SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 24, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Silvaco Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SVCO, “Silvaco” or the “Company”), a provider of TCAD, EDA software, and SIP solutions that enable semiconductor design and digital twin modeling through AI software and innovation, today announced that its 2024 TCAD Baseline Release simulation platform with digital twin modeling, provides support for planar CMOS, FinFET and Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor technologies, enabling semiconductor companies to accelerate technology development.
Silvaco’s latest TCAD technology platform, enables advanced CMOS Process and Device simulation to support the development of next-generation semiconductor devices. This platform boosts performance, yield and efficiency across the evolving semiconductor design and manufacturing landscape. The solution enables highly accurate 3D process simulation, using digital twin-like precision and integrates stress simulation to model deformed structures. Additionally, the platform supports cryogenic applications through an atomistic quantum transport approach, enabling straightforward modeling of transistor structures down to 1 Kelvin.
“Our TCAD platform has gained significant traction in the Display, Photonics, Memory and Power Semiconductor markets, where our solutions have been instrumental in driving innovation and enhancing performance,” said Dr. Babak Taheri, Chief Executive Officer, Silvaco. “We have now extended our comprehensive suite of tools to the advanced CMOS market, enabling next-generation advancements in technologies to address growing markets such as foundries, 5G, AI and high-performance computing. Our newly released TCAD platform has been utilized by a strategic customer for the past few years and is now available for broad market adoption. This new capability for advanced CMOS technology enables customers to accelerate their technology development with significant cost savings.”
“Nanotechnology, like GAA, exhibits advanced quantum physical effects,” said Tillmann Kubis, Associate Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. “Over the past six years, our team of scientists has collaborated with Silvaco to enable the simulation of full devices, such as nanowires and GAAs, powered by NEMO5 which is an NEGF-based atomistic quantum transport simulation tool developed at Purdue and licensed by Silvaco. This collaboration is now enabling Silvaco’s TCAD simulation performance with atomistic accuracy.”
“This latest release of our TCAD platform is the culmination of years of intensive development, refinement and industry collaboration in order to meet the demanding needs of designing in advanced CMOS process technologies,” said Eric Guichard, Senior VP and General Manager TCAD Business Unit, Silvaco. “The latest release of our TCAD platform now incorporates digital twin modeling for CMOS technologies, as well as atomistic simulation technologies to provide a highly competitive and attractive alternative solution for semiconductor companies designing in advanced Planar CMOS, FinFET and emerging GAA process technologies.”
About Silvaco
Silvaco is a provider of TCAD, EDA software, and SIP solutions that enable semiconductor design and digital twin modeling through AI software and innovation. Silvaco’s solutions are used for semiconductor and photonics processes, devices, and systems development across display, power devices, automotive, memory, high-performance compute, foundries, photonics, internet of things, and 5G/6G mobile markets for complex SoC design. Silvaco is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has a global presence with offices located in North America, Europe, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, each as amended, that are intended to be covered by the “safe harbor” provisions of those sections. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the Company’s expectations, beliefs, intentions, plans, or strategies related to the release and adoption of its 2024 TCAD Baseline Release simulation platform, the anticipated benefits of this platform for advanced CMOS, FinFET, GAA, and other emerging technologies, and the potential advantages for customers in terms of performance, cost savings, and accelerated technology development. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by the use of words such as “anticipate,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “believe,” “estimate,” “potential,” “continue,” and similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words.
These statements are based on the Company’s current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including those described in the Company’s most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.
Media Contact Tyler Weiland +1 972-571-7834 press@silvaco.com
Washington, DC: On September 10, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded the Article IV consultation[1] with the Dominican Republic and considered and endorsed the staff appraisal without a meeting.[2]
A track record of sound policies and institutional policy frameworks has helped the Dominican Republic achieve robust and resilient economic growth and low inflation over the last two decades. Effective policies contributed to a growth moderation that appropriately supported inflation’s rapid and sustained return to its target last year and then aided the recovery, while close monitoring of the financial sector supported macro-financial stability. Planned enhancements to policy frameworks and deepening structural reforms—in particular, comprehensive fiscal and electricity reforms—have the potential to further support stability, competitiveness, and inclusive growth.
Following a strong post-pandemic recovery, economic growth slowed to 2.4 percent in 2023 due to tighter global and domestic financial conditions, weak export demand, and transient domestic factors, largely climate related. The growth slowdown, alongside lower commodity prices, drove inflation’s faster-than-expected convergence to its target range (4±1 percent). In response, the Central Bank of The Dominican Republic (BCRD) cautiously and appropriately reduced its key policy rate, allowing for greater exchange rate flexibility while increasing foreign exchange interventions to smooth daily exchange volatility. Fiscal policy was also prudently adjusted to support the economy. The current account deficit in 2023 narrowed markedly to 3.6 percent of GDP and was fully financed by foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. The financial sector weathered the period of tight monetary policy and slower growth and is adequately capitalized and profitable.
Supported by sound policies and macroeconomic fundamentals, the outlook is favorable despite elevated, mostly global, uncertainty. For 2024 and over the medium term, real GDP growth is projected around its long-term trend of 5 percent, with inflation around its 4 percent target. The current account deficit is projected to gradually narrow to less than 3 percent of GDP and continue being fully financed by FDI. Near-term risks to the outlook—including tighter global financial conditions, geopolitical tensions, and volatile commodity prices—have moderated since last year but remain elevated and tilted to the downside. Over the medium-term risks are more balanced and include upside risks if key domestic reforms are implemented successfully.
Executive Board Assessment
In concluding the 2024 Article IV Consultation with the Dominican Republic, Executive Directors endorsed staff’s appraisal, as follows:
A track record of sound policies and institutional policy frameworks has helped the Dominican Republic achieve robust and resilient economic growth and low inflation over the last two decades. Effective policies contributed to a growth moderation that appropriately supported inflation’s rapid and sustained return to its target in 2023. The authorities provided timely policy support to aid the recovery while monitoring closely the financial sector. The external position improved significantly in 2023 and was broadly in line with fundamentals and desirable policies.
The outlook is favorable despite elevated—mostly global—uncertainty. Real GDP growth is projected around its long-term trend of 5 percent in 2024 and thereafter, with inflation around its (4±1 percent) target. The current account deficit, expected to be fully financed by FDI, is projected to gradually narrow over the medium term. Downside risks dominate in the near‑term term—including tighter for longer monetary policy in the U.S., intensification of regional conflicts, or extreme local weather events—but are broadly balanced over the medium term, including upside risks if reforms are successfully implemented. Existing buffers, further contingency planning, and agile sound policy making can help face adverse shocks.
In the near term, policy priorities should remain focused on maintaining macroeconomic and financial stability, including further flexibility of the exchange rate. Monetary policy normalization can continue, given remaining economic slack and that inflation is firmly within the target range. Efforts to expedite the recapitalization of the central bank to reinforce its autonomy should remain a priority. Endeavors should continue to deepen the FX market, expand the use of hedging mechanisms and limit FXIs to large shocks that lead to destabilizing changes in hedging and financing premia to support further exchange rate flexibility, and therefore further enhance the effectiveness of the inflation targeting framework. While international reserves are broadly adequate based on traditional metrics, further reserve accumulation is necessary to increase buffers to deal with future shocks.
Fiscal policy should remain focused on rebuilding buffers and critical spending needs. The fiscal responsibility law and its planned implementation are welcomed and are important steps to better anchor medium-term policies and further secure debt sustainability. The authorities’ planned gradual fiscal consolidation, consistent with this law, is appropriate to place debt on a firmly downward path and build fiscal buffers. An integral fiscal reform that durably raises revenues—through elimination of tax exemptions and expansion of the tax base—and improves spending efficiency—especially by reducing electricity sector subsidies and untargeted transfers—is imperative. This can provide space for needed development spending (including disaster-resilient infrastructure) to promote inclusive growth.
The financial sector remains resilient and well capitalized, and efforts to bring the regulatory framework up to the latest international standards should continue. The sector weathered well the period of high interest rates and slower growth in 2023. Stress tests show that the banking sector can absorb a range of shocks. Continued close monitoring to contain any build‑up of vulnerabilities remains warranted amid higher for longer interest rates and past increases to credit growth. The modernization of the financial and prudential regulatory framework, alongside the expansion of the macroprudential toolkit, and closing regulatory/supervisory gaps (including for savings and loans cooperatives) will further increase financial sector resilience.
Ongoing efforts to improve public institutions and the business climate are essential to maintaining the strong investment and growth trajectory. The fiscal policy framework, and spending and revenue efficiency can be further enhanced by continued improvements to public financial management and further strengthening of revenue administration. Reforms to education and the labor market, alongside further improvements to social outcomes and implementation of climate adaptation and mitigation policies will be critical to support inclusive and resilient growth and continue to reduce vulnerabilities. The authorities should continue in their efforts to fully implement the Electricity Pact.
Sources: National authorities; World Bank; and IMF staff calculations.
1/ Latest available.
2/ The consolidated public sector includes the budgetary central government (CG); the rest of the Non-Financial Public Sector, i.e., extra-budgetary central government institutions (decentralized and autonomous institutions), social security funds, local governments and non-financial public companies; and the quasi-fiscal central bank debt. With the dissolution of the state electricity holding company (CDEEE) in 2022, the deficit of CDEEE from 2019 was transferred to the CG.
3/ Excluding reserves.
[1] Under Article IV of the IMF’s Articles of Agreement, the IMF holds bilateral discussions with members, usually every year. A staff team visits the country, collects economic and financial information, and discusses with officials the country’s economic developments and policies. On return to headquarters, the staff prepares a report, which forms the basis for discussion by the Executive Board.
[2] The Executive Board takes decisions under its lapse-of-time procedure when the Board agrees that a proposal can be considered without convening formal discussions.
Washington, DC: An International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission led by Mr. Ricardo Llaudes issued a statement following in person and virtual discussions with the Honduran authorities on policies to support the authorities’ economic program:
“The Fund team welcomes the adoption by the Council of Ministers of Honduras of the 2025 draft Budget Bill. The draft Budget is in line with the authorities’ economic program supported by the IMF, providing space for critical social and infrastructure spending.
“In addition, productive discussions, both virtual and in person, have taken place over the past months on economic policies to safeguard Honduras’ domestic and external stability, paving the way for a program review mission planned for the first half of October.”
Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region
Public urged to stay vigilant against dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases during holidays Public urged to stay vigilant against dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases during holidays ******************************************************************************************
With the approach of the National Day holiday, the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health today (September 24) appealed to members of the public who intend to travel to stay alert to the situation of mosquito-borne diseases in their destinations. In view of the recent increase in dengue fever (DF) activity in neighbouring areas, the CHP specifically reminded members of the public to adopt necessary anti-mosquito precautions to guard against the disease when travelling abroad. From September 1 to yesterday (September 23), the CHP recorded 12 imported DF cases; the patients had been to Guangdong Province (4), India (3), Nepal (2), the Philippines (2) and Malaysia (1) during the incubation period. The CHP has been closely monitoring the latest DF situation in neighbouring and overseas areas. DF is endemic in many tropical and subtropical areas of the world. The latest surveillance data showed that there was a significant increase in DF cases noted in some places in Asia compared to the same period last year. According to information from the Singapore Ministry of Health, a total of 11 847 DF cases have been recorded from January to September 14 this year, which is higher when compared to 6 755 cases recorded in the same period in 2023. In addition, Malaysia has recorded 98 442 cases from January to September 7 this year, which was a 19.3 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2023. According to the Health Commission of Guangdong Province, the number of DF cases recorded in Guangdong Province in the past three months has been increasing, with 233 and 1 220 cases in July and August 2024 respectively. Most of the cases were locally acquired infection. Information from the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention further showed that more than 1 400 DF local cases have been recorded in September (as of September 15), with the highest numbers of cases recorded in Foshan, Guangzhou and Zhongshan. According to the World Health Organization, the global incidence of DF has markedly increased over the past two decades, posing a substantial public health challenge. In 2023, ongoing transmissions, combined with an unexpected spike in DF cases, had resulted in close to a historic high of over 6.5 million cases, and more than 7 300 dengue-related deaths reported in over 80 countries/territories. Since the beginning of 2024, the Americas, including Brazil, Argentina and Peru, have recorded over 11 million cases, a record number. Detailed information on the latest DF situation in Hong Kong, as well as neighbouring and overseas countries and areas, has been uploaded to the CHP website (www.chp.gov.hk/files/pdf/df_imported_cases_and_overseas_figures_eng.pdf). A spokesman for the CHP urged members of the public to stay vigilant and adopt appropriate anti-mosquito measures during their travel to prevent DF, as well as other mosquito-borne diseases including Japanese encephalitis, zika virus infection, malaria, etc. The CHP spokesman reiterated that members of the public should follow stringent anti-mosquito measures when travelling. When travelling to areas where vector-borne diseases are common, they may consider to arrange travel health consultation with a doctor at least six weeks before the journey for risk assessment during which the need for any vaccinations, chemoprophylaxis and vector preventive measures will be determined. The following measures on mosquito control could reduce the chance of acquiring mosquito-borne disease during travel:
Wear loose, light-coloured, long-sleeved tops and trousers; Use DEET-containing insect repellent on exposed parts of the body and clothing. For details about the use of insect repellents and the key points to be observed, please refer to ‘Tips for using insect repellents’; and When engaging in outdoor activities, avoid using fragrant cosmetics or skin care products, re-apply insect repellents according to instructions, and apply insect repellents after sunscreen if both are used.
“Returned travellers should consult a doctor promptly if developing symptoms such as fever, respiratory symptoms, rash or painful swelling, and inform the doctor of their travel history for prompt diagnosis and treatment,” the spokesman added. The CHP will continue to monitor the local and overseas situation of infectious diseases and provide the latest information to members of the public in a timely manner for a better understanding of the development of infectious diseases and preparation on precautionary works. For more information, please refer to the CHP website on GAS infection (www.chp.gov.hk/en/healthtopics/content/24/107780.html), DF (www.chp.gov.hk/en/healthtopics/content/24/19.html) and travel health service (www.travelhealth.gov.hk).
Ends/Tuesday, September 24, 2024Issued at HKT 20:00
Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency, and Facts Global Energy
The United States is the world’s largest exporter of motor gasoline (finished gasoline plus gasoline blending components), supplying over 16% of total global exports. U.S. motor gasoline exports in 2023 averaged 900,000 barrels per day (b/d), equivalent to about 10% of domestic consumption and enough to fill up the tanks of over 1.5 million SUVs per day, assuming an average tank size of 24 gallons. Other large gasoline exporters, including Singapore and the Netherlands, have never exceeded 700,000 b/d in gasoline exports. China and India have both added significant refining capacity since 2010 and have also increased gasoline exports.
The United States was a net importer of motor gasoline for over a half century from 1961 to 2015. However, that trend changed during the past decade. The high volume of motor gasoline exports in recent years reflects longer trends in increasing U.S. exports of refined products in general, which set records in 2022 and 2023. The growth in U.S. refined product exports reflects several factors, including generally increasing refinery capacity from 2010 to 2023 and rising production from existing refineries through increased utilization. Much of the increase in refinery capacity has led to higher motor gasoline yields because of added light crude oil processing units that process increasing volumes of light tight oil produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Finally, although refinery capacity has grown, U.S. consumption of gasoline has not, making more gasoline available for export. Motor gasoline consumption in 2023 was flat compared with 2010 (and 0.4 million b/d less than its peak in 2018).
Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
Motor gasoline accounts for the third-largest share of U.S. refined product exports, behind propane and distillate fuel oil. Unlike propane, which is primarily exported to Asia, the majority of U.S. motor gasoline exports (over 500,000 b/d) go to Mexico, with the remainder going primarily to Central American and South American countries. Over 90% of U.S. gasoline exports came from the U.S. Gulf Coast (PADD 3).
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 24, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — QuestionPro, a global leader in online survey and research services today announced the agenda and speaker lineup for its annual customer event, XDay 2024 North America. The event takes place Thursday, October 3, 2024 from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (U.S. Central Time) at the Thompson Austin in Austin, Texas. The event features keynotes, in-depth panels, and one-to-one chats with industry leaders on a range of topics related to the future of insights, experience, and delight.
The day begins with opening remarks from Vivek Bhaskaran, QuestionPro’s founder and CEO, whose irreverent personality is combined with deep industry knowledge and vision. He will unveil exciting new products and feature updates across QuestionPro product lines and set the stage for a day of innovation and inspiration.
Bhaskaran is followed immediately by the morning keynote from Dr. Dipul Patadia, a visionary healthcare executive with over 20 years of experience of leadership, innovation and insights. As the Head of Health System Strategy and Innovation at Salesforce, he has been pivotal in aligning technology with the unique needs of health systems. His extensive background, including roles as Chief Medical Officer at hospitals within Ascension and Advocate Health, uniquely equips him with insights into the melding of data, and new trends.
Attendees will benefit from his leadership in national healthcare organizations and advisory roles with multiple healthcare startups. Expect to gain actionable insights into transforming your data, AI-driven empowerment, and leading with human centric data.
Following the morning keynotes will be a series of practitioner-led breakouts featurimg experts who have held senior roles at some of the most recognized brands in the world, including: Microsoft, Twitch, HubSpot, Cost Plus World Market and others. Panels, workshops and keynotes will cover workplace experience; AI in research and experience; deep dives on CX and many others. A full agenda is available via the web at: https://www.questionpro.com/xday/2024/
The afternoon keynote address will be delivered by Tim Sanders, currently the Vice President of Research Insights at G2. He brings a deep understanding of AI, digital transformation, and customer-centric strategies after serving as Vice President of Client Strategy at Upwork and many other prestigious institutions. As an Executive Fellow at Harvard’s Digital Data Design Institute, he drives AI adoption and data-driven business decisions. With a rich history at Yahoo and a bestselling author, Tim’s insights on leadership, digital transformation, and change management are not to be missed.
The event concludes with a rooftop dinner reception at Arriba Abajo, on top of the Thompson Hotel. Arriba Abajo beckons guests with its unique blend of cantina concept and elevated hospitality while captivating guests with its awe-inspiring rooftop patio and pool.
About QuestionPro: Founded in 2006, QuestionPro is a global provider of online survey and research services that help companies make better decisions through data. Our fully integrated online platform includes surveys, research & insights, customer experience (CX) and workforce/employee experience software. We additionally offer polling, journey mapping, employee 360s, and data visualization. Our clientele ranges from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies, who rely on us for insights about customers, employees, and the marketplace. With offices in the US, Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, Japan, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and India, we offer customers 24-7 access to highly trained support specialists and engineers. More information is available at www.questionpro.com.
This post originally appeared on theTransform with Google Cloud blog. It was first published April 12, 2024; last updated with new use cases September 24, 2024.
Since generative AI first captured the world’s attention, there’s been a vigorous discussion about what, exactly, the new technology is best used for. While we all enjoyed those early funny chats and witty limericks, we’ve quickly discovered that many of the biggest AI opportunities are clearly in the enterprise, government, and with exciting new companies.
When we first published this post during Google Cloud Next ‘24, we showcased 101 of the best use cases out of the hundreds featured across the event. Now, we’re adding another 84 to the list as customers across the globe continue to put generative AI to work.
[If you’ve visited this post in the past, you can find the newest use cases listed at the top of each section.]
In a matter of months, organizations have gone from AI helping answer questions, to AI making predictions, to generative AI agents. What makes AI agents unique is that they can take actions to achieve specific goals, whether that’s guiding a shopper to the perfect pair of shoes, helping an employee looking for the right health benefits, or supporting nursing staff with smoother patient hand-offs during shifts changes.
In our work with customers, we keep hearing that their teams are increasingly focused on improving productivity, automating processes, and modernizing the customer experience. These aims are now being achieved through the AI agents they’re developing in six key areas: customer service; employee empowerment; code creation; data analysis; cybersecurity; and creative ideation and production.
Hundreds of Google Cloud customers have now put AI agents and gen-AI solutions into production throughout their businesses and the world — with many seeing a tangible return on investment. They have come to rely on Google Cloud technologies that include our AI infrastructure, Gemini models, Vertex AI platform, Google Workspace, and Google Distributed Cloud.
Here’s a snapshot of how 185 of these industry leaders are putting AI to use today, creating real-world use cases that will transform tomorrow.
Customer agents
Similar to great sales and service people, customer agents are able to listen carefully, understand your needs, and recommend the right products and services. They work seamlessly across channels including the web, mobile, and point of sale, and can be integrated into product experiences with voice and video.
1.Alaska Airlines is developing natural language search, providing travelers with a conversational experience powered by AI that’s akin to interacting with a knowledgeable travel agent. This chatbot aims to streamline travel booking, enhance customer experience, and reinforce brand identity.
2. Bennie Health uses Vertex AI to power its innovative employee health benefits platform, providing actionable insights and streamlining data management in order to enhance efficiency and decision-making for employees and HR teams.
3. Beyond 12, a tech-enabled nonprofit focused on student empowerment, has developed an AI-powered college coach to offer scalable coaching to first-generation students that’s available over text, app, and the web.
4. CareerVillage is building an app called Coach to empower job seekers, especially underrepresented youth, in their career preparedness; already featuring 35 career development activities, the aim is to have more than 100 by next year.
5. Character.ai built its realistic conversational chat platform using the full stack of Google Cloud AI services, including for model training and daily operations, allowing it to manage terabytes of conversations each day without interruption.
