New diplomatic brushfires broke out almost immediately among the plush cottages of the top-scale Sea Island resort, even as US President George W. Bush led Iraq's new interim ruler onto the world stage.
World leaders yesterday wrapped up the latest G8 summit after a new era of trans-Atlantic unity dissolved in just one day into fresh US-France spats and squabbles over Iraq's US$120 billion debt pile.
The summit of G8 industrialized nations had been billed as a chance to consign old animosity over the US invasion to history, after the West closed ranks to pass a new UN resolution on Iraq Tuesday.
Leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US did manage to agree on Bush's controversial reform plan for the Islamic world.
They also endorsed an end-of-July target for an outline deal on the most divisive issues in global trade talks, unveiled measures to halt transfers of nuclear technology and endorsed airline security improvements.
Yesterday, the G8 leaders will meet several counterparts from Africa, including South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and Senegal's Abdulaye Wade, in a bid to head off claims they only pay lip service to the continent's woes.
Then Bush and other leaders will hold final press conferences. The US leader will go straight to Washington to pay his final respects to late former president Ronald Reagan, lying in state in Washington.
Interim Iraqi president Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar's first international bow at the swank private beach resort hosting the rich-nations summit was a world removed from the violence of postwar Iraq.
"Mr President, I'd like to express to you the commitment of the Iraqi people to move towards democracy," he said at his first-ever meeting with Bush.
Bush replied: "I really never thought I'd be sitting next to an Iraqi president of a free country a year and half ago."
But just one day after France signed up to a US-sponsored resolution at the UN on Iraqi sovereignty, the fractious allies were at loggerheads again -- on a handful of issues.
They clashed on NATO's role in Iraq, after Bush called for a greater presence of the Western alliance in the occupation.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
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