British police surrounded a G8 protest campsite yesterday after a day of sometimes violent confrontation around the summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations.
Officers said they had thrown a security cordon around the campsite in the town of Stirling, 32km south of Gleneagles, to protect public safety. They were allowing protesters to come and go as long as they submitted to body searches. They said everything was quiet. But protesters, who say there are upwards of 3,000 people inside the camp, insisted they were being kept in.
Police said they made 91 arrests on Wednesday and seized several weapons including an axe, a machete and a high-powered catapult with ball-bearing ammunition. Eight police officers were injured in the clashes, but none seriously.
The leaders of the G8 are meeting amid tight security at the Gleneagles hotel golf resort, 64km northwest of Edinburgh, to tackle African poverty and global warming. They were expected to make an announcement on global warming later yesterday and to wrap up the summit this afternoon.
politicians upstaged
Fighting for the poor has never been so cool as at the golf resort of Gleneagles, where the scruffy duo of Bob Geldof and Bono on Wednesday upstaged the world's most powerful men.
A media scrum of hundreds of journalists and star-struck officials greeted the two singers as they described their attempts to persuade G8 leaders to double aid to Africa.
Geldof wore a pin-striped blue jacket, but not quite in the style that the world leaders, or even the usually genteel clientele at Gleneagles golf club would recognize -- with no tie, shirt open and his long hair reaching down to the collar.
Next to him, Bono sported wrap-around sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap. Clearly the rockers and professional politicians make odd partners.
"It's equally unhip, it turns out, for the politicians to hang out with us, as it is unhip for us to hang out with them," Bono said.
For the men in suits who dominate G8 summits it must be a shock having to argue with unshaven entertainers in leather jackets.
But the celebrity campaigners have become pros in the high-stakes diplomatic debate over African poverty. Geldof is certainly not overawed by the trappings of power. He'd met Bush, he said, and found him "bullish," but open to discussion. Following the failure of Paris to secure the 2012 Olympic games, French President Jacques Chirac was probably "a bit glum," Geldof joked.
And neither the former Boomtown Rats lead singer nor Bono would take second place in a speechwriting competition.
"There is a lot at stake -- not only African lives ... but faith in the political system itself," Bono said, sounding like a politician.
"This isn't a sum of money. ... What they are talking about is 50,000 dead tomorrow and 50,000 dead the next day," Geldof said, no slouch in the battle of the soundbites.
Alongside them on the podium were Hollywood actor George Clooney, the hit Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour and Kenya's Nobel peace prize winner Wangari Maathai -- a line up bound to make the official photographs of the G8 leaders seem dull by comparison.
Unlike veteran activists Geldof and Bono, little had been known to date about Clooney's interest in African poverty. "I came in late to this game. I'm ashamed of how late I was," said the star of Ocean's Eleven and other hits. And what had brought him aboard? Brad Pitt.
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