6. Click Therapeutics develops prescription digital therapeutics designed to treat disease. Its Clinical Operations team leverages Gemini for Google Workspace to transform complex operations data into actionable insights, so they can quickly pinpoint ways to streamline the patient experience in clinical trials.
7. Formula E can now summarize a two-hour long race commentary into a 2-minute podcast in any language, incorporating driver data and ongoing seasonal storylines.
8. General Motors’ OnStar has been augmented with new AI features, including a virtual assistant powered by Google Cloud’s conversational AI technologies that are better able to recognize the speaker’s intent.
9. Gojek, an Indonesia-based super app, launched “Dira by GoTo AI,” a Bahasa Indonesia AI-powered voice assistant integrated into their GoPay service, allowing customers to use voice command to eliminate typing and scrolling, and complete tasks like bill payments and money transfers with fewer steps.
10. GroupBy, an ecommerce service provider, developed an AI-first Search and Discovery Platform powered by Vertex AI Search for Retail. This solution is meticulously designed to optimize revenue, strengthen brand loyalty, and drive sales growth for B2C and B2B retailers.
11. Hotelplan Suisse built a chatbot trained on the business’s travel expertise to answer customer inquiries in real-time, and, following that success, it plans to use gen AI to create travel content.
12. Justicia Lab is developing an AI-powered assistant that will simplify legal processes for asylum seekers and immigrants; by uploading a picture from a legal letter or document, users can extract valuable information and then receive personalized guidance and next steps.
13. Mercado Libre has incorporated semantic search into its digital shopping platforms, using AI embeddings from the Vertex AI Agent Builder, which greatly improved product recommendations and discoverability for more than 200 million consumers across Latin America.
14. Motorola’s Moto AI leverages Gemini and Imagen to help smartphone users unlock new levels of productivity, creativity, and enjoyment with features such as conversation summaries, notification digests, image creation, and natural language search — all with reliable responses grounded in Google Search.
15. mRelief has built an SMS-accessible AI chatbot to simplify the application process for the SNAP food assistance program in the U.S., featuring easy-to-understand eligibility information and direct assistance within minutes rather than days.
16. Personal AI offers a “personal language model” using only the data of one individual or brand and allowing them to control and own how it is used. Built on your own data, facts, and opinions, it creates a responsive and interactive messaging experience that helps people be more productive and deepen relationships.
17. PODS worked with the advertising agency Tombras to create the “World’s Smartest Billboard” using Gemini — a campaign on its trucks that could adapt to each neighborhood in New York City, changing in real-time based on data. It hit all 299 neighborhoods in just 29 hours, creating more than 6,000 unique headlines.
18. Quora developed Poe, its own generative AI platform for people to discover and chat with AI-powered bots, including Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral’s Large 2 — many of which are hosted on Google Cloud’s purpose-built AI infrastructure.
19. ScottsMiracle-Gro built an AI agent on Vertex AI to provide tailored gardening advice and product recommendations for consumers.
20. Snap has deployed the multimodal capability of Gemini within its “My AI” chatbot and has since seen over 2.5-times as much engagement within Snapping to My AI in the United States.
21. Tabiya has built a conversational interface, Compass, that helps young people find employment opportunities; the platform asks questions and requests information, drawing out skills and experiences and matching those to appropriate roles.
22. Telecom Italia (TIM) implemented a Google-powered voice agent to address many customer calls, increasing efficiency by 20%.
23. UPS Capital launched DeliveryDefense Address Confidence, which uses machine learning and UPS data to provide a confidence score for shippers to help them determine the likelihood of a successful delivery.
24. Volkswagen of America built a virtual assistant in the myVW app, where drivers can explore their owners’ manuals and ask questions, such as, “How do I change a flat tire?” or “What does this digital cockpit indicator light mean?” Users can also use Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to see helpful information and context on indicator lights simply by pointing their smartphone cameras at the dashboard.
25. ADT is building a customer agent to help its millions of customers select, order, and set up their home security.
26. Alaska Airlines is developing a personalized travel search experience using advanced AI techniques, creating hyper-personalized recommendations that engage customers early and foster loyalty through AI-generated content.
27. Best Buy is using Gemini to launch a generative AI-powered virtual assistant this summer that can troubleshoot product issues, reschedule order deliveries, manage Geek Squad subscriptions, and more; in-store and digital customer-service associates are also gaining gen-AI tools to better serve customers anywhere they need help.
28. The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is using Vertex AI to modernize transportation operations for a smoother, more efficient journey.
29. Etsy uses Vertex AI training to optimize their search recommendations and ads models, delivering better listing suggestions to buyers and helping sellers grow their businesses.
30. IHG Hotels & Resorts is building a generative AI-powered chatbot to help guests easily plan their next vacation directly in the IHG One Rewards mobile app.
31. ING Bank aims to offer a superior customer experience and has developed a gen-AI chatbot for workers to enhance self-service capabilities and improve answer quality on customer queries.
32. Magalu, one of Brazil’s largest retailers, has put customer service at the center of its AI strategy, including using Vertex AI to create “Lu’s Brain” to power an interactive conversational agent for Lu, Magalu’s popular brand persona (the 3D bot has more than 14 million followers between TikTok and Instagram).
33. Mercedes Benz will infuse e-commerce capabilities into its online storefront with a gen AI-powered smart sales assistant. Mercedes also plans to expand its use of Google Cloud AI in its call centers and is using Vertex AI and Gemini to personalize marketing campaigns.
34. Oppo/OnePlus is incorporating Gemini models and Google Cloud AI into their phones to deliver innovative customer experiences, including news and audio recording summaries, AI toolbox, and more.
35. Samsung is deploying Gemini Pro and Imagen 2 to their Galaxy S24 smartphones so users can take advantage of amazing features like text summarization, organization, and magical image editing.
36. The Minnesota Division of Driver and Vehicle Services helps non-English speakers get licenses and other services with two-way real-time translation.
37. Pepperdine University has students and faculty who speak many languages, and with Gemini in Google Meet, they can benefit from real-time translated captioning and notes.
38. Sutherland, a leading digital transformation company, is focused on bringing together human expertise and AI, including boosting its client-facing teams by automatically surfacing suggested responses and automating insights in real time.
39. Target uses Google Cloud to power AI solutions on the Target app and Target.com, including personalized Target Circle offers and Starbucks at Drive Up, their curbside pickup solution.
40. Tokopedia, an Indonesian ecommerce leader, is using Vertex AI to improve data quality, increasing unique products being sold by 5%.
41. US News saw a double-digit impact in key metrics like click-through rate, time spent on page, and traffic volume to its pages after implementing Vertex AI Search.
42-45. IntesaSanpaolo, MacquarieBank, and Scotiabank are exploring the potential of gen AI to transform the way we live, work, bank, and invest — particularly how the new technology can boost productivity and operational efficiency in banking.
Employee agents
Employee agents help workers be more productive and collaborate better together. These agents can streamline processes, manage repetitive tasks, answer employee questions, as well as edit and translate critical communications.
46. 2bots offers technology solutions, such as chatbots and virtual agents, built with Google Cloud’s AI solutions; these intelligent chatbots and content generation tools are transforming the way companies interact with their customers.
47. Augment is building an AI personal assistant that offers enhanced note-taking and collects information across your apps, including calendar, email, texts, and social media, so users can more quickly and easily find personal information and keep their lives organized.
48. Bayes Impact builds AI products to support nonprofits, and its flagship product, CaseAI, is a digital case manager that integrates with an NGO’s current system to add smart features to draft action plans tailored to a beneficiary’s unique history; caseworkers have saved 25 hours of work per week on average.
49. Bell Canada has built customizable contact center solutions for its business customers that offer AI-powered agents to address callers, and Agent Assist, which listens when a human agent is on, offering suggestions and sentiment analysis. AI has contributed $20 million in savings across customer operations.
50. Best Buy can generate conversation summaries in real time using Contact Center AI, allowing live agents to give their full attention to understanding and supporting customers, resulting in a 30-to-90-second reduction in average call time and after-call work. Both customers and agents have cited improved satisfaction.
51. Camanchaca, a Chilean seafood company, took only six weeks to develop Elon, a virtual assistant that aims to provide more efficient customer service through digital channels, enhancing Camanchaca’s customer interactions.
52. Certify OS is automating credentialing, licensing, and monitoring of medical providers for healthcare networks, relieving the burden of time-consuming and often siloed information.
53. Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs widely uses Gemini for Google Workspace, estimating that employees are saving an average five hours per week just with AI capabilities in Gmail. Gemini is also streamlining time-consuming, manual processes through uses like AI-generated transcriptions and auto-formatting of pharmaceutical lab results or FDA compliance documentation.
54. Dun & Bradstreet built an email-generation tool with Gemini that helps sellers create tailored, personalized communications to prospects and customers for its research services. The company also developed intelligent search capabilities to help users with complex queries like, “Find me all the companies in this area with a high ESG rating.”
55. England’s Football Association is training Vertex AI on the FA’s historical and current scouting reports so they can be transformed into concise summaries, helping national teams discover future talent.
56. Fireflies.ai can transcribe, summarize, and analyze meetings, recordings, and other voice conversations to save time and improve collaboration and information sharing across teams.
57. Fluna, a Pan-African digital services company, has automated the analysis and drafting of legal agreements using Vertex AI, Document AI, and Gemini 1.5 Pro, achieving an accuracy of 92% in data extraction while ensuring security and reliability for sensitive information.
58. Hemominas, Brazil’s largest blood bank, partnered with Xertica to develop an omnichannel chatbot for donor search and scheduling, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency. The AI solution has the potential to save half-a-million lives annually by attracting more donors and optimizing blood supply management.
59. Hiscox used BigQuery and Vertex AI to create the first AI-enhanced lead underwriting model for insurers, automating and accelerating the quoting for complex risks from three days down to a few minutes.
60. LiveX AI delivers AI Agents that swiftly enhance product education, boost customer conversion, reduce churn, and provide personalized customer support, with the goal of offering everyone a seamless VIP experience across their customer journey.
61. Opportunity@Work is applying gen AI to scale a suite of software tools and APIs that help employers identify “STAR” job candidates — “skilled through alternative routes” such as community college, military service, and on-the-job experience — helping fill roles in a tight market and expand opportunities.
62. QuantumMetric has introduced Felix AI, powered by Gemini Pro, to simplify digital analytics and decision making. Felix AI automatically summarizes a user’s web or mobile session and consolidates the moments that matter most into short, readable summaries for customer service workers.
63. Randstad, a large HR services and talent provider, is using Gemini for Workspace across its organization to transform its work culture, leading to a more culturally diverse and inclusive workplace that’s seen a double-digit reduction in sick days.
64. Sprinklr built Sprinklr AI+ into its unified customer experience management platform, giving brands gen-AI capabilities for customer service, insights, social media management, and marketing that has enterprise-grade governance, security, and data privacy built-in.
65. Thomson Reuters added Gemini Pro to its suite of large language models approved for employee use; with its 2-million-token context window, Gemini makes some tasks as much as 10-times faster to process and can process entire documents in context.
66. Warner Bros. Discovery built an AI captioning tool with Vertex AI and saw a 50% reduction in overall costs, and an 80% reduction in the time it takes to manually caption a file without the use of machine learning.
67. The U.S. Air Force built a new proof-of-concept portal for searching, browsing, and reading e-published PDFs — all within a 90-day deadline that leveraged the prebuilt tools and speed of Vertex AI Search and Conversation.
68. Avery Dennison empowered their employees with generative AI to enable secure, flexible, and borderless collaboration for enhanced productivity to drive growth.
69. Bank of New York Mellon built a virtual assistant to help employees find relevant information and answers to their questions.
70. Bayer is building a radiology platform that will assist radiologists with data analysis, intelligent search, and to create documents that meet healthcare requirements needed for regulatory approval. The bioscience company is also harnessing BigQuery and Vertex AI to develop additional digital medical solutions and drugs more efficiently.
71. Bristol Myers Squibb is transforming its document processes for clinical trials using Vertex AI and Google Workspace. Now, documentation that took scientists weeks now gets to a first draft in minutes.
72. BenchSci develops generative AI solutions empowering scientists to understand complex connections in biological research, saving them time and financial resources and ultimately bringing new medicine to patients faster.
73. Cintas is using Vertex AI Search to develop an internal knowledge center for customer service and sales teams to easily find key information.
74. Covered California, the state’s healthcare marketplace, is using Document AI to help improve the consumer and employee experience by automating parts of the documentation and verification process when residents apply for coverage.
75. Dasa, the largest medical diagnostics company in Brazil, is helping physicians detect relevant findings in test results more quickly.
76. DaVita leverages DocAI and Healthcare NLP to transform kidney care, including analyzing medical records, uncovering critical patient insights, and reducing errors. AI enables physicians to focus on personalized care, resulting in significant improvements in healthcare delivery.
77. Discover Financial helps their 10,000 contact center representatives to search and synthesize information across detailed policies and procedures during calls.
78. HCA Healthcare is testing Cati, a virtual AI caregiver assistant that helps to ensure continuity of care when one caregiver shift ends and another begins. They are also using gen AI to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation, so physicians and nurses can focus more on patient care.
79. The Home Depot has built an application called Sidekick, which helps store associates manage inventory and keep shelves stocked; notably, vision models help associates prioritize which actions to take.
80. Los Angeles Rams are utilizing AI across the board from content analysis to player scouting.
81. McDonald’s will leverage data, AI, and edge technologies across its thousands of restaurants to implement innovation faster and to enhance employee and customer experiences.
82. Pennymac, a leading US-based national mortgage lender, is using Gemini across several teams including HR, where Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Gmail is helping them accelerate recruiting, hiring, and new employee onboarding.
83. Robert Bosch, the world’s largest automotive supplier, revolutionizes marketing through gen AI-powered solutions, streamlining processes, optimizing resource allocation, and maximizing efficiency across 100+ decentralized departments.
84. Symphony, the communications platform for the financial services industry, uses Vertex AI to help finance and trading teams collaborate across multiple asset classes.
85. Uber is using AI agents to help employees be more productive, save time, and be even more effective at work. For customer service representatives, they’ve launched new tools that summarize communications with users and can even surface context from previous interactions, so front-line staff can be more helpful and effective.
86. The U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs is using AI at the edge to improve cancer detection for service members and veterans. The Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM) is deployed at remote military treatment facilities around the world. The prototype device is helping pathologists find cancer faster and with better accuracy.
87. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has improved the quality and efficiency of their patent and trademark examination process by implementing AI-driven technologies.
88. Verizon is using generative AI to help teams in network operations and customer experience get the answers they need faster.
89. Victoria’s Secret is testing AI-powered agents to help their in-store associates find information about product availability, inventory, and fitting and sizing tips, so they can better tailor recommendations to customers.
90. Vodafone uses Vertex AI to search and understand specific commercial terms and conditions across more than 10,000 contracts with more than 800 communications operators
91. WellSky is integrating Google Cloud’s healthcare and Vertex AI capabilities to reduce the time spent completing documentation outside work hours.
92. Woolworths, the leading retailer in Australia, boosts employees’ confidence in communications with “Help me write” across Google Workspace products for more than 10,000 administrative employees. It’s also using Gemini to create next-generation promotions, as well as for quickly assisting customer service reps in summarizing all previous customer interactions in real time.
93-97. Box, Typeface, Glean, CitiBank, and Securiti AI discuss developing AI-powered apps across the enterprise, with measurable returns on investment for marketing, financial services, and HR use cases.
98-99. Highmark Health and Freenome join Bristol Myers Squibb to explore how AI can improve efficiency and innovation across care delivery, drug discovery, clinical trial planning, and bringing medicines to market.
Code agents
Code agents are helping developers and product teams to design, create, and operate applications faster and better, and to ramp up on new languages and code bases. Many organizations are already seeing double-digit gains in productivity, leading to faster deployment and cleaner, clearer code.
100. Labelbox has built a fully managed AI model evaluation solution directly integrated into the Vertex AI platform, allowing Google Cloud users to seamlessly launch human evaluation jobs and set specific criteria for evaluation, such as question-answering and summarization; this eases and accelerates the ability to deploy human-in-the-loop AI systems with higher levels of trust and authority.
101. Leroy Merlin, a global home improvement retailer, developed its Pull Request Analyzer using Vertex AI. This generative AI solution summarizes code changes, helping developers understand projects faster and improve code review efficiency.
102. Linear, a product development platform, built Similar Issues, a feature that uses AI to detect and prevent duplicate or overlapping tickets and ensures cleaner and more accurate data representation.
103. Magic is building a developer platform with a 100-million-token context window, so organizations can upload extremely large code bases and more easily query and build on them using gen AI assistance.
104. Pinecone provides infrastructure for developers to build accurate, secure, and scalable AI applications, allowing companies to easily ground gen AI apps in their proprietary data for use in AI search, retrieval-augmented generation, coding agents, and more.
105. Regnology built its Ticket-to-Code Writer tool with Gemini 1.5 Pro to automate the conversion of bug tickets into actionable code, significantly streamlining the software development process.
106. Weights & Biases, a creator of AI tools for developers, created W&B Weave, a lightweight toolkit to track, evaluate, and debug gen AI applications built with Gemini, so teams can confidently go from demo to production.
107. Capgemini has been using Code Assist to improve software engineering productivity, quality, security, and developer experience, with early results showing workload gains for coding and more stable code quality.
108. Commerzbank is enhancing developer efficiency through Code Assist’s robust security and compliance features.
109. Quantiphi saw developer productivity gains of more than 30% during their Code Assist pilot.
110. Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit’s software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform.
111. Seattle Children’s hospital is using AI to boost data engineering productivity and accelerate development.
112. Turing is customizing Gemini Code Assist on their private codebase, empowering their developers with highly personalized and contextually relevant coding suggestions that have increased productivity around 30 percent and made day-to-day coding more enjoyable.
113. Wayfair piloted Code Assist, and those developers with the code agent were able to set up their environments 55 percent faster than before, there was a 48 percent increase in code performance during unit testing, and 60 percent of developers reported that they were able to focus on more satisfying work.
Data agents
Data agents are like having knowledgeable data analysts and researchers at your fingertips. They can help answer questions about internal and external sources, synthesize research, develop new models — and, best of all, help find the questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet, and then help get the answers.
114. 180Seguros is powering its data management platform for employees with Google Cloud AI and BigQuery to improve operational metric tracking, allowing for 3X faster query times.
115. Addy AI is helping mortgage lenders and banks automate their lending processes with custom AI models trained on Vertex AI. For example, the platform can extract loan opportunity details from lengthy email threads with numerous attachments.
116. Bayer Crop Science has developed Climate FieldView, a comprehensive agricultural platform with more than 250 layers of data and billions of data points; AI-powered recommendations allow farmers to design and monitor their fields for greater yields and efficient fertilization, with the added benefit of reduced carbon emissions.
117. CME Group is building a first-of-its-kind cloud-based commodities trading platform with AI tools built-in, offering CME’s trading customers access to deeper insights and smarter trades as well as rapid experimentation on new trading strategies that won’t interrupt existing trade flows.
118. Digits is developing next-gen accounting software for startups and small businesses; using AI-driven bookkeeping, expense management, and financial analysis, Digits enables business owners to achieve financial clarity and focus on growth.
119. Elanco, a leader in animal health, has implemented a gen AI framework supporting critical business processes, such as Pharmacovigilance, Customer Orders, and Clinical Insights. The framework, powered by Vertex AI and Gemini, has resulted in an estimated ROI of $1.9 million since launching last year.
120. Full Fact, a UK-based nonprofit working in 18 countries to combat misinformation, is now using gen AI to actively monitor stories so its 30 fact-checking partner organizations can focus on addressing specific claims and harmful information.
121. Fullstory, a digital behavioral data platform, is building the ability to analyze and summarize user behavior on a site to create more informed and enriching chatbot experiences; responses are more relevant and accurate, ultimately improving virtual agent performance and customer experience
122. GamudaBerhad, a Malaysian infrastructure and property management company, has integrated a Gemini-powered conversational agent into its cloud-based Tunnel Insight platform, providing faster information and insights during construction projects.
123. IntelligenciaAI is using AI models to research novel new drugs, relying on Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure to deliver scalable research that is accurate and transparent to meet the stringent needs of medicine.
124. IPRally built a custom machine-learning platform that uses natural language processing on the text of more than 120 million global patent documents, creating an accurate, easily searchable database that adds more than 200,000 new sources a week.
125. Ipsos built a data analysis tool for its teams of market researchers, eliminating the need for time-consuming requests to data analysts, which is powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash models as well as Grounding with Google Search to enhance real-world accuracy from contemporaneous Search information.
126. Materiom, a startup researching zero-waste, bio-based alternatives to fossil-fuel-made products like plastics, is creating a gen AI tool that enables entrepreneurs to develop novel compostable materials with broad applications; AI offers faster research and information gathering to speed up the development process.
127. Mendel has built a clinical AI system designed to break down the longstanding silos in medical data, boosting accuracy, accessibility, and ultimately patient health outcomes.
128. NeuroPace, a medical device company, built a solution to quickly identify effective epilepsy treatment options best suited to different patients; by analyzing brainwave patterns, it can find similar patients and apply successful therapies, streamlining personalized care.
129. NotCo, a Chilean food tech company, partnered with Eleven Solutions to develop a conversational AI chatbot powered by Gemini; the chatbot has revolutionized data access, allowing employees to instantly query their SAP system and gain real-time insights for faster, data-driven decision-making.
