dévaluation). Au total, les exportations vont dépasser les importations de quelques trente pour cent, et le service de la dette représentera entre deux et cinq pour cent de l'ensemble des richesses produites (PIB) selon les pays et les années.