Club de Madrid: Imperial Springs International Forum (ISIF) amplifies global call for cooperation and dialogue from Madrid
A newly released highlights video now brings fresh attention to the Forum's key ideas. The audiovisual piece captures powerful moments and offers an accessible recap of the event's main discussions on pressing global issues — from geopolitical tensions and economic instability to AI governance and climate change.
Organised under the theme Collective Action for One Future and co-hosted by Club de Madrid, the 2024 Forum marked a pivotal moment for the initiative. The move to Madrid underscored its commitment to fostering inclusive dialogue between East and West.
The event included a message from President Xi Jinping, reaffirming China's support for multilateralism and dialogue, and remarks by Spain's Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Diego Martínez Belío, who highlighted Spain's dedication to closer China cooperation and global solidarity.
Over two days of high-level debate, participants discussed concrete proposals to revitalise multilateral institutions. Topics included WTO and international financial reforms, sovereign debt solutions, and global standards for AI and green technologies. Special emphasis was placed on the Pact for the Future, adopted at the 2024 UN Summit on the Future, as a shared roadmap for action.
As Danilo Türk, President of Club de Madrid, stated: "Even in a fragmented world, dialogue and cooperation remain our most effective tools for addressing shared challenges."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Cision Canada
5 hours ago
- Cision Canada
Media Advisory - Monday, July 28, 2025 Français
OTTAWA, ON, July 27, 2025 /CNW/ - Note: All times local Prince County, Prince Edward Island 10:30 a.m. The Prime Minister will announce new measures to lower costs for Canadians. A media availability will follow. Note for media: Open coverage This document is also available at
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
China is suppressing coverage of deadly attacks. Some people are complaining online
BEIJING (AP) — Late last month, a car struck children near an elementary school in an outlying district of Beijing, according to a Chinese news report. A four-sentence police statement said a 35-year-old male driver hit pedestrians due to 'improper operation' of the car. It didn't mention the school or that the victims included children. Photos of the aftermath, which showed a half-dozen people lying in the street, were scrubbed from China's closely controlled internet. 'We need the truth,' said one post on Weibo, a leading social media platform similar to X. The ruling Communist Party has expanded information control since leader Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, seeing it as a way to prevent unrest. More and more topics, from negative news about the economy to LGBTQ+ identity, have become subject to some form of censorship. In the past half year, mass attacks — in which a person kills or injures multiple people with a vehicle or knife — appear to have been added to the list. Some people in China are pushing back, complaining online in at least two cases in recent months after drivers hit pedestrians. The government may be trying to prevent copycat crimes, experts have said. Another motivation could be local authorities wanting to cover up when they fail to do so. A deadly case in November sparked a government reaction There was a spate of attacks last fall, but it's difficult to gauge whether they are increasing, given the dearth of information. The attacks weren't always a taboo topic. In the past, authorities released the basic details. Typically, the assailant was described as taking out their anger on society, often over financial losses. That appears to have changed following a particularly horrific case in November that killed 35 people in Zhuhai in southern China. Authorities said the driver was upset about a divorce settlement. Orders came from the very top — from Xi — to take steps to prevent similar attacks. Eight days later, an SUV hit students arriving at an elementary school in Hunan province. The number of injured — 30 children and adults — wasn't made public until nearly a month later when the driver was sentenced. The clampdown on information has tightened further since. In April, reports circulated online that a car had run into people outside a primary school in Jinhua city. At least three provincial state media outlets posted stories — but they were quickly taken down. To date, authorities haven't released any information. Censorship makes some people hungry for information Twelve days later, a fast-moving car veered off a street and into people at a bus stop in the city of Tengzhou in eastern China. Authorities said nothing. Videos of the May 4 crash were taken down from social media. The next day, online criticism of the silence began to appear. People said the police should release basic information such as the driver's identity and the number of casualties. A few defended the police, saying it happened on a holiday. 'If a few such precedents are set, and more local governments follow this way in the future, the rules of information disclosure may not be upheld and may be compromised,' Hu Xijin, the former editor of a state-owned newspaper, warned in a social media post. Local governments want to cover up news that reflects badly on them or their polices, said Jennifer Pan, a Stanford University professor who researches how political censorship and information manipulation work in the digital age. The central government sometimes has other priorities. 'When the issue gains attention despite local censorship efforts, the center has an incentive to preserve the legitimacy of the overall system through responsiveness and acknowledgement of the event and underlying issues,' she said in an email response. The details came out 48 hours after the crash. Six people had died, and it had not been an intentional attack: The driver was drunk, a state media report said. Police respond with quick statements that are short on details Since then, local authorities, at least in two cases in Beijing, seem to be taking a new approach: Issue a report quickly but with scant details. Eleven days after the drunk driving case, a car hit people outside an elementary school in Beijing on May 15. The Beijing Traffic Police issued a report within a few hours but left out that the location was near a school. It said only that four people had been injured when a car sideswiped pedestrians on Jian'an West Road, and that the driver had been detained. Authorities appeared to impose an information shutdown that evening. Police were stationed along the stretch of road and a person who appeared to be a neighborhood watch volunteer cautioned people in a nearby residential compound not to speak to strangers. Six weeks later, posts appeared online on June 26 saying a car had hit children in Miyun, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of central Beijing. One well-reputed media outlet, Caixin, reached area shop owners who said that children had been hit, and a hospital that confirmed it was treating some child victims. Whether it was an intentional act remains unclear. ___ Associated Press journalist Emily Wang Fujiyama contributed to this story.