130. SURA Investments, the largest asset manager in Latin America, developed an AI-based analysis model for employees that allows them to better understand customer needs and improve customer experience and satisfaction.
131. AI21 Labs offers a BigQuery integration called Contextual Answers that allows users to query data conversationally and get high-quality answers quickly.
132. Anthropic has partnered with Google Cloud to offer its family of Claude 3 models on Vertex AI — providing organizations with more model options for intelligence, speed, cost-efficiency, and vision for enterprise use cases.
133. The Asteroid Institute is using AI to discover hidden asteroids in existing astronomical data. This is a major focus for astronomers researching the evolution of the Solar System, investors and businesses hoping to fly missions to asteroids, and for all of us who want to prevent future large asteroid impacts on Earth.
134. Contextual is working with Google Cloud to offer enterprises fully customizable, trustworthy, privacy-aware AI grounded in internal knowledge bases.
135. Cox 2M, the commercial IoT division of Cox Communications, is able to make smarter, faster business decisions using AI-powered analytics.
136. Essential AI, a developer of enterprise AI solutions, is using Google Cloud’s AI-optimized TPU v5p accelerator chips to train its own AI models.
137. Generali Italia, Italy’s largest insurance provider, used Vertex AI to build a model evaluation pipeline that helps ML teams quickly evaluate performance and deploy models.
138. Globo, one of Brazil’s largest media networks, is using Service Extensions and Media CDN to fight piracy during live events by blocking pirated streams in real time.
139. Golden State Warriors are using AI to improve the fan experience content in their Chase Center app.
140. Hugging Face is collaborating with Google across open science, open source, cloud, and hardware to enable companies to build their own AI with the latest open models from Hugging Face and Google Cloud hardware and software.
141. Kakao Brain, part of Korean technology company Kakao Group, has built a large-scale AI language model that is the largest Korean language-specific LLM in the market, with 66 billion parameters. They’ve also developed a text-to-image generator called Karlo.
142. Mayo Clinic has given thousands of its scientific researchers access to 50 petabytes worth of clinical data through Vertex AI search, accelerating information retrieval across multiple languages.
143. McLaren Racing is using Google AI to get up-to-the-millisecond insights during races and training to gain a competitive edge.
144. Mercado Libre is testing BigQuery and Looker to optimize capacity planning and reservations with delivery carriers and airlines to fulfill shipments faster.
145. Mistral AI will use Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure, to further test, build, and scale up its LLMs, all while benefiting from Google Cloud’s security and privacy standards.
146. MSCI uses machine learning with Vertex AI, BigQuery and Cloud Run to enrich its datasets to help our clients gain insight into around 1 million asset locations to help manage climate-related risks.
147. NewsCorp is using Vertex AI to help search data across 30,000 sources and 2.5 billion news articles updated daily.
148. Orange operates in 26 countries where local data must be kept in each country. They are using AI on Google Distributed Cloud to improve network performance and deliver super-responsive translation capabilities.
149. Spotify leveraged Dataflow for large-scale generation of ML podcast previews, and they plan to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with data engineering and data science to build better experiences for their customers and creators.
150. UPS is building a digital twin of its entire distribution network, so both workers and customers can see where their packages are at any time.
151. Workday is using natural language processing in Vertex Search and Conversation to make data insights more accessible for technical and non-technical users alike.
152. Woven — Toyota‘s investment in the future of mobility — is partnering with Google to leverage vast amounts of data and AI to enable autonomous driving, supported by thousands of ML workloads on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer. This has resulted in resulting in 50% total-cost-of-ownership savings to support automated driving.
152-153. Broward County, Florida, and Southern California Edison are using geospatial capabilities and AI to improve infrastructure planning and monitoring, generate new insights, and create regional resilience for communities facing climate challenges today and tomorrow.
154-155. Kinaxis and Dematic are building data-driven supply chains to address logistics use cases including scenario modeling, planning, operations management, and automation.
156-157. NOAA and USAID are among the U.S. government agencies using Google Cloud AI to unlock critical data insights to streamline operations and improve mission outcomes — all with an emphasis on responsible AI.
Security agents
Security agents assist security operations by radically increasing the speed of investigations, automating monitoring and response for greater vigilance and compliance controls. They can also help guard data and models from cyberattacks, such as malicious prompt injection.
158. Apex Fintech is using Gemini in Security to accelerate the writing of complex threat detections from hours to a matter of seconds.
159. Exabeam has built a generative AI copilot for security analysts into its New-Scale Security Operations Platform.
160. Fiserv, a developer of financial services technology, can now summarize threats, find answers, and detect, validate, and respond to security events faster with the Gemini in Security Operations platform.
161. NetRise developed Trace to provide software supply chain security by introducing AI-powered intent-driven searches; these allow users to search their assets based on the underlying motives or purposes behind the code and configurations, rather than solely relying on signature-based methods.
162. Palo Alto Networks is using Gemini to create a grounded AI assistant for 24/7 security platform support in order to improve agent efficiency and response time; grounding the assistant in organizational data and security protocols has greatly improved the accuracy of responses.
163. BBVA uses AI in Google SecOps to detect, investigate, and respond to security threats with more accuracy, speed, and scale. The platform now surfaces critical security data in seconds, when it previously took minutes or even hours, and delivers highly automated responses.
164. Behavox is using Google Cloud technology and LLMs to provide industry leading regulatory compliance and front office solutions for financial institutions globally.
165. Charles Schwab has integrated their own intelligence into the AI-powered Google SecOps, so analysts can better prioritize work and respond to threats.
166. Fiserv’s security operations engineers create detections and playbooks with much less effort, while analysts get answers more quickly.
167. Grupo Boticário, one of the largest beauty retail and cosmetics companies in Brazil, employs real-time security models to prevent fraud and to detect and respond to issues.
168. Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM, the AI-driven security operations platform, is built on more than a decade of expertise in machine-learning models and the most comprehensive, rich, and diverse data store in the industry. Backed by Google’s advanced cloud infrastructure and advanced AI services, including BigQuery and Gemini models, the combination delivers global scale and near real-time protection across all cybersecurity offerings.
169. Pfizer can now aggregate cybersecurity data sources, cutting analysis times from days to seconds.
Creative agents
Creative agents can expand your organization with the best design and production skills, working across images, slides, and exploring concepts with workers. Many organizations are building agents for their marketing teams, audio and video production teams, and all the creative people that can use a hand. With creative agents, anyone can become a designer, artist, or producer.
170. AdoreMe marketers write differentiated product descriptions in one hour, a tedious task which used to take 30-40 hours a month thanks to Gemini for Google Workspace.
171. Globo, the largest media group in Latin America, is using Google Cloud’s AI to hyper-personalize content for its streaming users, and create a better experience for spectators.
172. Higgsfield.ai built a number of text-to-video apps for consumers, including Diffuse 2.0, which can combine users photos, videos, and texts through AI models to create more realistic avatars.
173. Jasper trains its suite of creativity-, writing-, and marketing-focused AI models on Google’s AI infrastructure, delivering on-brand, data-optimized assets faster and at scale to teams large and small.
174. Puma is using Imagen to customize product photos on its website, saving time and ensuring they are locally relevant across markets; PUMA India has already seen a 10% increase in click through rate.
175. RadissonHotel Group personalized its advertising at scale in collaboration with Accenture and using Vertex AI and Gemini models, training them on extensive datasets stored in BigQuery; ad teams saw productivity rise around 50% while revenue increased from AI-powered campaigns by more than 20%
176. SquareEnix is using customer data to develop AI-optimized marketing assets to keep its gamers engaged, sharing personalized emails suited to each player’s preferences, leading to a 20% increase in email opens and a 10% increased retention rate.
177. Urmobo, a mobile-device management platform, created a virtual agent, Odin, that significantly improved user experience and reduced support tickets by enabling clients to interact with the platform using natural language.
178. The World Bank is developing a tool to extract key information from research literature on the causal impact of development interventions, with the ultimate goal to empower decision-makers to allocate the $220B in annual aid and trillions in annual impact investing more effectively.
179. Belk ECommerce is using generative AI to craft better product descriptions, a necessary yet time-consuming task for digital retails that has often been done manually.
180. Canva is using Vertex AI to power its Magic Design for Video, helping users skip tedious editing steps while creating shareable and engaging videos in a matter of seconds.
181. Carrefour used Vertex AI to deploy Carrefour Marketing Studio in just five weeks — an innovative solution to streamline the creation of dynamic campaigns across various social networks. In just a few clicks, marketers can build ultra-personalized campaigns to deliver customers advertising that they care about.
182. Major League Baseball continues to innovate its Statcast platform, so teams, broadcasters, and fans have access to live in-game insights.
183. Paramount currently relies on manual processes to create the essential metadata and video summaries used across its Paramount+ platform for showcasing content and creating personalized experiences for viewers. VertexAI Text Bison is now helping to streamline this process.
184. Procter & Gamble used Imagen to develop an internal gen AI platform to accelerate the creation of photo-realistic images and creative assets, giving marketing teams more time to focus on high-level planning and delivering superior experiences for its consumers.
185. WPP will integrate Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities into its intelligent marketing operating system, called WPP Open, which empowers its people and clients to deliver new levels of personalization, creativity, and efficiency. This includes the use of Gemini 1.5 Pro models to supercharge both the accuracy and speed of content performance predictions.
To find even more customers using our AI tools to build agents and solutions for their most important enterprise projects, visit the Google Cloud customer hub.
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Following the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting at the High-Level Week of the UN General Assembly, the following statement was made by Chair Antonio Tajani.
1. Introduction
In today’s meeting in New York, in the wake of the Summit of the Future, the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the High Representative of the European Union reiterated their commitment to upholding the rule of law, humanitarian principles and international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, and to protecting human rights and dignity for all individuals.
They re-emphasized their determination to foster collective action in order to preserve peace and stability to address global challenges, such as the climate crisis and to advance the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In doing so, the G7 members renewed their commitment to the promotion of free societies and democratic principles, where all persons can freely exercise their rights and freedoms.
2. Summit for the Future
In the spirit of the renewed determination to strengthen the multilateral system based on the UN Charter’s principles, as reflected in the Pact for the Future adopted at the Summit of the Future by world Leaders, the G7 members committed to continue working with countries and all relevant stakeholders within the UN system through dialogue, mutual understanding and respect in the pursuit of common solutions, with the aim of upholding and reforming the multilateral system so that it better reflects today’s world and is fit to respond to the complex global challenges of the future. They reaffirmed their commitment to work with all UN member states to strengthen the roles of the UNSG as well as the UNGA. They also recommitted to the reform of the UNSC.
3. Steadfast Support to Ukraine
The G7 members reaffirmed their unwavering support to Ukraine as it defends its freedom, sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity, against Russia’s brutal and unjustifiable war of aggression. The G7 members strongly condemned Russia’s blatant breach of international law, including the UN Charter, and of the basic principles that underpin the international order. They strongly condemned the serious violations of international humanitarian law perpetrated by Russia’s forces in Ukraine, which have caused a devastating impact on the civilian population. Violence against civilians, including women, children, and prisoners of war is unacceptable.
They expressed their outrage at Russia’s repeated attacks against critical infrastructure and they condemned in the strongest possible terms any targeting of civilian buildings and even hospitals. Ensuring the protection and resilience of Ukraine’s energy grid and its power generation capacity remains a fundamental and urgent priority as winter approaches. They welcomed the international conference on energy security held on August 22. .as well as the ongoing coordination of the G7 energy group. They reiterated their commitment to help Ukraine meet its urgent short-term financing needs, as well as support its long-term recovery and reconstruction priorities.
Russia must end its war of aggression and pay for the damage it has caused to Ukraine. The G7 members reiterated their commitment to explore and use all possible lawful avenues by which Russia is made to meet those obligations.
The launch of the Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) Loans for Ukraine, as mandated by G7 leaders, will make available approximately USD 50 billion in additional funding to Ukraine that will be serviced and repaid by future flows of extraordinary revenues stemming from the immobilization of Russian sovereign assets held in the European Union and other relevant jurisdictions.
The G7 Foreign Ministers and the High Representative are working, together with Finance Ministers, to operationalize the G7 Leaders’ commitment by the end of the year. They will maintain solidarity in this commitment to providing this support to Ukraine. The G7 members confirmed that, consistent with all applicable laws and their respective legal systems, Russia’s sovereign assets in their jurisdictions will remain immobilized until Russia ends its aggression and pays for the damage it has caused to Ukraine.
They also committed to strengthening the Ukraine Donor Platform to help coordinate the disbursal of funds and ensure they align with Ukraine’s highest priority needs at a pace it can effectively absorb. This will play a key role in advancing Ukraine’s reforms in line with its European path and in contributing to a successful Ukraine Recovery Conference to be held in Italy in 2025.
Any use of nuclear weapons by Russia in the context of its war of aggression against Ukraine would be inadmissible. They therefore condemned in the strongest possible terms Russia’s irresponsible and threatening nuclear rhetoric, as well as its posture of strategic intimidation. They also expressed their deepest concern about the reported use of chemical weapons as well as riot control agents as a method of warfare by Russia in Ukraine.
The G7 members remained committed to holding those responsible accountable for atrocities in Ukraine, in line with international law. They also condemned the seizures of foreign companies and called on Russia to reverse these measures and seek acceptable solutions with the companies targeted by them.
They condemned Russia’s seizure and continued control and militarization of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which poses severe risks for nuclear safety and security, potentially affecting the entire international community. They reiterated their support to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s efforts directed at mitigating such risks.
They underlined once again their support for Ukraine’s right of self-defense and reiterated their commitment to Ukraine’s long-term security, recalling the launch of the Ukraine Compact in Washington on 11 July 2024. They re-affirmed the intention to increasing industrial production and delivery capabilities to assist Ukraine’s self-defense. They highlighted their support to Ukraine in its efforts to modernize its armed forces and strengthen its own defense industry. They expressed their resolve to bolster Ukraine’s air defense capabilities to save lives and protect critical infrastructure.
They remained committed to raising the costs of Russia’s war of aggression by building on the comprehensive package of sanctions and economic measures already in place. Though existing measures have had a significant impact on Russia’s war machine and ability to fund its invasion, its military is still posing a threat not just to Ukraine but also to international security.
The G7 members expressed the intention to continue taking appropriate measures, consistent with their legal systems, against actors in China and in third countries that materially support Russia’s war machine, including financial institutions, and other entities that facilitate Russia’s acquisition of items for its defense industrial base.
They expressed their intention to continue to apply significant pressure on Russian revenues from energy and other commodities. This will include improving the efficacy of the oil price cap policy by taking further steps to tighten compliance and enforcement, including against Russia’s shadow fleet, while working to maintain market stability.
They especially emphasized the urgency to support Ukraine’s energy security, including by coordinating international assistance through the G7+Ukraine Energy Coordination Group. They underscored the importance to continue working with the Ukrainian authorities and International Financial Institutions through the Ukraine Donor Platform, and by mobilizing private investments and fostering participation of civil society.
They highlighted the reality of millions of internally displaced Ukrainians and the importance of an inclusive rights-based, gender-responsive recovery, including the reintegration of veterans and civilians with disabilities, and to address the needs of women, children as well as other population groups who have been disproportionately affected by Russia’s war of aggression. They reiterated their condemnation of Russia’s unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children and welcomed coordinated efforts to secure their safe return. They called on Russia to release all persons it has unjustly detained and safely return all civilians it has illegally transferred or deported, starting with children. They welcomed the Ministerial Conference on the Human Dimension of Ukraine’s 10 point peace formula that will be hosted by Canada on October 30-31.
They reiterated the need to support Ukraine’s agriculture sector, which is critical for global food supply, particularly for the most vulnerable nations, and called for unimpeded exports of grain, foodstuffs, fertilizers and inputs from Ukraine.
They acknowledged the importance to involve the private sector in the sustainable economic recovery of Ukraine. They welcomed and underscored the significance of Ukraine itself continuing to implement domestic reform efforts, especially in the fields of anti-corruption, justice system reform, decentralization, and promotion of the rule of law. These endeavors are in line with the Euro-Atlantic path Ukraine has embraced. The G7 members were unanimous on the need to continue to support efforts of the Ukrainian government and people in these endeavors.
They resolutely condemned Russia’s holding of illegitimate ‘elections’ in the occupied Ukrainian Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. Russia’s actions once again demonstrate its blatant disregard for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence, and the UN Charter. They called on all members of the international community to refrain from recognizing Russia’s illegitimate actions.
They welcomed the Summit on Peace in Ukraine that took place in Switzerland on June 15-16 and its focus on the key priorities needed to achieve a framework for peace based on international law, including the UN Charter and its principles, and respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. They remained committed to follow up on the Conference through constructive engagement with all international partners to reach a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.
The G7 members acknowledged that Russia continues to expand its campaigns of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI). They condemned Russia’s use of FIMI to support its war of aggression against Ukraine. They reiterated their determination to bolster the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism by developing a collective response framework to counter foreign threats to democracies.
4. Situation in the Middle East
The G7 members reiterated their condemnation of Hamas’ horrendous attacks on October 7, 2023. 101 hostages are still in the hands of Hamas. They noted with deep concern the trend of escalatory violence in the Middle East and its repercussions on regional stability and on the lives of civilians shattered by this conflict, from the Gaza Strip to the Israeli-Lebanese Blue Line. Actions and counter-reactions risk magnifying this dangerous spiral of violence and dragging the entire Middle East into a broader regional conflict with unimaginable consequences. They called for a stop to the current destructive cycle, while emphasizing that no country stands to gain from a further escalation in the Middle East.
They expressed their deep concern about the situation along the Blue Line. They recognized the essential stabilizing role played by the Lebanese Armed Forces and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon in mitigating that risk. They demanded the full implementation of UNSCR 1701 (2006) and urged that all relevant actors implement immediate measures towards de-escalation.
The G7 members reaffirmed their strong support for the ongoing mediation efforts undertaken by the United States, Egypt and Qatar to reach a resolution between the parties to the conflict in Gaza. They reiterated their full commitment for the implementation of the UNSC Resolution 2735 (2024) and the comprehensive deal outlined by President Biden in May that would lead to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, a significant and sustained increase in the flow of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza, and an enduring end to the crisis, to secure a pathway to a two-state solution with a safe Israel alongside a sovereign Palestinian state. They urged the parties to the conflict to unequivocally accept the ceasefire proposal, stressing the need for countries in a position to directly influence the parties to cooperate in strengthening mediation efforts. They called for the full implementation of the terms of the ceasefire proposal without delay and without conditions.
They called on all parties to fully comply with international law, including international humanitarian law. They expressed their deep alarm for the heavy toll this conflict has taken on civilians, deploring all losses of civilian lives equally and noting with great concern that, after nearly a year of hostilities and regional instability, it is mostly civilians, including women and children, who are paying the highest price. Protection of civilians must be an absolute priority for all parties at all times.
The G7 members expressed concern at the unprecedented level of food insecurity affecting most of the population in the Gaza Strip. Securing full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access in all its forms and through all relevant crossing points remains an absolute priority. They urged all parties to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid and ensure protection of humanitarian workers by properly implementing de-confliction measures. They recognized the crucial role played by UN agencies and other humanitarian actors in delivering assistance especially health care for the most vulnerable persons, including the polio vaccination campaign. They expressed their support for UNRWA to effectively uphold its mandate, emphasizing the vital role that the UN Agency plays.
The G7 members reaffirmed their unwavering commitment, through reinvigorated efforts in the Middle East Peace Process, to the vision of a two-state solution where two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders, consistent with international law and relevant UN resolutions, and in this regard stress the importance of unifying the Gaza strip with the West Bank under Palestinian Authority. We note that mutual recognition, to include the recognition of a Palestinian state, at the appropriate time, would be a crucial component of that political process. They expressed their concern about the risk of weakening the Palestinian Authority and underlined the importance of maintaining economic stability in the West Bank. They welcomed the EU’s 400 million Euro emergency package for the Palestinian Authority. All parties must refrain from unilateral actions and from divisive statements that may undermine the prospect of a two-state solution, including the Israeli expansion of settlements and the “legalization” of settlement outposts. They condemned the rise in extremist settler violence committed against Palestinians, which undermines security and stability in the West Bank and threatens prospects for a lasting peace. They expressed their deep concern regarding the deteriorating security situation in the West Bank.
They reiterated their commitment to working together – and with other international partners – to closely coordinate and institutionalize their support for civil society peacebuilding efforts, ensuring that they are part of a larger strategy to build the foundation necessary for a negotiated and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. The G7 members called on Iran to contribute to de-escalation of tensions in the region. They demanded that Iran cease its destabilizing actions in the Middle East. They underlined that they stand ready to adopt further sanctions or take other measures in response to further destabilizing initiatives.
They reiterated their determination that Iran must never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon and that the G7 will continue working together, and with other international partners, to address Iran’s nuclear escalation. A diplomatic solution remains the best way to resolve this issue. As the IAEA remains unable to verify that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful, they urged Iran’s leadership to cease and reverse nuclear activities that have no credible civilian justification and to cooperate with the IAEA without further delay to fully implement their legally binding safeguards agreement and their commitments under UNSCR 2231(2015).
They condemned in the strongest possible terms Iran’s export and Russia’s procurement of Iranian ballistic missiles. Evidence that Iran has continued to transfer weaponry to Russia despite repeated international calls to stop represents a further escalation of Iran’s military support to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Russia has used Iranian weaponry such as UAVs to kill Ukrainian civilians and strike their critical infrastructure.
They reiterated that Iran must immediately cease all support to Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable war against Ukraine and halt such transfers of ballistic missiles, UAVs and related technology, which constitute a direct threat to the Ukrainian people as well as European and international security more broadly.
They reaffirmed their steadfast commitment to hold Iran to account for its unacceptable support for Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine that further undermines global security. In line with their previous statements on the matter, they underscored that they are already responding with new and significant measures.
They also reiterated their deep concern about Iran’s human rights violations, especially against women and minority groups. They reiterated their call on Iran to allow access to the country to relevant UN Human Rights Council Special Procedures mandate holders.
De-escalation efforts in the region must also include the immediate and unconditional termination of any attack by the Houthis against international and commercial vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea. The G7 members reiterated their strong condemnation of these attacks and the right of countries to defend their vessels from attacks. They called for the immediate release by the Houthis of the Galaxy Leader and its crew. They expressed their strong concern about the August 21 attack on the merchant vessel Sounion and the ongoing risk of an environmental catastrophe as salvage operations continue. They welcomed the efforts by the EU maritime operation Aspides and by the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect vital sea lanes. They appreciated the efforts of those countries that are committed to protect freedom of navigation and trade, as well as maritime security, in line with UNSCR 2722 (2024) and in accordance with international law.
5. Fostering partnerships with African Countries
The G7 members reaffirmed their commitment to support African nations in the pursuit of sustainable development as well as the creation of jobs and growth. The focus remains on fostering fair partnerships, built on shared principles, democratic values, local leadership, and practical initiatives.
They reiterated their intention to align actions with the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the specific needs of African countries, including plans to improve local and regional food security, infrastructure, trade, and agricultural productivity. They expressed their support for the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area, a crucial factor for Africa’s growth in the next decade.
The G7 members emphasized the need to strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation with African countries and regional organizations. In addition to maintaining financial support for African nations, they expressed their determination to improve the coordination and effectiveness of G7 resources, mobilizing domestic resources and encouraging increased private investments.
They welcomed the African Union’s permanent membership in the G20, and the creation of an additional Chair for Sub-Saharan Africa on the IMF Executive Board in November.
They reaffirmed their commitment to the G20 Compact with Africa, a tool aimed at enhancing private investment, driving structural reforms, supporting local entrepreneurship, and fostering cooperation, particularly in the energy sector. The G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), and initiatives like the EU’s Global Gateway can contribute to promote sustainable, resilient, and economically viable infrastructure in Africa, ensuring transparency in project selection, procurement, and financing. In this framework, they welcomed Italy’s Mattei Plan for Africa.
They recognized that sustainable development, peace and security and democracy go hand in hand, reaffirming their commitment to help African governments in strengthening democratic governance and respect for human rights, while addressing conditions conducive to terrorism, violent extremism, and instability.
They expressed their deep concern about the destabilizing activities of the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group and other Russia-supported entities. They called for accountability for all those responsible for human rights violations and abuses.
6. Indo-Pacific
The G7 members reiterated their commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, based on the rule of law, which is inclusive, prosperous and secure, grounded on sovereignty, territorial integrity, peaceful resolution of disputes, fundamental freedoms and human rights. They reaffirmed the importance of working together with regional partners and organizations, notably the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). They reaffirmed their thorough support for ASEAN centrality and unity. They reaffirmed their intention to work to support Pacific Island Countries’ priorities, as articulated through the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
As they seek constructive and stable relations with China, they recognized the importance of direct and candid engagement to express concerns and manage differences. They reaffirmed their readiness to cooperate with China to address global challenges. They expressed their deep concern at the China’s support to Russia. They called on China to step up efforts to promote international peace and security, and to press Russia to stop its military aggression and immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw its troops from Ukraine. They encouraged China to support a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on territorial integrity and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter, including through its direct dialogue with Ukraine. They also expressed their deep concern at China’s ongoing support for Russia’s defense industrial base, which is enabling Russia to maintain its illegal war in Ukraine and has significant and broad-based security implications. They called on China to cease the transfer of dual-use materials, including weapons components and equipment, that are inputs for Russia’s defense sector.
They recognized the importance of China in global trade. However, they expressed their concerns about China’s persistent industrial targeting and comprehensive non-market policies and practices that are leading to global spillovers, market distortions and harmful overcapacity in a growing range of sectors, undermining our workers, industries and economic resilience and security, as well as impacting on currencies. The G7 members are not decoupling or turning inwards. They are de-risking and diversifying supply chains where necessary and appropriate and fostering resilience to economic coercion. They called on China to refrain from adopting export control measures, particularly on critical minerals, that could lead to significant supply chain disruptions. Together with partners, the G7 members will invest in building their respective industrial capacities, promote diversified and resilient supply chains, and reduce critical dependencies and vulnerabilities.
They remained seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas and reiterated their strong opposition to any unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force or coercion. They reaffirmed that there is no legal basis for China’s expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea, and they reiterated their opposition to China’s militarization and coercive and intimidation activities in the South China Sea. They re-emphasized the universal and unified character of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and reaffirmed UNCLOS’s important role in setting out the legal framework that governs all activities in the oceans and the seas. They reiterated that the award rendered by the Arbitral Tribunal on 12 July 2016 is a significant milestone, which is legally binding upon the parties to those proceedings and a useful basis for peacefully resolving disputes between the parties. They reiterated their strong opposition to China’s dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia in the South China Sea and its repeated obstruction of countries’ high seas freedom of navigation. They expressed deep concern about the dangerous and obstructive maneuvers, including water cannons and ramming, by the China Coast Guard and maritime militia against Philippines vessels.
The G7 members reaffirmed that maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is indispensable to international security and prosperity, and called for the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues. There is no change in the basic position of the G7 members on Taiwan, including stated One-China policies. They supported Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations as a member where statehood is not a prerequisite and as an observer or guest where it is.
They remained concerned by the human rights situation in China, including in Xinjiang and Tibet. They are also worried about the crackdown on Hong Kong’s autonomy and independent institutions, and ongoing erosion of rights and freedoms. They urged China and the Hong Kong authorities to act in accordance with their international commitments and applicable legal obligations.
The G7 members strongly condemned North Korea’s continuing expansion of its unlawful nuclear and ballistic missile programs in violation of multiple UNSC resolutions and its continuous destabilizing activities. They reiterated their call for the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and demanded that North Korea abandons all its nuclear weapons, existing nuclear programs, and any other WMD and ballistic missile programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner, in accordance with all relevant UNSC resolutions. They called on North Korea to return to dialogue to promote peace and stability in the Korean peninsula. They urged all UN Member States to fully implement all relevant UN Security Council resolutions. They reiterated their deep disappointment with Russia’s veto last March on the mandate renewal of the UNSC 1718 Committee Panel of Experts.
They condemned in the strongest possible terms the increasing military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, including North Korea’s export and Russia’s procurement of North Korean ballistic missiles and munitions in direct violation of relevant UNSCRs, as well as Russia’s use of these missiles and munitions against Ukraine. They are also deeply concerned about the potential for any transfer of nuclear or ballistic missiles-related technology to North Korea, in violation of the relevant UNSCRs. They urged Russia and North Korea to immediately cease all such activities and abide by relevant UNSCRs. They urged North Korea to respect human rights, facilitate access for international humanitarian organizations, and resolve the abductions issue immediately.
They called on China not to conduct or condone activities aimed at undermining the security and safety of our communities and the integrity of our democratic institutions, and to act in strict accordance with its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
7. Regional Issues
Venezuela
The G7 members reiterated their deep concern about the situation in Venezuela, following the vote on July 28.
They emphasized that the announced victory of Maduro lacks credibility and democratic legitimacy, as indicated by reports of the UN Panel of Experts and independent international observers as well as data published by the opposition. They underscored that it is essential for electoral results to be complete and independently verified to ensure respect for the will of the Venezuelan people.
They expressed their outrage for the arrest warrant and constant threats to the security of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, who decided to seek refuge in Spain. According to the above-mentioned independent reports, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia appears to have won the most votes.
They urged Venezuelan representatives to cease all human rights violations and abuses, arbitrary detentions and widespread restrictions on fundamental freedoms, particularly affecting the political opposition, human rights defenders, and representatives of independent media and civil society. They called for the release of all political prisoners and for a path to freedom and democracy for the people of Venezuela.
They urged the international community to keep Venezuela high on the diplomatic agenda and they expressed their support for efforts by regional partners to facilitate the Venezuelan-led democratic and peaceful transition that the people of Venezuela have clearly chosen in the polls.
Haiti
The G7 members expressed their determination to continue supporting Haitian institutions – including the Transitional Presidential Council (CPT) and the Government of Prime Minister Conille – in their commitment to create the necessary conditions of general security and stability for the convening, by February 2026, of free and fair elections. The expression of popular will would set the foundation for the full restoration of democracy and the rule of law in Haiti.
They also expressed full support to the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, which is providing critical support to the Haitian National Police as they counter criminal gangs engaged in illicit trafficking and inflicting brutal violence upon the population.
The G7 members emphasized the importance of continued support to the MSS mission through financial contributions to the UN Trust Fund as well as contributions in kind. They expressed their strong appreciation for the commitment of the Government of Kenya – which has already deployed 380 personnel on the ground – to support the Haitian National Police in restoring peace and security.
They called on all countries that have committed to deploy their contingents to the MSS mission to do so as soon as possible, to consolidate the mission and its fundamental role in the Country. They called on Haiti’s partners to continue their humanitarian assistance to the Haitian people and to expedite their financial and in-kind contributions to the MSS mission to help ensure that the mission is resourced for success.
They called also on the United Nations Security Council to consider a UN Peace Operation to maintain the security gains of the Haiti National Police and the MSS mission for holding free and fair elections and called on the Secretary-General accordingly to provide support.
The G7 members welcomed the work of the G7 Working Group on Haiti in monitoring institutional, political, social and security developments in Haiti, with a view to supporting the stabilization of the country and the restoration of full democratic governance.
Libya
The G7 members reiterated their unwavering commitment to Libyan stability, sovereignty, independence and unity. They expressed deep concern about recent developments in the country, in particular those involving the leadership of the Central Bank of Libya and the High Council of State, which show the fragility and unsustainability of the present status quo. They urged relevant Libyan parties to rapidly reach the necessary compromises to begin to restore the institutional integrity of the Central Bank of Libya and its standing with the international financial community. They called on Libyan political actors to refrain from taking harmful unilateral actions that create further political tension and fragmentation and make the country vulnerable to harmful foreign interference.
They noted advances made in the organization of local elections and they called for a free, fair and inclusive participation of all Libyans. It is now imperative to relaunch a Libyan-led and Libyan-owned political process facilitated by the UN towards free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections.
They expressed their support and commended the efforts made by UNSMIL officer in charge Stephanie Koury in support of the stabilization of Libya. They called on the Secretary General to appoint a new Special Representative without delay.
Sudan
The G7 members reiterated their grave concern over the ongoing fighting, mass-displacement and famine in Sudan.
They condemned the serious human rights violations and abuses against the civilian population, including widespread sexual and gender-based violence, as well as international humanitarian law violations by both sides to the conflict. They called for an immediate end to the escalating violence, which is creating further displacement, and urged the warring parties to ensure the protection of civilians. They reiterated their commitment to holding accountable all those responsible for violations of international law in Sudan.
They condemned the emergence of famine in Sudan as a direct consequence of efforts to restrict access of humanitarian actors. They noted recent progress in relation to the re-opening of the Chad-Sudan Adre border crossing, in the wake of the Paris Conference and of the Geneva talks. They called for full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access both into Sudan and across lines of conflict so aid can reach all those in need.
They urged all parties to cease hostilities immediately and to engage in serious negotiations aimed at achieving a lasting ceasefire, humanitarian access and protection of civilians without pre-conditions.
They called on external actors to refrain from fueling the conflict, to respect the UN arms embargo on Darfur, and to play a responsible role in resolving the crisis.
They welcomed mediation efforts by regional and international actors and organizations to facilitate a durable peace for the country.
Inclusive, national dialogue, aimed at restoring democracy, re-establishing and strengthening the civilian and representative institutions after the end of the conflict, is a prerequisite for lasting peace. The G7 Members emphasized that it is necessary for representatives of Sudanese civil society, including women, to be fully engaged in the reflection on the political future of the country.
CashX’s Self-Service Kiosks and Mobile Wallet App Launch Across the OPMX Retail Network in California, Colorado and Texas Beginning in October 2024
SAN DIEGO and SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 24, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CashXAI Inc. (“CashX”) and OPMX are pleased to announce that they have signed an international agreement to install CashX Self Service Financial Services Kiosks at OPMX customers’ retail locations including approximately 500 supermarkets in California, Colorado and Texas. This expands CashX’s reach to comprise 5,000 retailers across the United States and over 5,000 locations in Mexico and Latin America.
In addition to physical kiosk access, CashX offers its CashX Mobile Wallet Application, which enables consumers digital access to all their financial needs without an evaluation of financial history. This mobile solution consists of services including check cashing, money transfer, mobile recharge, bill payment, gift cards, e-tickets and other high demand financial transactions.
Stephen Combe, CEO of CashX, said, “We are delighted to partner with OPMX and expand their offering with accessible financial offerings, providing additional vital services to the Latin Community. Pharmacies and supermarkets have long been a hub in Latin neighborhoods and stocked with OPMX’s well known and trusted brands and products that provide that close-to-home feel to consumers from other countries. With our recent steps to innovate CashX’s financial services infused with AI retail sector marketing technology, we provide consumers an adjacent essential utility that digitizes and simplifies routine purchases.”
Fernando Garces, CEO of OPMX, commented, “We proudly maintain a strong presence in well-recognized locations that cater to the Hispanic community. Our strategic distribution network allows us to reach our valued customers in these vibrant communities, making our products readily available and accessible to those who matter most to us – adding Financial Services and helping our customer’s gain access to financial freedom is a key extension to our mission. We would also like to thank our channel partner, Mr. Quedon Baul for bringing this opportunity to us and facilitating the partnership between OPMX and CashX.”
CashXRollout Plan
Installation of CashX solutions will begin in October 2024 in approximately 500 retailers in California, Colorado and Texas, with a parallel rollout throughout Mexico. Further expansion to all states and additional key countries in Latin America is expected in early 2025. The total network is expected to cover 5 countries and over 15,000 retail locations.
The second phase of the rollout will launch CashX’s next generation of kiosks with AI integrated retail marketing strategies of consumers at point of sale, which is empowering the future interplay of business, consumers and retail advertising.
AboutCashXAIInc.
CashXAI Inc., a leader in financial innovation, offers a dynamic platform for individuals lacking traditional banking access. The CashXAI mobile app simplifies converting cash into digital currency, supporting transactions from check cashing to money transfer without requiring a bank account. With an extensive retail network, CashXAI provides unparalleled financial freedom and management capabilities, empowering users to effortlessly control their finances from anywhere. CashXAI stands at the forefront of bridging financial gaps for underbanked communities. Further illustrating CashX’s innovative business structure, its previously announced intellectual property license agreement with Alpha Modus permits CashX with the exclusive right to use all of Alpha Modus’ patented intellectual property in connection with CashX’s promotional, advertising, and operational functions, including co-development arrangements with Alpha Modus, within the Exclusive Industry. The “Exclusive Industry” means the industry relating to self-service kiosks located in retail food, drug and convenience stores for the purpose of serving Unbanked and Underbanked consumers, by offering banking, phone and insurance solutions to the consumer. An “Unbanked” consumer means a person that does not have a checking or savings account with an FDIC-insured institution, and an “Underbanked” consumer means a person that has or had a checking or savings account with an FDIC-insured institution, but regularly uses non-traditional banks such as Venmo or the Cash App, or lenders such as a check cashing company or payday lender.
For more information, please visit the CashX website at https://cashx.ai/.
AboutOPMX
OPMX are leaders in the Latino pharmaceutical market in the United States through stores and brands that connect consumers with their countries of origin, evoking trust and a feeling of being close to home.
Latino consumers have a strong sense of cultural identity and pride in their heritage, and by seeing brands that represent their culture, they can feel an emotional connection to the products and companies behind them. With a focus on quality, cultural relevance, and a dedication to serving the Hispanic market in the United States, our pharmaceutical products stand as a testament to our unwavering commitment to providing innovative, effective, and compassionate healthcare solutions to this vibrant and diverse audience. Discover more at www.opmx.us
Forward-LookingStatementsDisclaimer
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “ongoing,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “will,” “would,” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which such performance or results will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time the statements are made and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainty and other factors that may cause our results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements in this press release. This press release should be considered in light of all filings of the Company that are contained in the Edgar Archives of the Securities and Exchange Commission at SEC.gov.
Iquitos (Agenzia Fides) – “We need authorities to defend the rights of girls, boys and young people of indigenous peoples, because they cannot continue to be excluded,” says Mariluz Canaquiri, a member of the indigenous people of the “Kukama Kukamiria” in the Peruvian Amazon, who complains about the decline in education among indigenous peoples.”The authorities do not care about the education of indigenous children, there is no adequate infrastructure and not enough bilingual teachers to teach them in our language,” says Canaquiri, who is also president of the women’s rights organization “Federation of Kukama-Kukamiria Women”.Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) is one of the educational policies in the South American country of 33 million inhabitants and 55 recognized indigenous peoples, four from the Andes and 51 from the Amazon.According to the results of the latest National Evaluation of Learning Outcomes (ENLA) published by the Ministry of Education, only 5.6 percent of fourth-grade elementary school students (10 and 11 years old) in IBE institutions in the Amazon region achieved the expected results. “There is no bilingual intercultural education here,” Canaquiri said. “How are they supposed to learn when our identity, our culture, our way of seeing the world are not taken into account in any way in the curriculum, and in logistical conditions where the school building is an area covered by branches and tree trunks in unbearable heat,” she noted in a statement to an international non-governmental organization.Although the first policy in favor of indigenous students was launched in 1972, more than half a century ago, it has always received little interest from the State, even though IBE is one of their individual and collective human rights. “They hire teachers because they speak Quechua, Shipibo, Asháninka or the equivalent, but when they go to school they do not apply the IBE. Sometimes they teach only in Spanish, sometimes they speak the children’s mother tongue, but everything else they read and write in Spanish,” reported one analyst.There are 24,000 schools affiliated to the IBE throughout the country, where most reinforce the students’ native language and teach them Spanish. Education policies try to ensure that the school population of indigenous peoples is bilingual and has oral and written skills, but studies by local researchers show that success is becoming increasingly limited.Despite this precarious situation, a small school in the rural community of Accollya, in the municipality of Soccos, almost 3,400 meters above sea level, in the province of Huamanga, one of the 11 provinces of Ayacucho, stands out positively. In the Andean department, affected by an internal armed conflict that Peru experienced between 1980 and 2000, the school is supported by an NGO and has a single teacher with 33 years of experience, but who has always been actively committed to bilingual intercultural education through training and in-depth courses. “I work in Spanish from Monday to Thursday and in Quechua on Fridays, using the notebooks that the ministry provides us for each subject,” says the teacher, who teaches ten students in first, second and third grade, aged six to eleven. “The response from the children is very good, from the first grade they learn to read and write, now it is September and the youngest can already read. That is the advantage of teaching different classes, because they motivate each other,” stressed the teacher.Also significant is the important contribution of the Catholic Church in the Amazon region in the field of education and health, where it has often taken the place of the State. Hundreds of missionaries have been true promoters of respect for human dignity throughout history. Religious and lay people from dozens of countries have sacrificed their lives in the most remote places to make the Amazon a place of coexistence and respect for the dignity and rights of all, especially the most vulnerable, largely indigenous peoples.Other initiatives to promote learning and the establishment of school libraries in these areas include the commitment of the “yachacs”, the wise men of the community, who hold intergenerational meetings and encourage reading among students and their families.The indigenous school population is estimated at 1.2 million nationwide, with the vast majority coming from the Quechua (700,000) and Aymara (300,000) peoples from the Andean areas of the country and the rest from Amazonian language groups such as Asháninka, Shipibo Konibo, Awajún and others.The Kukama Kukamiria people live mainly in the department of Loreto, the largest in the Peruvian Amazon. According to the Ministry of Culture, the population of the communities of the Kukama Kukamiria people is estimated at 37,053. Of these, 1,185 have declared that they speak the Kukama Kukamiria language, which represents 0.02% of the total number of indigenous languages in the country. (AP) (Agenzia Fides, 24/9/2024)
Share:
Since his first day in office, President Biden has been committed to restoring American leadership at the United Nations. Our world today faces many challenges that no one country can or should confront alone. But when the United States shows up and leads at the UN, we can rally global action to tackle problems that affect us all. That is why the Biden-Harris Administration has worked tirelessly at the UN to advance American values, safeguard human rights for all, and address conflict and instability. Alongside our allies and partners from around the world, we have worked with UN agencies to tackle the climate crisis, shape our digital future, and fight poverty and disease.
At a time of increasing geopolitical challenges and growing global needs, strong and effective American leadership at the UN is more critical than ever. The Biden-Harris Administration has worked to strengthen American leverage at the United Nations, uphold the UN Charter, and keep human rights at the core of the organization. Without robust American engagement, our competitor nations would gain leverage to advance their interests and values at our expense.