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Let's not panic about Taiwan yet
Opinion 'I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we (the U.S. and China) will fight in 2025,' wrote General Mike Minihan, head of U.S. Air Mobility Command, in a private memo two years ago. There's still five months to go, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he's wrong. Don't take my word for it, because my recent record in these matters is bad. I didn't think Russia's Vladimir Putin was crazy enough to invade Ukraine although I knew he was largely detached from reality, and I was wrong. For a long time I would not use the word 'genocide' to describe what Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu was doing in Gaza, and I was wrong again. In my defence, I had not spent quality time with either man and I was reluctant to predict their actions based entirely on other people's estimates of their characters (especially since most of those people didn't know them personally either). I still felt compelled to weigh the pros and cons of the case, on the mistaken assumption that facts had some influence on their decisions. The possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is a far greater threat to the peace of the world (such as it is) than the relative sideshows in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. Aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons on both sides. A few poorly planned displays of 'determination,' and the U.S. is in a war with China — with the two Koreas and Japan not far behind. China's President Xi Jinping will never rule out using force to 'recover' Taiwan, but the story that he has set a 2027 deadline for that terrifying gamble is just a Washington think-tank special. He does harp about it a lot, though. Successive American administrations have practised 'strategic ambiguity' (i.e. maybe the U.S. would fight to defend Taiwan and maybe it wouldn't), and the fickle enthusiasms of Donald Trump muddy the waters even further. He is widely seen as a strategic coward (TACO), but he is sufficiently erratic that his response is really incalculable. As for Taiwan, President Lai Ching-te of the cautiously pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) serves up the usual word salad: 'The message of history is clear. Today we share the same values and face similar challenges as many of the democracies that participated in the European war (1939-45).' Evasiveness as policy, so as not to rile China. So I will risk my reputation as a soothsayer once again and assume that both Xi Jinping and Lai Ching-te are rational men. In that case, it is unlikely that either man will risk everything on one roll of the dice. Xi will not set the machinery in motion for a sea- and airborne invasion of Taiwan, and Lai will certainly not declare independence for Taiwan. No government of Taiwan, even back in the decades when the KMT (now reformed) was the tyrannical and maniacally anti-communist single ruling party, has ever seriously considered abandoning the sacred fiction that there is only one China including Taiwan. There is just a persistent non-violent dispute over which government is legitimate, Beijing or Taipei. As for Xi, who is effectively president-for-life, he faces no special deadline to claim his prize. 'Reunification' is his legacy project, but he has just turned 72 and there's lots of time yet. And always before him is the nightmare example of Putin's three-day 'special military operation' to bring Ukraine back under the rule of the Russian 'motherland.' Above all, there is Taiwan's 'silicon shield.' The island state manufactures 47 per cent of the world's advanced semiconductor chips, including all of the most advanced ones. Even the United States is one generation behind, and so is China despite its 'Deep Seek' triumph in producing much cheaper high-performance AIs (on Nvidia chips made in Taiwan). Invade Taiwan and all that is gone. It might be irrational, but even the Trump administration might feel that Taiwan is a treasure that it must defend come what may. The game is not worth the candle, and Xi will not invade for at least three years. He probably never will. There! I said it! Now we wait and see. Gwynne Dyer's new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World's Climate Engineers.