The Biden-Harris Administration has also been committed to reforming and adapting the UN to the needs of the 21st century. For example, President Biden announced a new U.S. openness to expanding the membership of the UN Security Council, including permanent seats for Africa and Latin America. The UN is not a perfect organization, but given the scale of today’s challenges, the world needs global institutions that are more inclusive and effective.
Over nearly four years, the Biden-Harris Administration’s leadership at the UN has delivered results for the American people. At the UN, we have:
Responded to Threats to International Peace and Security
After Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we worked at the UN to build support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and hold Russia to account. We rallied 141 countries in the UN General Assembly to condemn Russia’s violations of international law. We used UN Security Council debates to shine a spotlight on Russia’s illegal war and atrocities. We pressed the UN General Assembly to kick Russia off the UN Human Rights Council. We isolated Russia by denying it senior UN appointments and preventing its election to UN bodies.
Responding to the security situation in Haiti, we partnered with Ecuador to obtain UN Security Council authorization of a new Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission.
Working with African partners, we secured a UN Security Council decision to create in December 2023 a new mechanism to largely fund future African Union-led Peace Support Operations from the UN-assessed budget.
Following the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, we defended at the UN Security Council Israel’s right to defend itself and demanded the release of hostages. Also in the Security Council, we called for increased humanitarian assistance to Gaza and established a new UN mechanism to improve aid coordination. In July 2024, we secured Security Council endorsement of President Biden’s plan for a ceasefire and hostage release deal.
As the Sudan conflict worsened, we mobilized action in the UN Security Council, including the adoption of a resolution in June 2024 demanding an end to the siege of El Fasher.
Responding to concerns that Russia intended to deploy nuclear weapons in space, we and Japan proposed a UN Security Council resolution calling on countries not to develop such weapons.
In 2022, we partnered with Ireland at the UN Security Council to reform, expand and strengthen humanitarian exemptions for UN sanctions.
Working with the United Kingdom, we secured adoption of the first-ever UN Security Council resolution condemning the February 2021 military coup in Burma.
Protected and Upheld Universal Human Rights
We rejoined the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, enabling the United States to once again lead multilateral efforts to hold accountable human rights violators worldwide.
We issued a standing invitation to all UN thematic human rights monitors to visit the United States and assess our human rights record at home. In contrast to authoritarian governments, this invitation showed that a confident democracy is willing to have its record scrutinized and receive advice on strengthening rights protections for its citizens.
We pressed for the release of a landmark report from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on human rights violations against Uighurs in China.
We worked in the UN Human Rights Council to establish a new Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Russia to examine Moscow’s crackdown on dissent at home and a Commission of Inquiry on violations and abuses in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
We restored American leadership at the UN in defending the human rights of LGBTQI+ individuals around the world. This included participating in high-level meetings of the Core Group of countries advocating for LGBTQI+ rights, including a September 23 meeting where the First Lady represented the United States. We also secured the renewal of the mandate of the UN’s Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and urged the UN to release its first-ever organization-wide strategy on LGBTQI+ rights, co-sponsoring the first-ever Human Rights Council resolution on the rights of intersex persons, and convening the second-ever informal UN Security Council meeting on the rights of LGBTQI+ individuals.
We spotlighted egregious human rights violations by North Korea, including by organizing the first briefing of the UN Security Council on North Korea human rights since 2017.
We helped establish mechanisms through the UN Human Rights Council to investigate human rights violations and abuses in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Nicaragua.
We worked at the UN to advance the global fight against antisemitism, including to ensure 36 countries and four multilateral organizations joined the U.S.-led Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism. In 2023, we convened a UN meeting on antisemitism with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and, in 2022, a roundtable at UNESCO.
We advanced the UN’s work to promote racial equality, including by championing the inaugural session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. We co-sponsored a UN General Assembly resolution designating July 25 as International Day of Women and Girls of African Descent.
We engaged seriously with the human rights treaty body process, including through periodic reports about our domestic human rights record to the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Reaffirming support for the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we pressed for enhanced participation of Indigenous Peoples throughout the UN system. In 2022, Ambassador (ret.) Keith Harper, the first-ever Senate confirmed U.S. ambassador from a federally-recognized tribe, was elected to the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues.
We supported efforts in the UN General Assembly to advance discussion of a proposed convention on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.
After assuming the presidency of the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), we hosted the UNCAC conference in Atlanta, Georgia in 2023, with approximately 2,600 delegates, including an unprecedented 1,000 from civil society.
Advanced Gender Equity and Equality
We restored American leadership in pressing at the UN for the rights of women and girls, advancing their inclusion in societies, and supporting strong language in UN resolutions and at the Commission on the Status of Women on sexual and reproductive rights.
The January 2021 Presidential Memorandum on Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad restored life-saving funding to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
We announced that the United States will contribute for the first time to the UNICEF–UNFPA Global Program to End Child Marriage.
Following the Iranian regime’s killing of Mahsa Amini and crackdown on protestors, we helped establish a new UN Fact-Finding Mission to investigate human rights abuses. We spearheaded efforts to remove Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women.
In 2024, we reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development Program of Action.
We launched the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse, which included actions at the UN to address online safety for women and girls.
Shaped Our Digital Future, Promoted Labor Rights, and Tackled Synthetic Drugs
We sponsored the first-ever UN General Assembly resolution outlining principles for the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI). This landmark resolution helped define a global consensus on safe, secure and trustworthy AI systems for advancing sustainable development.
We hosted events at the UN on misuses of new technologies, such as countries using commercial spyware to surveil dissidents and journalists.
We worked at the International Labor Organization (ILO) to empower workers worldwide and joined the ILO’s Equal Pay International Coalition to share best practices to close the gender wage gap.
At the first Summit for Democracy in 2021, we announced the Multilateral Partnership for Organizing, Worker Empowerment and Rights (M-POWER), an initiative working with governments, trade unions, labor support, civil society organizations, and philanthropy to uphold and promote workers’ trade union rights around the world.
In coordination with the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), we launched and hosted at the UN high-level meetings of the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats and secured adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution to enhance international action to fight such drugs.
Strengthened Global Health Cooperation, Advanced Sustainable Development, and Bolstered Climate Action
We redoubled efforts to support implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, launching a U.S. Strategy on Global Development to accelerate progress and mobilizing $150 billion of U.S. funding and billions more from the private sector, philanthropic, and other donor resources.
In 2021, we reversed the previous administration’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), enabling the United States to shape the WHO’s work on global health and reform. With the WHO, we led the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic by launching the COVID-19 Global Action Plan and donating nearly 700 million vaccine doses to 117 countries.
We hosted the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’s 7th Replenishment in 2022, resulting in more than 75 governments, foundations, and corporations delivering pledges totaling a record $15.67 billion.
We worked at the UN to advance universal health coverage, continue the fight against tuberculosis and mpox, and combat global antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including to push countries for commitments on AMR that are bold, aspirational, and implementable.
We focused attention at the UN on addressing global food insecurity, repeatedly using the U.S. presidency of the UN Security Council to focus on the nexus between food security and conflict. We hosted at the UN ministerial-level meetings to generate new commitments to expand agricultural capacity and respond to famine with over 100 partner countries.
U.S. Representative to the UN Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland co-led the U.S. delegation to the 2023 UN Water Conference, where they announced more than $49 billion towards water security both at home and abroad.
In 2024, Secretary Haaland co-led the U.S. delegation to the Fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS4), where we announced new efforts to enhance our partnerships with SIDS.
After rejoining the Paris Agreement, we galvanized efforts at the UN to combat climate change, raising global climate ambition through countries’ enhanced national contributions, accelerated action to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, forward-leaning decisions at annual UN Climate Change Conferences, and major initiatives for ocean-climate action catalyzed by the annual Our Ocean Conference.
Former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and Senior Advisor for International Climate Policy John Podesta have helped lead an all-out effort, including critical agreements at the UN Climate Change Conference COPs 26 and 28 to partner with countries to accelerate climate efforts worldwide and reduce global emissions sufficiently to limit warming to 1.5° Celsius.
We advanced efforts within the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Maritime Organization, and other multilateral organizations to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from the aviation, shipping, and other sectors.
Strengthened American Presence at the United Nations
After a five-year absence, we rejoined the UN Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This allowed us to partner with UNESCO to combat the scourge of antisemitism, support global Holocaust education, promote journalist safety, safeguard Ukrainian cultural heritage, bolster ethical uses of AI, and advance science education for girls in Africa.
We led robust campaigns resulting in the election of U.S. citizens to key UN positions, including Doreen Bogdan-Martin as Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Amy Pope as Director-General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and Sarah Cleveland as Judge on the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
We supported the appointments of highly qualified Americans to lead UN agencies, such as Ambassador Cathy Russell as Executive Director of UNICEF, Ambassador Cindy McCain as Executive Director of the World Food Program, and Ian Saunders as Secretary-General of the World Customs Organization.
Co-chairing the UN Accessibility Steering Committee, we worked to make UN headquarters in New York more accessible for all delegates, including construction of a 24/7 entrance for wheelchair users and the installation of a lift so everyone can address the General Assembly from behind the official rostrum.
TRENTON – Kicking off Climate Week, Environmental Protection Commissioner Shawn M. LaTourette today announced the release of the final 2024 New Jersey Statewide Water Supply Plan, which for the first time assesses water supply challenges resulting from climate change and offers climate resilience solutions. Climate Week provides an opportunity for the public to learn about the many ways climate change is threatening the planet and the steps that can be taken to become more resilient and mitigate its impacts.
The water supply plan concludes that, under normal conditions and in most regions, New Jersey has adequate volumes of source water supply and is well-positioned to address water supply challenges as long as the state continues to take actions to mitigate the threats of climate change, aging infrastructure and emerging contaminants.
“The Statewide Water Supply Plan plays a critical role to inform local water supply management decisions by presenting the newest science to better prepare us for the challenges brought on by our changing climate,” said Commissioner LaTourette. “In addition to upgrading our aging infrastructure, a healthy water supply is dependent on constant reevaluation of how we can use water more efficiently to protect it for future generations.”
Consistent with the state’s comprehensive approach to making New Jersey resilient to the worsening impacts of climate change, the 2024 plan seeks to assess the threats of climate change to the state’s water supply. Of particular concern are temperature, precipitation, and sea-level changes, which will significantly impact water quantity, where and when it is available, and its quality. The plan also examines how emerging contaminants may impact water supply.
“New Jersey’s climate is changing. From increased temperatures to sea-level rise, these climate impacts can pose a threat to our water supplies if not properly addressed by proactive planning, management, and permitting,” said State Geologist Steven Domber. “By conducting comprehensive monitoring that factors in climate impacts such as increased temperatures, we can develop models and identify trends that will help local water users make informed decisions to ensure New Jerseyans have access to reliable and safe supplies of water now and in the future.”
A 60-day public comment period followed the release of the draft plan on February 26, 2024. The DEP then held two public meetings (one in-person and one virtual) and reviewed and incorporated comments from those meetings before finalizing the plan. Both the plan and a summary response to comment report are available at dep.nj.gov/water-supply-plan.
The DEP has also developed a new interactive website that outlines key information from the plan for specific audiences, including residential users, water professionals and others to summarize key plan topics, such as climate change and environmental justice. The website can be found at dep.nj.gov/water-supply-plan/storymap. The site will be updated as additional data and plan updates become available.
Water Supply Planning
The Water Supply Management Act (N.J.S.A. 58:1A-13) directs the DEP to prepare the New Jersey Statewide Water Supply Plan, analyze water supply data, examine associated risks, study projections, and make recommendations for effective management of the state’s water supplies.
The initial version of the plan was adopted in 1982 and updated in 1983, 1985, 1987, 1991, and 1993. Major revisions occurred in 1996 and 2017. The 2024 plan will be updated again in five years, but some aspects may be revised sooner.
The plan must carry out its assessments and recommendations from both statewide and regional perspectives to pursue comprehensive management addressing the diversity of water supply issues faced in different areas of New Jersey.
Drafted to align with the DEP’s related water regulations and policies, the plan provides guidance for state and regional groups making decisions concerning water supply. One of the primary goals of the plan is to put forward defined, actionable steps that the DEP can take to ensure water supplies are sufficient, in quality and quantity, to meet existing and future needs.
Water Supply Challenges Assessed
New Jersey has repeatedly faced a confluence of water resource challenges that have tested both infrastructure and responsiveness. Extremely low precipitation and streamflow in summer 2022 led the DEP to declare a Drought Watch, the first in more than six years. During the same period, aging infrastructure failed, resulting in massive water main breaks; water systems were required to address sources contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and harmful algal blooms were worsened by extremely warm temperatures. Additional challenges occurred in 2023, with four months experiencing near record temperatures and the state having its wettest December on record.
The combination of these challenges in 2022 and 2023 severely tested the resilience of New Jersey’s management of water resources. Such conditions are expected to persist or worsen in the future, requiring the DEP and its partner institutions to delicately balance the management of water resources by carefully administering planning, regulatory, investment and incident response initiatives. Recommended Action Areas
The availability of surface water, unconfined groundwater, and confined aquifers, the use of which varies geographically, was modeled to investigate potential shortages. Although not evenly distributed throughout the state, total natural water resource availability (including reservoirs) remains about the same as the 2017 New Jersey Statewide Water Supply Plan determined. However, current and forecasted use did change, and a few regions showed potential shortages. The plan provides details and recommendations to address these areas.
To meet requirements and ensure that New Jerseyans continue to have ample, reliable, and safe supplies of water now and in the future, the following action areas are covered in the plan, with greater detail on each found in Chapter 8, and elsewhere throughout the plan:
Hydrologic Data, Monitoring, Models, and Assessments: The availability of long-term and real-time hydrologic datasets are critical pieces of information the DEP uses to quantify trends, characterize current conditions, and to build and calibrate models. This information is used to ultimately make informed decisions and to update future water supply plans.
Climate Change – Water Availability Research and Modeling: This plan and its recommendations benefit from the availability of sound and reliable climate change science. This science continues to evolve, and the DEP will remain committed to monitoring new developments, with a particularized focus on the regional and local impacts of climate change upon New Jersey and its natural resources. As new and additional climate change data becomes available, it will be utilized to improve DEP water supply models and monitoring methods to more effectively mitigate and manage climate change impacts to water resources.
Climate Change – Infrastructure Resilience Recommendations: The DEP develops recommendations and establishes criteria to improve the resilience of water infrastructure and mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change upon the state’s water supply, including through actions to reform relevant DEP policies, protocols, statutes, or regulations pertaining to water infrastructure assessments and modifications.
Regional and Statewide Water Supply Planning and Protection: Water supply planning is a critical element to ensure that the state continues to have adequate supplies of acceptable quality to meet all current and future needs, and to balance human uses with ecological needs. Regional and statewide planning is adaptive and evolves as new information becomes available or issues emerge. The plan prioritizes regions of New Jersey where future planning efforts should be focused.
Water Policy Modernization: The DEP is obligated and empowered to improve and protect water supply resources and water system infrastructure to ensure water availability and the delivery of safe drinking water to homes and businesses. In some cases, the federal and state laws and regulations that give rise to these obligations are fit for modernization to better position the state and its water providers to confront new and evolving water supply challenges.
Asset Management and Resilience: Maintenance and improvement of infrastructure is key to effective and successful water supply management, and critical to ensure the state has access to clean and plentiful drinking water. Proper asset management can reduce water incidents and emergencies, limit disruptions to customers, and reduce long-term costs.
Policies and Priorities for Efficient Water Use: The plan identifies key policy priorities for the DEP as it continues to regularly re-evaluate new technologies and research to ensure the responsible and efficient use of the state’s water resources.
Public Outreach: DEP is committed to continuing public education and engaging with people and communities it serves on key water supply issues and initiatives.
The DEP’s Our Water’s Worth It campaign works to draw attention to the importance of clean water in our lives, from drinking water to supporting vibrant ecosystems and health places for recreation. An important focus of the campaign is educating the public on reducing potential lead exposure in drinking water.
NEW YORK, NY — The U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors representing approximately 60 percent of the U.S. economy and 55 percent of the U.S. population, today launched the Governors’ Climate-Ready Workforce Initiative to grow career pathways in climate and clean energy fields, strengthen workforce diversity, and jointly train 1 million new registered apprentices by 2035 across the Alliance’s states and territories.
Today’s announcement was made at a Climate Week NYC event featuring Alliance co-chairs New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, founding member Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi.
“In New York, we’re showing how climate action and economic growth go hand-in-hand,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. “As a co-chair of the U.S. Climate Alliance, I’m proud to be collaborating with states, industry leaders, labor unions, higher education and community organizations to create the jobs of the future required to build a clean, equitable, and resilient economy. A skilled and well-prepared workforce will drive innovation, create new businesses, and ensure a sustainable, resilient future for our country.”
“We need a climate-ready workforce — from EV technicians and heat pump installers to solar panel manufacturers — to meet our carbon reduction goals,” said New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. “The Executive Order I’m issuing today in conjunction with the Alliance’s new Workforce Initiative will help ensure that workers from all backgrounds have access to the skills and training needed for high-quality, climate-ready jobs across New Mexico.”
“We’re aligning our ambitious climate policies with workforce development to have 1 million more workers poised to take these good-paying, union jobs that serve our communities and strengthen our economies,” said Washington Gov. Jay Gov. Inslee. “These are economy-wide jobs, not just in clean energy but building trades, land management, clean technology and more. Climate Alliance states have a track record of meeting our ambitious goals and that momentum continues today.”
“Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’s leadership, we are bringing down the barriers to economic opportunity, lowering costs for American families, and catalyzing a renaissance of American-made manufacturing that is creating jobs across America. In fact, just last year, we added over 250,000 new American energy jobs — with clean energy jobs growing twice as fast as the rest of the sector,” said White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi. “Governors across America are at the forefront of our efforts to spur growth in union jobs, expand American energy production, and invest in the economic success of our communities. Today’s announcement will help capitalize on our momentum to create a climate-ready workforce that is rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, communities, and industrial strength.”
The Initiative’s launch comes as historic federal investments, combined with ambitious state climate action, have unleashed a significant expansion of good-paying and union jobs in climate-ready fields — with millions more anticipated in the coming years under the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This includes high-quality jobs not only in clean energy and clean technology sectors — such as wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and batteries — but also in fields associated with climate resilience and natural climate solutions.
Under this Initiative, Alliance states and territories will collaborate to collectively support 1 million new workers in completing Registered Apprenticeship programs across the coalition by 2035. These programs, registered with the U.S. Department of Labor or federally approved State Apprenticeship Agencies, provide an especially valuable and proven career pathway, empowering workers to earn while they learn in key climate-ready occupations and industries.
Alliance members will also advance a series of collective goals aimed at strengthening and expanding pathways into a wide variety of climate-ready professions critical to building a clean, equitable, and resilient net-zero future. The Initiative’s goals include boosting job quality and ensuring climate-ready employment pathways lead to good-paying, high-quality jobs; expanding opportunities for workers from underrepresented and underserved communities; and promoting the use of stackable and portable credentials in climate-ready fields to build transferable skills, support reskilling and upskilling, and strengthen workers’ economic mobility. A full list of the Initiative’s goals can be found here.
Finally, to advance sector-specific strategies, Alliance members will work together through new multi-state cohorts focused on in-demand, climate-ready fields. These cohorts will provide a platform for states and territories to increase collaboration, share evidence-based practices, engage experts and stakeholders, and develop sectoral workforce solutions that can be scaled across the country. Cohorts to be launched in the Initiative’s first year will focus on careers in the following areas:
Clean Energy, Fuels, and Technologies: Led by Michigan and New Jersey, this cohort will focus on careers in the design, construction, and maintenance of a clean, affordable, and resilient power system; the manufacturing and deployment of zero-emission vehicles and technologies; and the development and distribution of alternative, low-carbon fuels.
Clean Buildings and Industry: Led by Maine and Massachusetts, this cohort will focus on careers in the engineering, design, construction, retrofitting, maintenance, and operation of buildings and industrial processes that are clean, energy-efficient, healthy, and resilient.
Resilient Communities and Lands: Led by Arizona and Vermont, this cohort will focus on careers in the development and maintenance of safe, livable, and resilient communities; preparedness for and response to climate impacts such as extreme heat, wildfires, severe storms, flooding, and drought; and the deployment of natural climate solutions and climate-smart stewardship of our lands and waters.
The Initiative will be led by Alliance states and territories with support from the Alliance’s Secretariat. In implementing the Initiative, Alliance members will customize efforts to meet their individual needs and challenges, while working together to achieve the collective goals. States and territories will also collaborate directly with their workforce development system partners, labor unions, higher education institutions, industry, and other key partners that bring substantial expertise and experience in this work.
This Initiative builds on a number of federal-state collaborations between the Alliance’s members and the Biden-Harris Administration, including a White House convening with Alliance governors’ offices in May focused on creating good-paying jobs and mobilizing a diverse workforce in climate and clean energy.
Additional information on the Governors’ Climate-Ready Workforce Initiative can be found here.
PALM BEACH, Fla., Sept. 24, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — FN Media GroupNews Commentary – Abuse-deterrent transdermal technology can be used to prevent the misuse of drugs with abuse potential, such as fentanyl, by incorporating aversive agents into transdermal patches. Abuse-deterrent opioid formulations (ADFs) are designed to make it more difficult to abuse opioids by making them less attractive or rewarding, or by increasing the difficulty of manipulating them. ADFs can help reduce the risk of adverse effects associated with snorting or injecting opioids, and may also help prevent medication errors. Active companies in the industry include: Nutriband Inc. (NASDAQ: NTRB), Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA), Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY), Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS), Amneal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMRX).
Some benefits of ADFs include:
Reduced risk of abuse: ADFs can help reduce the risk of abuse, addiction, and substance use disorder.
Reduced risk of overdose: ADFs can help reduce the risk of opioid overdose and poisoning.
Reduced risk of medication errors: ADFs can help prevent medication errors, such as when a caregiver crushes an extended-release opioid to mix into applesauce.
According to OXFORD Academic: “The misuse and abuse of prescription opioids constitute a growing public health problem, which is described in detail in The Burden of the Nonmedical Use of Prescription Opioid Analgesics. Recent efforts to decrease abuse of opioids through formulation engineering have focused on creating broader impediments to abuse, such as incorporating physical barriers, combining agonists with antagonists, including components that cause aversion, and formulating opioid prodrugs, with the goal of reducing abuse by oral and intranasal, as well as, routes. Several of these newer formulations are in late-stage clinical testing and, if approved, may reach the US market later this year. The true “abuse-resistance” or “abuse-deterrence” of these products will be established only when epidemiologic data on their impact confirming such effects are available.” As reported by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration: “The FDA is encouraging the development of prescription opioids with abuse-deterrent formulations (ADFs) to help combat the opioid crisis. The agency recognizes that abuse-deterrent opioids are not abuse- or addiction-proof but are a step toward products that may help reduce abuse.”
Nutriband Inc. (NASDAQ: NTRB)RECEIVES CHINA PATENT NOTICE OF ALLOWANCE FOR ITS AVERSA™ ABUSE DETERRENT TRANSDERMAL TECHNOLOGY
Notice of Allowance received from Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) for a patent application covering its Nutriband AVERSA™ abuse deterrent transdermal technology
Nutriband abuse-deterrent transdermal technology consists of a proprietary aversive agent coating that employs taste aversion to deter the oral abuse of and accidental exposure to transdermal opioid and stimulant patch products
Nutriband Inc.(NASDAQ:NTRB) (NASDAQ:NTRBW), a company engaged in the development of prescription transdermal pharmaceutical products, today announced that it has received a Notice of Allowance from the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) for patent application entitled, “Abuse and Misuse Deterrent Transdermal Systems,” which protects its AVERSA™ abuse deterrent transdermal technology.
The Aversa™ abuse deterrent technology is now covered by a broad international intellectual property portfolio with patents issued in 46 countries including the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea, Russia, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and China.
Nutriband’s AVERSA™ abuse-deterrent technology incorporates aversive agents into transdermal patches to prevent the abuse, diversion, misuse, and accidental exposure of drugs with abuse potential including opioids and stimulants. The AVERSA™ abuse-deterrent technology has the potential to improve the safety profile of transdermal drugs susceptible to abuse while making sure that these drugs remain accessible to those patients who really need them.
Nutriband abuse-deterrent transdermal technology consists of a proprietary aversive agent coating that employs taste aversion to deter the oral abuse of and accidental exposure to transdermal opioid and stimulant patch products. Preliminary studies have shown that the coating is very difficult to scrape off and the technology has a patented immediate and extended-release profile which presents an additional layer of deterrence to prevent the aversive layer from easily being washed off in an attempt to separate the drug from the aversive agents.
Nutriband is currently working with its partner Kindeva Drug Delivery, a leading global contract development and manufacturing organization focused on drug-device combination products, to develop its lead product, AVERSA™ Fentanyl, which incorporates Nutriband’s AVERSA™ abuse-deterrent transdermal technology into Kindeva’s FDA-approved transdermal fentanyl patch system.
AVERSA Fentanyl has the potential to be the world’s first abuse-deterrent opioid patch designed to deter the abuse and misuse and reduce the risk of accidental exposure of transdermal fentanyl patches. AVERSA Fentanyl has the potential to reach peak annual US sales of $80 million to $200 million. (Health Advances Aversa Fentanyl market analysis report 2022). CONTINUED…Read this full press release and more news for NTRB at:https://www.financialnewsmedia.com/news-ntrb
Other recent developments in the industry of note include:
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA)announced recently that a new analysis from the European cohort of the RIM-TD open-label extension (OLE) study revealed that deutetrabenazine treatment of patients with Tardive Dyskinesia (TD) was associated with long term improvement of TD symptoms. The improvement in symptoms was sustained throughout the three-year study, and deutetrabenazine was well tolerated. The data were presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) annual congress in Milan.
TD is a stigmatising and debilitating involuntary movement disorder characterised by repetitive movements of the tongue, lower face, jaw, and limbs, which develops in around 15%-25% of patients receiving antipsychotic medications for conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder.
As part of the Lilly 30×30 pipeline efforts, Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) is collaborating with NIDA through a Screening Agreement to explore the potential of some early-phase therapies that might be repurposed for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD).
OUD is the chronic use of opioids that causes clinically significant distress or impairment. More than 9.5 million people over age 12 in the U.S. alone misused opioids in the past year. Opioid and other addictive disorders disproportionately affect people with limited resources. Nearly half of non-elderly adults with OUD in the United States have low incomes and almost a quarter live in poverty. Although there are three drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of opioid dependence, misuse of opioids remains a significant public health concern, and there is a high unmet need to develop new and effective treatments for opioid and other addictive disorders.
Sandoz Inc., a Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS) division, and Pear Therapeutics, Inc., in 2019 announced the US commercial launch of reSET-O(TM) for patients with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). reSET-O, cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December, is immediately available.
The reSET-O prescription digital therapeutic (PDT) is a 12-week cognitive behavioral therapy intended to be used in addition to outpatient treatment. It includes transmucosal buprenorphine, a commonly used medication to treat opioid addiction, and contingency management designed to provide incentives to reinforce positive behaviors. reSET-O is available by prescription only for patients 18 years or older under the care of a clinician.
“The launch of reSET-O provides an important technology-based treatment option for patients with Opioid Use Disorder and may fundamentally change how they interact with their therapies,” said Richard Francis, CEO, Sandoz. “At Sandoz, we are proud and excited to push the frontiers of medical innovation.”
Amneal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMRX) earlier this year announced the availability of Over the Counter (“OTC”) Naloxone Hydrochloride (Naloxone HCI) Nasal Spray, USP, 4mg, following Abbreviated New Drug Application (“ANDA”) approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). Amneal’s Naloxone HCI Nasal Spray, manufactured in the U.S., is a generic equivalent to OTC NARCAN® HCI Nasal Spray, a medication that is widely used to help treat drug overdose from opioids, including heroin, fentanyl and prescription opioid medications.
“With today’s launch, Amneal is proud to help address this public health emergency by providing naloxone nasal spray at an affordable price and without a prescription. Our business is deeply rooted in a commitment to helping others. By enhancing access to naloxone nasal spray, we hope to get this affordable emergency treatment into the hands of even more people who could potentially save countless families and communities from further heartache and loss,” said Chirag and Chintu Patel, Co-Chief Executive Officers.
About FN Media Group:
At FN Media Group, via our top-rated online news portal at www.financialnewsmedia.com, we are one of the very few select firms providing top tier one syndicated news distribution, targeted ticker tag press releases and stock market news coverage for today’s emerging companies. #pressreleases #tickertagpressreleases
DISCLAIMER: FN Media Group LLC (FNM), which owns and operates FinancialNewsMedia.com and MarketNewsUpdates.com, is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM’s market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. FNM is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. For current services performed FNM expects to be compensated forty two hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press releases issued by Nutriband Inc. by the company. FNM HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE.
This release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. “Forward-looking statements” describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as “may”, “future”, “plan” or “planned”, “will” or “should”, “expected,” “anticipates”, “draft”, “eventually” or “projected”. You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company’s annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and FNM undertakes no obligation to update such statements.
Contact Information:
Media Contact email: editor@financialnewsmedia.com – +1(561)325-8757
The Government has decided to advance its allocations to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). This comes as humanitarian needs are increasing while these organisations’ life-saving activities are severely underfunded. Sweden is therefore augmenting its 2024 support by SEK 461 million, of which SEK 186 million will be allocated to WFP to stave off famine, SEK 185 million to UNHCR to help displaced people and SEK 90 million to UNFPA to prevent maternal mortality and combat gender-based violence.
“We see how humanitarian crises around the world are becoming deeper and more numerous, while funding is not increasing at the same pace. A record number of people are displaced. More than a million people are on the brink of starvation in Gaza, Haiti, Mali, Sudan and South Sudan. The support we’ve approved will help the family in Darfur who lost everything when fleeing violence and conflict and, at best, might only have a loaf of bread to share for dinner tonight, or the heavily pregnant woman in Gaza who might not survive childbirth. Sweden’s development assistance makes a difference in these heartbreaking situations,” says Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade Benjamin Dousa.
Hunger and forced displacement are currently two of the most prominent humanitarian challenges. More than 300 million people are suffering from chronic hunger in 71 countries, and more than 120 million people are displaced from their homes. For the first time in seven years, there is famine in the world – this time in Sudan, where more than 12 million people have been forced to flee their homes since April 2023. Women and girls are often particularly vulnerable in humanitarian crises and lack life-saving maternal health care and other sexual and reproductive health services. The assessment of the UN is that more than 300 million people will need humanitarian assistance in 2024.
At the same time, donor countries have only provided one third of the funding required. A number of humanitarian organisations are thus facing an urgent and extremely strained situation. These include the central UN agencies – UNHCR, WFP and UNFPA – where liquidity shortages are currently threatening their ability to help people in need. It is therefore particularly urgent that the Government disburse Sweden’s support to these UN agencies now, earlier than planned, when their life-saving operations are needed most. Sweden will also provide SEK 185 million to UNHCR and SEK 133 million to WFP in remaining funds that the Government approved earlier this year. Sweden is providing a total of SEK 779 million to these three UN agencies – much needed additional funding for an important cause.
Sweden is one of the world’s largest humanitarian donors. Every day, Swedish kronor help people with the most pressing humanitarian needs. This government decision means that Sweden is taking even greater responsibility for helping people who are displaced, suffering from famine, lacking maternal health care or subjected to gender-based violence. At the same time, more actors must renew their efforts to reduce humanitarian needs and expand the humanitarian donor base.
The text of the following joint statement was released by the Governments of Australia, Chile, Denmark, France, Iceland, the Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America
The undersigned country members of the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse (Global Partnership) call attention to the urgent need to counter the spread of gendered disinformation and address all forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) against women in political and public life.
Gendered disinformation is a threat to societies defending peaceful, democratic values. False or misleading gender and sex-based narratives are being used in campaigns by malign actors to deter and discredit the participation of women, girls and LGBTQI+ persons in political and public life. This not only causes deep harm to the individuals targeted, but also threatens electoral integrity, access to information and the exercise of freedom of expression. At the same time, new and emerging technologies are being used to enable harmful, violent rhetoric and attacks against women, girls and LGBTQI+ public figures across borders at a scale and speed previously unseen.
In our 2023 Road Map, the Global Partnership committed to promoting the meaningful participation in public life for women and girls, in all their diversity, by countering TFGBV and gendered disinformation.
We welcome the work being done to shine a light on how and why gendered disinformation is conceived, who it targets and how it is spread. Last year, in a groundbreaking study, Canada, the European External Action Service, Germany, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States jointly assessed the tactics used by foreign state and non-state actors to sow gendered and other identity-based disinformation across the world.
In March 2024 the Global Partnership and members of its Advisory Group co-hosted a multi-stakeholder conference convened by the National Democratic Institute on possible responses to countering the spread of gendered disinformation in the context of electoral processes. Stakeholders affirmed the need for a comprehensive response to disrupt the spread of gendered disinformation and to support victims and survivors.
The world is at a critical moment for upholding democracy. More than 100 countries have held, or are soon to be holding elections, many of them taking place under democratically challenging circumstances. The active participation of all people, including women, girls and LGBTQI+ persons, is essential for secure, healthy and prosperous democracies.
We call upon states to join us in recognising and taking action to counter the threat of gendered disinformation to democracies globally. We urge technology and other private companies to take appropriate action to respond to this threat, including a commitment to a Safety-by-Design approach to the development and deployment of platforms and technologies. We ask states and all stakeholders to defend and protect the ability of women, girls and LGBTQI+ persons to participate in public life freely, safely and without fear.
Dietary rules that unite and define American cuisine can so easily be perverted to use disgust to divide Americans. In the U.S., cow is food and dog is friend. Chicken is food. Cat is companion. The sharp lines between the animals Americans eat, love, protect and exterminate help write the dietary rules that define American norms.
What we eat, what we don’t and with whom we break bread are just some of the food rules that unite and define Americans. Think of how turkey – or tofurkey – unites Americans behind the Thanksgiving ritual. Bottled water. Ice. Ballpark hot dogs. Airplane pretzels. Movie theater popcorn.
Food can also establish group identity apart from the mainstream. Think of the many factions of vegan, vegetarian, paleo, grain-free and carnivore dieters who use food to express a political position. Also, of course, religious dietary proscriptions have worried scholars for centuries so that Jews, Muslims and Christians may never share a meal.
There is no evidence that Haitians are stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. There is evidence, however, that racists have long twisted dietary rules to divide people and dehumanize immigrants. Trump told a lie to draw a line between Americans and others who allegedly eat the animals Americans love.
A sign at a popular hot dog restaurant in Chicago reads ‘Immigrants eat our dogs,’ on Sept. 12, 2024, two days after the presidential debate. Scott Olson/Getty Images
The legend of delicious pets
The myth of eating pets traces back to old legends in Europe, Australia and the United States that “immigrants are stealing our cats and dogs for their dinner tables or to serve in ethnic restaurants,” writes the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand.
Two of the most common food-based legends center on “Oriental restaurants serving dog (or cat) meat, and legends about Asian immigrants in the United States capturing and cooking people’s pets,” Brunvard writes.
By 1883, the legend was so well-established that the Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo offered US$500 to anybody in New York for proof that Chinese people were eating cats or rats. No proof was found, but that didn’t stop the racist jokes or urban legends.
None of the many examples deserve retelling. But scholars, for example, have cited “sick jokes” such as a “new Vietnamese cookbook is titled 100 Ways to Wok Your Dog.”
Or as comedian Tessie Chua joked about her multiracial Chinese, Filipino and Irish identity in 1993 when she said, “That means I eat dog, but only if I can wash it down with Guinness Stout!”
In 1971, mainstream news outlets, including Reuters, reported an “outrageously silly urban legend” of a pet poodle named Rosa served at a Hong Kong restaurant, complete with chili sauce and bamboo shoots.
In 1980, Stockton, California, was seized by racist rumors of Vietnamese families stealing expensive purebred dogs for dinner.
More precise, maybe, than the adage that “we are what we eat” is that we are what we won’t eat. Shunning our neighbor for their vile food – stinky, strange, unpalatable – is also decidedly an American tradition.
“Garlic eater” was at one time recognizable in the U.S. as an ethnic slur for Italian Americans in the early 20th century. The names “spaghetti bender” and “grape stomper” were also used, but “garlic eater” stuck because, as one scholar argued, “garlic served as an ‘olfactory signifier’” – a distinguishing odor – “for the alien who consumed it.”
To an outsider, being called a lentil- or polenta-eater seems more like praise for a healthy diet than a racial epithet, but such are the vagaries of racism: People hate who they hate and justify it however possible.
Other examples of how food can distinguish communities abound. In the Amazon, the Parakanã people appreciate tapir meat but abhor monkey. The Arara people, their neighbors, feel the opposite. Both groups are disgusted by one another. Curry, garlic, tapir, polenta, lentils – it doesn’t matter what the nail is, but how the hammer hits.
Philomene Philostin, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Haitian origin, works in her store in Springfield, Ohio, that caters mainly to Haitian residents. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Rumors with real-life consequences
Urban legends about food and racist rumors can have serious consequences. Earlier in 2024, a false rumor that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in Fresno, California, cooked pit bulls led to such vile harassment that the owner, David Rasavong, moved the restaurant to a new location.
But there’s a more hopeful side to the issue of food being used as a way to divide or unite people, too. The Latin origins for the words company and companionship mean the people we share our bread with.
Garlic is now as central to American cuisine as apple pie. Nowadays, Americans are so much the better for the sushi, garlic and curry – and the diversity behind the deliciousness – that flavor American cuisine.
Adrienne Bitar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Migrants at a shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, watch the first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Sept. 10, 2024. Carlos Moreno/NurPhoto/Getty Image
In late July 2024, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris released a campaign ad about the U.S.-Mexico border that resembled something out of the Republican playbook.
In the ad, Harris said as president she would increase Border Patrol agents, stop human traffickers and prosecute transnational gangs – some of the very things that Republican contender Donald Trump has also promised to do if elected.
Considered by her campaign strategists to be a good political move, Harris’ shift to the right reflects the more anti-immigrant direction the U.S. population has taken over the past few years. According to a July 2024 Gallup Poll, 55% of Americans wanted increased limits on immigration, marking the first time in nearly two decades that a majority of Americans supported such curbs.
These anti-immigrant attitudes are partially due to exaggerated claims from conservative politicians and right-wing pundits that management of the U.S.-Mexico border is a disaster and the government is endangering public safety by allowing violent criminals to cross into the U.S.
Worse, during the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating dogs and cats.
As someone who has worked extensively with asylum-seekers at the border since 2019, I see clear differences between Harris and Trump on the issue of immigration.
While in office, Trump instituted restrictive immigration policies at the border, which all but halted asylum. He also was behind the controversial child separation policy in 2018 and sought to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era federal program that prevents hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from being deported.
Though Harris’ record on immigration is not as extensive as Trump’s, she has shown as U.S. senator and vice president a willingness to be more restrictive on the border while continuing to support a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” and undocumented migrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
Perhaps Trump’s most controversial action during his first term was his child separation policy in 2018, which led to over 5,000 children being taken from their parents after being apprehended at the border. This action led to nationwide protests and international condemnation. As of May 2024, about 1,400 children remained separated from their families.
Undaunted, Trump pursued other restrictive policies.
Trump signed an executive order in 2019 and launched the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as the Remain in Mexico policy. This order required asylum-seekers arriving at the U.S. border to be returned to Mexico while their claims were being processed. This program stayed in effect until the end of Trump’s presidency in 2020 and led to 81,000 expulsions.
Trump also used Title 42 restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic to quickly expel migrants without visas to contain the pandemic with no exceptions. In the first seven months, almost 200,000 migrants were expelled.
Notably, the use of violent rhetoric against migrants increased dramatically during Trump’s emergence as the GOP leader. In his first term, Trump and his officials discussed shooting migrants crossing the border in the leg. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, one of his key allies, said the reason officials there do not shoot migrants is because they would be charged by the federal government.
As a U.S. senator in 2019, Harris voted against an anti-sanctuary city amendment that would have allowed local police to cooperate with federal immigration officials and potentially deport immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
She was also the initial sponsor of legislation that would limit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions against those caring for unaccompanied minors. But as attorney general of California, Harris did support turning over to immigration authorities minors living in the U.S. illegally who had committed crimes.
As vice president, Harris has appeared to support a more restrictive approach similar to that of Biden‘s June 4, 2024, executive order that limited the number of asylum-seekers allowed to cross the border.
She also supports the CBP One app system that was created by the Biden administration in early 2023.
Under that process, individuals seeking asylum are given an opportunity to meet with an immigration official but often have to wait for months in dangerous conditions in Mexico.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris holds a virtual meeting with immigrant rights leaders on July 22, 2021. Win McNamee/Getty Images
If elected, Harris likely would extend another of Biden’s 2024 executive orders that created a legal pathway to citizenship for immigrants who don’t have legal authorization to be in the U.S. but are married to U.S. citizens.
The Biden-Harris administration also had a nuanced record on the border and deportations. They have deported almost the same number of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization as Trump did.
The Texas National Guard conducts an operation to prevent migrants from building a camp along the U.S.-Mexico border in April 2024. David Peinado/Anadolu via Getty Images
As of June 2024, the number of deportations since the start of the Biden administration in January 2021 was already at 4.4 million. At the same time, these higher numbers reflect the fact that more people are coming to the border due to increased chances of entering.
During the first three years of Biden’s presidency, over 1 million migrants at the border were granted temporary humanitarian parole, which allows them to stay in the U.S. while waiting for their asylum hearing.
The reality of immigration
Immigration has been largely portrayed as either a clear and present threat by Republicans or as an act of compassion by Democrats.
In the increasingly anti-immigrant environment, however, you’ll rarely hear that the increased immigration under the Biden-Harris administration has been a significant factor in U.S. economic growth.
Indeed, many economists also have argued that working-class immigrants coming from across the border have helped reduce inflation. Its my belief that the U.S. is in need of more migrants, not fewer, and hard-line stances and policies damage our society and economy.
While Trump’s hard-line stance against immigrants both at the border and within the country is well known, Harris’ record shows a more balanced approach that has offered support for at least some immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally – and for those seeking asylum.
William McCorkle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andrew J. Hoffman, Professor of Management & Organizations, Environment & Sustainability, and Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan
The U.S. has seen a large number of billion-dollar disasters in recent years.AP Photo/Mark Zaleski
Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowners insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country.
There are a few reasons, but a common thread: Climate change is fueling more severe weather, and insurers are responding to rising damage claims. The losses are exacerbated by more frequent extreme weather disasters striking densely populated areas, rising construction costs and homeowners experiencing damage that was once more rare.
Hurricane Ian, supercharged by warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane in October 2022 and caused an estimated $112.9 billion in damage. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images
Just a decade ago, few insurance companies had a comprehensive strategy for addressing climate risk as a core business issue. Today, insurance companies have no choice but to factor climate change into their policy models.
Rising damage costs, higher premiums
There’s a saying that to get someone to pay attention to climate change, put a price on it. Rising insurance costs are doing just that.
Increasing global temperatures lead to more extreme weather, and that means insurance companies have had to make higher payouts. In turn, they have been raising their prices and changing their coverage in order to remain solvent. That raises the costs for homeowners and for everyone else.
The importance of insurance to the economy cannot be understated. You generally cannot get a mortgage or even drive a car, build an office building or enter into contracts without insurance to protect against the inherent risks. Because insurance is so tightly woven into economies, state agencies review insurance companies’ proposals to increase premiums or reduce coverage.
The insurance companies are not making political statements with the increases. They are looking at the numbers, calculating risk and pricing it accordingly. And the numbers are concerning.
The arithmetic of climate risk
Insurance companies use data from past disasters and complex models to calculate expected future payouts. Then they price their policies to cover those expected costs. In doing so, they have to balance three concerns: keeping rates low enough to remain competitive, setting rates high enough to cover payouts and not running afoul of insurance regulators.
But climate change is disrupting those risk models. As global temperatures rise, driven by greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use and other human activities, past is no longer prologue: What happened over the past 10 to 20 years is less predictive of what will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.
The number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. each year offers a clear example. The average rose from 3.3 per year in the 1980s to 18.3 per year in the 10-year period ending in 2024, with all years adjusted for inflation.
With that more than fivefold increase in billion-dollar disasters came rising insurance costs in the Southeast because of hurricanes and extreme rainfall, in the West because of wildfires, and in the Midwest because of wind, hail and flood damage.
Hurricanes tend to be the most damaging single events. They caused more than US$692 billion in property damage in the U.S. between 2014 and 2023. But severe hail and windstorms, including tornadoes, are also costly; together, those on the billion-dollar disaster list did more than $246 billion in property damage over the same period.
As insurance companies adjust to the uncertainty, they may run a loss in one segment, such as homeowners insurance, but recoup their losses in other segments, such as auto or commercial insurance. But that cannot be sustained over the long term, and companies can be caught by unexpected events. California’s unprecedented wildfires in 2017 and 2018 wiped out nearly 25 years’ worth of profits for insurance companies in that state.
To balance their risk, insurance companies often turn to reinsurance companies; in effect, insurance companies that insure insurance companies. But reinsurers have also been raising their prices to cover their costs. Property reinsurance alone increased by 35% in 2023. Insurers are passing those costs to their policyholders.
What this means for your homeowners policy
Not only are homeowners insurance premiums going up, coverage is shrinking. In some cases, insurers are reducing or dropping coverage for items such as metal trim, doors and roof repair, increasing deductibles for risks such as hail and fire damage, or refusing to pay full replacement costs for things such as older roofs.
Some insurances companies are simply withdrawing from markets altogether, canceling existing policies or refusing to write new ones when risks become too uncertain or regulators do not approve their rate increases to cover costs. In recent years, State Farm and Allstate pulled back from California’s homeowner market, and Farmers, Progressive and AAA pulled back from the Florida market, which is seeing some of the highest insurance rates in the country.
In some cases, insurers are restricting coverage. Roof repairs, like these in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., after Hurricane Ian, can be expensive and widespread after windstorms. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
State-run “insurers of last resort,” which can provide coverage for people who can’t get coverage from private companies, are struggling too. Taxpayers in states such as California and Florida have been forced to bail out their state insurers. And the National Flood Insurance Program has raised its premiums, leading 10 states to sue to stop them.
According to NOAA data, 2023 was the hottest year on record “by far.” And 2024 could be even hotter. This general warming trend and the rise in extreme weather is expected to continue until greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are abated.
In the face of such worrying analyses, U.S. homeowners insurance will continue to get more expensive and cover less. And yet, Jacques de Vaucleroy, chairman of the board of reinsurance giant Swiss Re, believes U.S. insurance is still priced too low to fully cover the risk from climate change.
Andrew J. Hoffman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Karen Mollica (BA Hons [Political Science], McMaster University, 2000; MA [International Affairs], Carleton University, 2003) joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2003 following internships in Guyana and Costa Rica.
Karen Mollica (BA Hons [Political Science], McMaster University, 2000; MA [International Affairs], Carleton University, 2003) joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2003 following internships in Guyana and Costa Rica. Her early assignments included coordinator in the Anti-personnel Mine Action Team and desk officer for several countries in West and Central Africa. She subsequently moved to the Canadian International Development Agency and served as first secretary at the High Commission in South Africa and as counsellor and head of cooperation at the Embassy to Jordan. Upon her return to Headquarters in 2019, she became director of policy, planning and operations for Latin America and the Caribbean, a position she held until 2022. Most recently, she served as director and senior departmental adviser in the Office of the Minister of International Development and as chargé d’affaires at the Embassy to the Holy See.
Ajit Singh (BA [Communications], University of Winnipeg, 2003; BA Hons [Political Science], University of Winnipeg, 2004; MA [International Law], United Nations University for Peace, 2006; JD, Osgoode Hall Law School, 2012) has lived, studied and worked in multiple languages in 6 countries on 4 continents. He joined the Government of Canada in 2008 after working in media, academia, the United Nations and civil society organizations. He later worked in private law in Toronto and was called to the Bar of Ontario as a barrister and solicitor. In 2013, he joined the Privy Council Office in the Intergovernmental Affairs Secretariat. He then worked in its Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat, where he led on relations with Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia regions and Latin America and on legal files. In 2017, he joined Global Affairs Canada as a deputy director in the Foreign Policy Planning Division to lead the team responsible for the foreign ministers’ track during Canada’s 2018 G7 presidency. After this, he worked in the Conflict Prevention, Stabilization and Peacebuilding Division. In 2021, he joined the Department of National Defence as a director of operations. In 2022, he rejoined the Privy Council Office, this time as the first person to hold the position of director of international crisis response.
Source: Republic of France in English The Republic of France has issued the following statement:
President of the General Assembly,
Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations,
Heads of State and Government,
Ministers,
Ambassadors,
Colleagues,
We are gathered here today to reaffirm our commitment to an ambitious, effective and representative multilateralism to face the challenges of tomorrow. Many of you want to advance our multilateral system, a system founded on respect for the rule of law and clear principles established following the Second World War and on respect for the Charter of the United Nations, a system based on cooperation between nations, sustainable development for all and solidarity between countries.
Today, that system needs reform. For global governance must be both more representative and, collectively, more effective. Everyone needs to contribute, everyone needs to shoulder their responsibilities.
I would like to thank the Secretary-General for enabling us to move forward on this essential project for future generations, which France is supporting with strength and conviction.
This Summit of the Future, Secretary-General, should enable the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals in good time. We need to step up our efforts to address climate challenges.
True to its historical commitment within the United Nations, France has worked to ensure the Pact for the Future meets the expectations of the Member States when it comes to Security Council reform. We are advocating an expansion in both categories of members and a greater African presence, including among permanent members. In the same vein, we promote a joint initiative with Mexico to regulate the use of vetoes in the event of mass atrocities, which is already supported by 106 States from all world regions.
France has also been innovative in its proposals to reform the international financial architecture, in the spirit of the Paris Pact for Peoples and the Planet that the French President launched at the June 2023 Paris Summit.
The New Agenda for Peace should help modernize United Nations tools for international peace and security. We need to ensure that peace operations, which have evolved considerably, are suited to addressing new challenges. I would like to seize this opportunity to commend the work of the blue helmets who foster global peace and security every day. I have in mind the men and women of UNIFIL in Lebanon, including its French contingent. The Lebanese people are also in my thoughts right now: Israeli strikes have just killed hundreds of civilians, including dozens of children. These strikes, made from both sides of the Blue Line and more widely in the region, must cease immediately. France once again calls on the parties and their supporters to de-escalate and avoid a regional conflagration that would be devastating for everyone, starting with civilian populations. That is why I have called for an emergency Security Council meeting this week to discuss Lebanon.
In Lebanon and elsewhere, France will remain totally committed to resolving the major crises that shake the international order. It will take initiatives. It will continue to condemn Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine unreservedly, and to demand peace and compliance with the law. It will continue to demand the release of all hostages, respect for international humanitarian law and a ceasefire in Gaza. France considers all human lives to be equal in dignity. France will not look away from any armed conflict. It will therefore continue its initiatives to support Sudan, alongside its partners.
Deputy Secretary-General, you want us to look together towards the future. That future will be marked by great progress in digital technologies, starting with artificial intelligence. The Global Digital Compact enshrines the commitment of the international community as a whole to coordinate on these new challenges. The digital revolution must not further widen the digital gap and must serve the Sustainable Development Goals. This will be a central priority at the AI Action Summit that will be held in France on 10 and 11 February 2025.
The fight against climate change and for the protection of the environment is not an issue for the future but a challenge for the present. The climate threat is devastating. Inaction and lack of ambition are culpable. We owe our people determined, tangible, immediate and effective action. It is in this spirit that the Presidents of France and Kazakhstan and the President of the World Bank are jointly organizing the One Water Summit this year.
We are in an era of epic transformation – facing challenges unlike any we have ever seen – challenges that demand global solutions.
Yet geo-political divisions keep deepening. The planet keeps heating.
Wars rage with no clue how they will end.
And nuclear posturing and new weapons cast a dark shadow.
We are edging towards the unimaginable – a powder keg that risks engulfing the world.
Meanwhile, 2024 is the year that half of humanity goes to the polls – and all of humanity will be affected.
I stand before you in this whirlwind convinced of two overriding truths.
First, the state of our world is unsustainable.
We can’t go on like this.
And second, the challenges we face are solvable.
But that requires us to make sure the mechanisms of international problem-solving actually solve problems.
The Summit of the Future was a first step, but we have a long way to go.
Getting there requires confronting three major drivers of unsustainability.
A world of impunity – where violations and abuses threaten the very foundation of international law and the UN Charter.
A world of inequality – where injustices and grievances threaten to undermine countries or even push them over the edge.
And a world of uncertainty – where unmanaged global risks threaten our future in unknowable ways.
These worlds of impunity, inequality and uncertainty are connected and colliding.
Excellencies,
The level of impunity in the world is politically indefensible and morally intolerable.
Today, a growing number of governments and others feel entitled to a “get out of jail free” card.
They can trample international law.
They can violate the United Nations Charter.
They can turn a blind eye to international human rights conventions or the decisions of international courts.
They can thumb their nose at international humanitarian law.
They can invade another country, lay waste to whole societies, or utterly disregard the welfare of their own people.
And nothing will happen.
We see this age of impunity everywhere — in the Middle East, in the heart of Europe, in the Horn of Africa, and beyond.
The war in Ukraine is spreading with no signs of letting up.
Civilians are paying the price – in rising death tolls and shattered lives and communities.
It is time for a just peace based on the UN Charter, on international law and on UN resolutions.
Meanwhile, Gaza is a non-stop nightmare that threatens to take the entire region with it.
Look no further than Lebanon.
We should all be alarmed by the escalation.
Lebanon is at the brink.
The people of Lebanon – the people of Israel – and the people of the world — cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.
Let’s be clear.
Nothing can justify the abhorrent acts of terror committed by Hamas on October 7th, or the taking of hostages – both of which I have repeatedly condemned.
And nothing can justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.
The speed and scale of the killing and destruction in Gaza are unlike anything in my years as Secretary-General.
More than 200 of our own staff have been killed, many with their families.
And yet the women and men of the United Nations continue to deliver humanitarian aid.
I know you join me in paying a special tribute to UNRWA and to all humanitarians in Gaza.
The international community must mobilize for an immediate ceasefire, the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, and the beginning of an irreversible process towards a two-State solution.
For those who go on undermining that goal with more settlements, more landgrabs, more incitement — I ask:
What is the alternative?
How could the world accept a one-state future in which a large a large number of Palestinians would be included without any freedom, rights or dignity?
In Sudan, a brutal power struggle has unleashed horrific violence — including widespread rape and sexual assaults.
A humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding as famine spreads. Yet outside powers continue to interfere with no unified approach to finding peace.
In the Sahel, the dramatic and rapid expansion of the terrorist threat requires a joint approach rooted in solidarity – but regional and international cooperation have broken down.
From Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Haiti to Yemen and beyond – we continue to see appalling levels of violence and human suffering in the face of a chronic failure to find solutions.
Meanwhile our peacekeeping missions are too often operating in areas where simply there is no peace to keep.
Instability in many places around the world is a by-product of instability in power relations and geo-political divides.
For all its perils, the Cold War had rules.
There were hot lines, red lines and guard rails.
It can feel as though we don’t have that today.
Nor do we have a unipolar world.
We are moving to a multipolar world, but we are not there yet.
We are in a purgatory of polarity.
And in this purgatory, more and more countries are filling the spaces of geopolitical divides, doing whatever they want with no accountability.
That is why it is more important than ever to reaffirm the Charter, to respect international law, to support and implement decisions of international courts, and to reinforce human rights in the world.
Anywhere and everywhere.
Excellences, Mesdames et Messieurs,
L’augmentation des inégalités est un deuxième facteur de l’insoutenabilité et une tache sur notre conscience collective.
L’inégalité n’est pas une question technique ou bureaucratique.
Au fond, l’inégalité est une question de pouvoir, aux racines historiques.
Les conflits, les bouleversements climatiques et la crise du coût de la vie étendent ces racines historiques plus profondément encore.
Dans le même temps, le monde peine encore à se relever de la flambée des inégalités engendrée par la pandémie.
Si l’on regarde les 75 pays les plus pauvres du monde, un tiers d’entre eux se trouve aujourd’hui dans une situation pire qu’il y a cinq ans.
Au cours de la même période, les cinq hommes les plus riches de la planète ont plus que doublé leurs fortunes.
Et un pour cent des habitants de la planète détient 43 % de l’ensemble des avoirs financiers mondiaux.
Au niveau national, certains gouvernements décuplent les inégalités en accordant des cadeaux fiscaux massifs aux entreprises et aux ultra-riches — au détriment des investissements dans la santé, l’éducation et la protection sociale.
Et personne n’est plus lésé que les femmes et les filles du monde entier.
Excellences,
La discrimination et les abus généralisés fondés sur le genre constituent l’inégalité la plus répandue dans toutes les sociétés.
Chaque jour, il semble que nous soyons confrontés à de nouveaux cas révoltants de féminicides, de violences fondées sur le genre et de viols collectifs – en temps de paix comme en tant qu’arme de guerre.
Dans certains pays, les lois sont utilisées pour menacer la santé et les droits reproductifs.
Et en Afghanistan, les lois sont utilisées pour entériner l’oppression systématique des femmes et des filles.
Et je suis désolé de constater que, malgré des années de beaux discours, l’inégalité de genre se manifesteet je vous demande pardon de le dire, elle se manifeste aujourd’hui encore, pleinement dans cette enceinte.
Moins de 10 pour cent des intervenants au Débat général de cette semaine sont des femmes.
C’est inacceptable, surtout quand on sait que l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes contribue à la paix, au développement durable, à l’action climatique et bien plus encore.
C’est précisément pour cela nous avons pris des mesures spécifiques pour atteindre la parité hommes-femmes parmi les hauts responsables de l’Organisation des Nations Unies,objectif qui est déjà complété.
C’est faisable.
J’exhorte les institutions politiques et économiques du monde dominées par les hommes à le faire aussi.
Excellences,
Les inégalités mondiales se reflètent et se renforcent jusque dans nos propres organisations internationales.
Le Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies a été conçu par les vainqueurs de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
À l’époque, la majeure partie du continent africain était encore sous domination coloniale.
À ce jour, l’Afrique n’a toujours aucun siège permanent au sein de la principale instance de paix du monde.
Un changement s’impose.
Il en va de même pour l’architecture financière mondiale, mise en place il y a 80 ans.
Je félicite les dirigeants de la Banque mondiale et du Fonds monétaire international pour les mesures importantes qu’ils ont entreprises.
Mais comme le souligne le Pacte pour l’avenir, la lutte contre les inégalités exige une accélération de la réforme de l’architecture financière internationale.
Au cours des huit dernières décennies, l’économie mondiale s’est développée et transformée.
Les institutions de Bretton Woods n’ont pas suivi le rythme.
Elles ne sont plus en mesure de fournir un filet de sécurité mondial, ni d’offrir aux pays en développement le niveau de soutien dont ils ont tant besoin.
Dans les pays les plus pauvres du monde, le coût des intérêts de la dette dépasse, en moyenne, le coût des investissements dans l’éducation, la santé et les infrastructures publiques réunis.
Et à l’échelle du monde, plus de 80 % des cibles des Objectifs de développement durable ne sont pas en bonne voie. Excelencias,
Volver al camino correcto requiere un aumento de financiamiento para la Agenda 2030 y el Acuerdo de París.
Esto implica que los países del G20 lideren un Estímulo para los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible de 500.000 millones de dólares al año.
Implica reformas para aumentar sustancialmente la capacidad de préstamo de los Bancos Multilaterales de Desarrollo – y permitirles ampliar masivamente la financiación asequible a largo plazo para el clima y el desarrollo.
Implica ampliar la financiación de contingencia mediante el reciclaje de los Derechos Especiales de Giro.
E implica promover una reestructuración de la deuda a largo plazo.
Excelencias,
No me hago ilusiones sobre las barreras a la reforma del sistema multilateral.
Los que tienen poder político y económico, o y los que creen tenerlo, son siempre reacios al cambio.
Pero el status quo ya está agotando su poder.
Sin reformas, la fragmentación es inevitable, y las instituciones globales perderán legitimidad, credibilidad y eficacia.
Excellencies,
The third driver of our unsustainable world is uncertainty.
The ground is shifting under our feet.
Anxiety levels are off the charts.
And young people, in particular, are counting on us and seeking solutions.
Uncertainty is compounded by two existential threats – the climate crisis and the rapid advance of technology — in particular, Artificial Intelligence.
Excellencies,
We are in a climate meltdown.
Extreme temperatures, raging fires, droughts, and epic floods are not natural disasters.
They are human disasters — increasingly fueled by fossil fuels.
No country is spared. But the poorest and most vulnerable are hardest hit.
Climate hazards are blowing a hole through the budgets of many African countries, costing up to five per cent of GDP – every year.
And this is just the start.
We are on course to careen past the global limit of a 1.5 degree temperature rise.
But as the problem gets worse, solutions are getting better.
Renewable prices are plummeting, roll-out is accelerating, and lives are being transformed by affordable, accessible clean energy.
Renewables don’t just generate power. They generate jobs, wealth, energy security and a path out of poverty for millions.
But developing countries cannot be plundered in that journey.
Our Panel on Critical Minerals has recommended fair and sustainable ways to meet global demand for these resources, which are essential to the renewables revolution.
Excellencies,
A future without fossil fuels is certain. A fair and fast transition is not.
That is in your hands.
By next year, every country must produce an ambitious new national climate action plan – or Nationally Determined Contributions.
These must bring national energy strategies, sustainable development priorities, and climate ambitions together.
They must align with the 1.5 degree limit, cover the whole economy, and contribute to every one of the COP28 energy transition targets.
An International Energy Agency report released today breaks this down.
By 2035, on average, advanced economies must slash energy emissions 80 per cent, and emerging markets 65 per cent.
The G20 is responsible for 80 per cent of total emissions.
They must lead the charge – keeping with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of different national circumstances.
But this must be a joint effort — pooling resources, scientific capacities and proven and affordable technologies for all to be able to reach those targets.
I’m honoured to be working closely with President Lula of Brazil – who is both G20 Chair and COP30 host – to secure maximum ambition, acceleration and cooperation. We just met for that purpose.
Finance is essential.
COP29 is around the corner.
It must deliver a significant new finance goal.
We also need a Loss and Damage Fund that meets the scale of the challenge – and developed countries meeting their adaptation finance promises.
And we must finally flip the script on a crazy situation:
We continue to reward polluters to wreck our planet.
The fossil fuel industry continues to pocket massive profits and subsidies, while everyday people bear the costs of climate catastrophe – from rising insurance premiums to lost livelihoods.
I call on G20 countries to shift money from fossil fuel subsidies and investments to a just energy transition;
To put an effective price on carbon;
And to implement new and innovative sources of financing – including solidarity levies on fossil fuel extraction – through legally-binding, transparent mechanisms.
All by next year and this taking into account that those who shoulder the blame must foot the bill.
Polluters must pay.
Excellencies,
The rapid rise of new technologies poses another unpredictable existential risk.
Artificial Intelligence will change virtually everything we know — from work, education and communication, to culture and politics.
We know AI is rapidly advancing, but where is it taking us:
To more freedom – or more conflict?
To a more sustainable world – or greater inequality?
To being better informed – or easier to manipulate?
A handful of companies and even individuals have already amassed enormous power over the development of AI – with little accountability or oversight for the moment.
Without a global approach to its management, artificial intelligence could lead to artificial divisions across the board – a Great Fracture with two internets, two markets, two economies – with every country forced to pick a side, and enormous consequences for all.
The United Nations is the universal platform for dialogue and consensus.
It is uniquely placed to promote cooperation on AI – based on the values of the Charter and international law.
The global debate happens here, or it does not happen.
I welcome important first steps.
Two resolutions in the General Assembly, the Global Digital Compact, and the recommendations of the High-Level Body on AI can lay the foundations for inclusive governance of AI.
Let’s move forward together to make AI a force for good.
Excellencies,
Nothing lasts forever.
But a feature of human life is that it appears otherwise.
The current order always feels fixed.
Until it is not.
Across human history, we see empires rising and falling; old certainties crumbling; tectonic shifts in global affairs.
Today our course is unsustainable.
It is in all our interests to manage the epic transformations underway; to choose the future we want and to guide our world towards it.
Many have said that the differences and divisions today are just too great.
That it is impossible for us to come together for the common good.
You proved that is not true.
The Summit of the Future showed that with a spirit of dialogue and compromise, we can join forces to steer our world to a more sustainable path.
It is not the end.
It is a start of a journey, a compass in the whirlwind.
Let’s keep going.
Let’s move our world towards less impunity and more accountability …. less inequality and more justice … less uncertainty and more opportunity.
The people of the world are looking to us – and succeeding generations will look back on us.
Let them find us on the side of the United Nations Charter … on the side of our shared values and principles … and on the right side of history.
Atlantic halibut is found in waters from eastern Newfoundland to the northeastern United States. The majority of the stock is found in Canadian fishing waters, with a small percentage of the stock also found in the French maritime zone off Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
September 23, 2024
Ottawa, Ontario – Atlantic halibut is found in waters from eastern Newfoundland to the northeastern United States. The majority of the stock is found in Canadian fisheries waters, with a small percentage of the stock also found in the French maritime zone off Saint Pierre and Miquelon. The Government of Canada recognizes the importance of this stock to both Canadian and French fisheries.
Today, the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, the Honourable Diane Lebouthillier, announced that after several months of negotiations, Canada has reached an agreement with France (with respect to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon) on the sharing of Atlantic halibut.
The agreement, concluded on September 20, 2024, will allow French fishermen in Saint Pierre and Miquelon to catch 3% of Canada’s total allowable catch. This allocation will allow for measured growth in the Atlantic halibut fishery in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, while providing benefits to Canadian coastal communities through French landings of Atlantic halibut in Canadian ports. This agreement supports the health and sustainability of the Atlantic halibut stock, and recognizes the importance of this fishery to coastal communities in Atlantic Canada, as well as the significant investments made by Canada and its fishing industry to develop and manage the fishery.
Since 2016, Canada has been working with France to reach an agreement on sharing Atlantic halibut quotas, with representatives from Fisheries and Oceans Canada leading the negotiations.
“I am pleased with the outcome of our negotiations with France. I am confident that we have reached a fair agreement that will ensure the long-term health of the Atlantic halibut stock, while supporting the economies and coastal communities of Canada and France.”
The Honourable Diane Lebouthillier, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard
Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with the Prime Minister of Haiti, Garry Conille, on the margins of the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Ahead of their participation in the high-level meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti, Prime Minister Trudeau welcomed the progress made by Prime Minister Conille and the Presidential Transitional Council toward restoring democracy, security and stability in Haiti. Both leaders agreed on the importance of the work underway toward free and fair elections in the country.
The Prime Ministers noted the importance of international partners filling the investment gap in the United Nations-authorized Multinational Security Support Mission, which aims to provide much-needed relief to the Haitian people. Prime Minister Trudeau reiterated his long-standing support for Haiti’s solutions to the ongoing crisis in the country, underscored Canada’s commitment to helping restore peace and security in the country, and looked forward to further progress during Canada’s presidency of ECOSOC in the 2024-25 session.
Prime Minister Trudeau and Prime Minister Conille reaffirmed the strong ties between Canada and Haiti and agreed to remain in regular contact.
Related links
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Apologies should the grammar and/or sentence structure not be perfect.
Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with the Prime Minister of Haiti, Garry Conille, on the margins of the 79th Session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.
Ahead of their participation at the High-Level Meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti, Prime Minister Trudeau welcomed progress made by Prime Minister Conille and the Transitional Presidential Council toward restoring democracy, security, and stability in Haiti. The two leaders agreed on the importance of ongoing work to hold free and fair elections in the country.
The prime ministers underscored the need for international partners to address the funding gap for the UN-authorized Multinational Security Support mission, which aims to provide much-needed relief to the Haitian people. Prime Minister Trudeau reaffirmed his longstanding support for Haitian-led solutions to the ongoing crises the country is facing, emphasized Canada’s commitment to helping re-establish peace and security in Haiti, and looked forward to furthering progress throughout Canada’s presidency of ECOSOC for the 2024-25 session.
Prime Minister Trudeau and Prime Minister Conille reaffirmed the strong bond between Canada and Haiti and agreed to remain in regular contact.
Source: United States Senator for New Mexico Martin Heinrich
The Interdiction of Fentanyl at Federal Prisons Act will help eliminatefentanyl and other illicit narcotics from entering prisons by mail
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) introduced legislation to protect prison officers, staff, and inmates from fentanyl and other illicit substances entering the Federal Prison System through inmate mail. By directing the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to develop a strategy that guarantees all mail is screened for illicit contraband, the Interdiction of Fentanyl at Federal Prisons Act would reduce the risk of intentional poisoning or lethal exposure from illicit substances in federal prisons and support the 38,000 BOP corrections officers and staff that are dedicated to keeping prisons safe.
“We need to deploy every available tool we can to tackle the opioid epidemic and support law enforcement in cracking down on the deadly flow of fentanyl,” said Heinrich. “By screening all mail at federal prisons, we can protect officers, staff, and inmates from harmful exposure to illicit substances and prevent life-endangering overdoses. I won’t stop fighting until we deliver the resources our law enforcement officers, first responders, medical providers, and New Mexicans on the front lines need to address this deadly epidemic.”
“As we fight back against the fentanyl crisis, we must protect those who face an elevated risk of dangerous exposure. I have long pushed for digital mail screening as an effective way to stop fentanyl from entering our prisons to protect officers, staff, and inmates,”said Casey. “This legislation is a critical step to keep Pennsylvanians safe and I will continue fighting like hell to stop the fentanyl crisis.”
As New Mexico and the nation continue to grapple with the opioid crisis, the Interdiction of Fentanyl at Federal Prisons Act would protect officers, staff, and inmates by requiring BOP to develop a strategy to intercept and interdict illicit substances, including fentanyl, mailed to federal correctional facilities. After one BOP official lost his life and numerous reports of officers being hospitalized after being exposed to mail saturated in fentanyl and other unknown substances, this legislation would help keep them safe on the job.
Specifically, this bill would enable BOP to acquire and deploy equipment to scan 100 percent of legal and postal mail arriving at federal correctional facilities. This legislation would enhance mail screening and ensure that all incarcerated people receive digital copies of mail addressed to them, while remaining consistent with the law and BOP procedures governing attorney-client privilege. This bill would also guarantee that all contraband-free mail be delivered once it has been screened.
The Interdiction of Fentanyl at Federal Prisons Act is endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), R Street Institute, National Association of Police Organizations, National District Attorneys Associations, Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, and Voices of JOE.
Read more about the Interdiction of Fentanyl at Federal Prisons Act here.
Senator Heinrich is leading comprehensive efforts to tackle the opioid epidemic and protect New Mexico communities from fentanyl, most recently securing more than $1 million for local law enforcement to detect illicit fentanyl, helping to pass the historic FEND Off Fentanyl Act into law, and authoring legislation to require the DEA to establish a nationwide fentanyl tracking system.
Find an extensive list of Heinrich’s actions to tackle the fentanyl crisis here.
Source: United States Senator for New Mexico Martin Heinrich
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and U.S. Representative Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) introduced legislation to approve the water rights settlement for the Navajo Nation as well as participating non-Tribal parties in the Rio San José watershed. U.S. Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and U.S. Representatives Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) and Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) cosponsored the bill.
Heinrich and Leger Fernández previously introduced the Rio San José and Rio Jemez Water Settlements Act, which would implement the water settlements agreed to by the Pueblos of Acoma and Laguna, the United States, the State of New Mexico, and non-Tribal parties, in the Rio San José watershed. That bill received a hearing and was reported out of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in December. The House version of this bill received a legislative hearing in the House Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee in July. The bill introduced this month would further resolve Tribal water claims in the Rio San José basin by settling the Navajo Nation’s claims.
“Our legislation will provide critically needed funding to get much-needed water to Navajo communities in the Rio San José watershed,” said Heinrich. “By passing this and our other pending Tribal water settlement bills this Congress, we can better follow through on the federal government’s promise to help Tribes access and use the water that has always been rightfully theirs.”
“In New Mexico we know water is life. Navajo Nation, the surrounding communities, and the state of New Mexico worked together to reach an agreement that would make sure the life-giving waters of the Rio San Jose would flow for everyone,” said Leger Fernández.“Senator Heinrich’s and my bill would provide funding for much needed water infrastructure for Navajo Nation as well as nearby acequias. The powerful stories of collaboration around this precious resource we heard in committee prove that settlement is the best road for resolving these water claims.” “As a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, I am proud to join my New Mexico colleagues in introducing legislation to approve the water rights settlement for the Navajo Nation in the Rio San José Watershed,” said Luján. “This legislation has strong backing from stakeholders across New Mexico and will provide a comprehensive resolution for the Navajo Nation’s water rights claims in the Rio San José Stream System. It will ensure the protection of Tribal water rights while effectively addressing the water needs of the community.” “In New Mexico, we know water is life,” said Stansbury. “As stewards of the land, water, and air since time immemorial, it is so important that our Tribal communities have a stake in how water is used in this state. This bill, as well as many others, will uphold our commitment to our Tribes and Pueblos granting them the right to use water for their needs. This is what environmental justice looks like.”
“Protecting a critical resource and honoring Tribal sovereignty are some of our core responsibilities in Congress, and I’m proud to work with the New Mexico Delegation to fulfill our trust responsibility and provide essential resources to support the New Mexico’s water infrastructure,” said Vasquez. “This settlement ensures the Navajo Nation and our non-Tribal users of the Rio San José watershed will have the water resources needed to thrive for generations to come.”
“On behalf of the Navajo Nation, I want to express my deepest appreciation to Senator Heinrich, Senator Lujan, and Representative Leger Fernandez for introducing this important legislation. Implementation of this settlement will make a real difference for Eastern Navajo communities where lack of water has constrained development. A collaborative negotiation process produced a comprehensive settlement that provides a path forward towards a better future for the people of the Rio San Jose and Rio Puerco Basins,” said Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren.
Additional Background on Tribal Water Settlements Legislation:
The introduction of this bill follows Heinrich and Vasquez’s introduction of the Zuni Indian Tribe Water Rights Settlement Act in July, with Luján, Stansbury, and Leger Fernández all joining as original cosponsors. That bill would unlock federal funding to support a trust for sustainable water management and infrastructure development that upholds the federal government’s trust responsibility while protecting the sacred Zuni Salt Lake. The bill ratifies the settlement between the federal government, State of New Mexico and Zuni Tribe that affirms their water rights for irrigation, livestock, storage, and domestic and other uses.
In June, Heinrich and Leger Fernández introduced the Ohkay Owingeh Rio Chama Water Rights Settlement Act, legislation to approve the water rights settlement of Ohkay Owingeh and participating non-Tribal parties for water in the Rio Chama Basin. Luján and Stansbury are original cosponsors of this bill.
Last December, Luján and Leger Fernández introduced the Technical Corrections to the Northwestern New Mexico Rural Water Projects Act, Taos Pueblo Indian Water Rights Settlement Act, and Aamodt Litigation Settlement Act, which authorizes the appropriation of $6.3 million for the Navajo Nation Water Resources Development Fund; $7.8 million for the Taos Pueblo Water Development Fund; and $4.3 million for the Aamodt Settlement Pueblos’ Fund, which covers Nambé, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, and Tesuque Pueblos. It will support water resources development projects for the Tribes. Heinrich and Stansbury are original cosponsors of this bill.
Last June, Luján and Leger Fernández introduced legislation that amends the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project to ensure it has the resources and time needed to deliver drinking water to northwestern New Mexico communities in the San Juan basin, including roughly 43 Chapters on the Eastern Navajo Nation, the southwestern portion of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the City of Gallup, which currently rely on a rapidly depleting groundwater supply of poor quality. Heinrich and Stansbury are original cosponsors of this bill.
Additionally, last year, the entire New Mexico Congressional Delegation announced a $235.1 million allocation to continue fulfilling settlements of Indian water rights claims using funding from the Infrastructure Law and the Reclamation Water Settlements Fund. As part of that overall allocation, the Navajo-Gallup Water Project received $164 million from the Infrastructure Law and the Reclamation Water Settlements Fund. Another $2 million was directed to Navajo-Gallup Water supply operations, maintenance and replacement efforts. The Aamodt Water Rights Settlement, which includes the Pueblos of Nambé, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, and Tesuque, received $69.1 million in federal funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The Right Honourable Mr. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, Your Excellency Dr. Garry Conille, Prime Minister of the Republic of Haiti, Distinguished Heads of State and Government,
On behalf of the United Nations Secretary-General, I have the honour to join you for this high-level event – and stand together in solidarity with Haiti, during these critical times.
I would like to thank Canada, the Chair of the ECOSOC Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti, for their active efforts to support a coordinated and coherent approach to Haiti’s stabilization and sustainable development.
Excellencies,
The security situation in Haiti remains extremely preoccupying – and poses major threats not only to the people of Haiti but also to peace and security in the region.
Gang violence continues to ravage the country.
Heavily armed gangs attack police stations, loot hospitals, occupy courthouses, and destroy other critical installations.
These are deliberate efforts to erode state authority, sow chaos and make it easier to prey on vulnerable communities.
Between January and end-August alone, the United Nations has documented more than 3,400 people killed and 1,600 others injured in gang violence – with over a 1,000 people kidnapped by these groups.
Other shocking human rights abuses have been amply documented, including rape, forced recruitment, and exploitation.
More than 578,000 people are internally displaced, over half of them children.
Nearly half of the population are food insecure and lack access to clean drinking water.
The proliferation of armed gangs in the capital has led to an alarming rise in sexual and gender-based violence mainly against women and girls.
In some areas, health service providers have reported receiving 40 rape victims a day.
The perpetrators of these heinous crimes must face justice.
Many children are victims of crossfire, exploitation and trafficking, forced to join gangs and increasingly used to carry out attacks.
[UNICEF estimates that 30 to 50 per cent of gang members are children.]
Haiti’s situation exemplifies a vicious cycle where decades of development deficits are deepened by ongoing insecurity and political instability.
This cycle has severely hampered any progress towards sustainable development, deeply affecting the socio-economic fabric of the nation.
Haiti also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere.
Excellencies,
These daily horrors must stop.
The Haitian National Police face significant shortages of human, material and financial resources.
They need sustained and generous international support to equip and empower them to tackle the escalating gang violence and to protect Haitians from violence.
The deployment of the Multinational Security Support mission in June is a welcome development.
I salute the commitment of Kenya, Belize and Jamaica, who have currently deployed personnel to the MSS.
The UN Trust Fund for the MSS has received $67 million in voluntary contributions from Member States, out of a total of $84 million pledged.
Still, much more is needed to ensure the MSS can fulfil its mandate.
This is why the Secretary-General has consistently urged Member States to contribute to the MSS.
However, addressing security concerns alone is insufficient.
Enhancing educational opportunities, healthcare access, social protection and economic development is crucial to breaking the cycle of poverty and instability and foster a resilient society.
Distinguished delegates,
Breaking the cycle of violence requires both political solutions and security measures – in parallel.
Progress on the establishment of transitional bodies is urgently to ensure that the elections timeline agreed by Haitian stakeholders and the restoration of democratic institutions by February 2026 does not slip.
I call on all political stakeholders in Haiti to reaffirm their commitment to the political accord and roadmap to re-establishing democratic institutions.
Finally, continued international support and collaboration are essential to ensure these political milestones are complemented by strong development policies.
Today, nearly half of the population needs humanitarian assistance.
Despite this dire situation, only one third [36%] of the 2024 Humanitarian Response Plan remains funded.
I urge donors to step up, contribute to addressing these urgent needs while pledging long term development aid that addresses the root causes of instability.
Dear friends,
The Secretary-General and the entire United Nations remain steadfast in our commitment to the people of Haiti.
Together, let us continue to do everything we can to bring peace, stability, and sustainable development – for all Haitians.
The Secretary-General met with H.E. Mr. Gabriel Boric Font, President of the Republic of Chile. The Secretary-General and the President discussed the outcomes of the Summit of the Future, reforms to international institutions and climate change. The Secretary-General and the President also addressed challenges to peace and security.
*****
El Secretario General se reunió con el Excelentísimo Sr. Gabriel Boric Font, Presidente de la República de Chile. El Secretario General y el Presidente conversaron sobre los resultados de la Cumbre del Futuro, la reforma de las instituciones internacionales y el cambio climático. El Secretario General y el Presidente también abordaron desafíos para la paz y la seguridad.
It is a pleasure to be here with you all to commemorate the African Union’s Year of Education.
As the world emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive disruption it caused, we were faced with an exacerbated education crisis. A crisis of exclusion, of quality and of relevance. A crisis made worse by stagnating investments by national governments, as well as the international community.
It was in this context that the Secretary-General called for the Transforming Education Summit.
The Summit was a landmark moment that was borne out of a realization that the education of yesterday was simply not up to task to respond to the needs of today and of tomorrow.
It succeeded in elevating education on the global agenda, in mobilizing greater commitment to deliver SDG4 at the country-level and in expanding the global movement for a reimagined education.
The Summit led to several important initiatives, calls to action and national statements of commitment by over 140 countries, more than 40 of which are from Africa. It led to the creation of the SG’s High-Level Panel on Teachers, which earlier this year produced specific, actionable recommendations on transforming teaching as well as the teaching profession. I hope that we are all heeding these recommendations, as we devise policies and draft legislation.
Importantly, it also led to the African Union’s declaration of 2024 as its year of education. A truly momentous decision. It represents a significant opportunity to highlight the importance of education within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals as well as Agenda 2063.
This is important because when it comes to investing in education, our continent offers significant returns. African youth are poised to expand our continents and the world’s economic productivity. Within the next ten years, every third new entrant into the global workforce will be African.
At the same time the proliferation of digital technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, offers an opportunity to leapfrog the many constraints we face when pursuing the traditional pathways of development.
Investing in education now will help achieve broader development goals.
Despite progress in the last two decades in increasing access to education in the region, there is still a lot to do. Close to 100 million children are out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa. Primary school completion rates are below 70%, which drops to 50% for girls. Africa needs an additional 15 million teachers in the classroom to achieve SDG targets by 2030.
As you continue your journey, the UN system – UNESCO, UNICEF, UNECA, the RC system – stands poised to support you, through technical support as well as programme funding. This support will focus on digital transformation, entrepreneurship and jobs, inclusion and equity, and data and accountability, along with the traditional models of multilateral support which are focused on classrooms and curricula.
Excellencies, ,
Today, exactly two years after the Transforming Education Summit, we stand at an important inflection point.
With our new Pact of the Future, you have renewed your commitment to the Goals including SDG4. With this rejuvenated focus on the SDGs we will proceed to the Global Education Meeting next month in Brazil; on to Financing for Development in Madrid (FFD4) and then the World Summit for Social Development in Qatar (WSSD2). As we do this, we must not lose sight of the work of actually delivering change.
While we must keep pushing education to the forefront of the global stage through our advocacy, our efforts must also be aimed at delivering effective education policy changes at the regional, national and sub-national level.
We must take concrete actions on the ground for a prosperous and growing Africa. We must transform and tailor teaching, curricula, and classrooms to the needs of young people and the demands of the modern world. We must harness technology, where possible to leapfrog the constraints that we may face in delivering the traditional model of education.
Excellencies,
In simple terms, we must deliver on education today, so a new generation of entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders can emerge in the years to come.
I look forward to hearing about your discussions and follow-up actions as you move forward on the journey to transform education. Your motivation to face the crisis in education in meaningful and concrete ways is a source of hope for all of us.
Source: United States Senator for West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last week, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) joined a bipartisan group of colleagues to reintroduce the Stop Importation and Manufacturing of Synthetic Analogues (SIMSA) Act. The legislation is led by U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).
Specifically, the SIMSA Act targets deadly drugs that are substantially similar to already-controlled substances, but carefully engineered—often in China or Mexico—to slip into the U.S. undetected.
“Preliminary data from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources shows that fentanyl and fentanyl analogues were involved in approximately 82% of all drug overdose deaths in West Virginia in 2023,” Senator Capito said. “These deadly substances are flowing into our communities from China and across our southern border, and criminals know that they can get around existing law by slightly changing the chemical makeup of a drug while still having the same negative effect on the human body. This legislation will allow for law enforcement to crack down on synthetic drugs and save lives.”
BACKGROUND:
U.S. law prohibits the unauthorized use of certain controlled substances. However, illicit drug makers and importers circumvent those laws by altering single atoms in controlled substances to create tweaked drugs that are not yet outlawed, but have similar effects on users. Currently, uncontrolled substances must undergo a time-consuming analysis before the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) can permanently schedule them.
