G7 leaders on Friday found common cause on combating terrorism after the bloodshed in Manchester, but failed to bridge a gulf between US President Donald Trump and Washington’s partners on trade and climate change.
On the opening day of a two-day summit, the leaders endorsed a British call urging Internet service providers and social media companies to crack down on the dissemination of militant Muslim content online, after 22 people were killed in the concert bombing in northwest England on Monday.
However, US partners hit deadlock in their attempt to persuade Trump to keep the world’s biggest economy inside the framework of the 2015 Paris Agreement on curbing carbon emissions to reduce global warming.
Photo: EPA
Tensions over trade also flared. Unusually for such a set-piece event, leaders made no effort to hide their divisions in Sicily’s ancient hilltop resort of Taormina.
The choice of venue overlooking the Mediterranean reflected the Italian hosts’ desire for the summit to showcase cooperation against deadly flows of illegal refugees and migrants from nearby Africa.
However, discussions on that subject also hit stalemate because of differences with the US at what EU President Donald Tusk called “the most challenging G7 summit in years.”
Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni acknowledged there had been no breakthrough on climate change, describing the future of the Paris pact as “still hanging,” as Trump reviews the arguments for and against ditching the global deal.
White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said the president’s views were “evolving.”
“He came here to learn,” Cohn said. “His basis for decision ultimately will be what’s best for the United States.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May led the discussion on terrorism, and won backing for her demand that extremist content should be quickly taken offline by platforms such as Facebook and YouTube — although details of what this will mean in practice were left vague.
“Make no mistake; the fight is moving from the battlefield to the Internet,” May told her colleagues.
In a joint statement on terrorism, the G7 powers also vowed a collective effort to track down and prosecute foreign fighters dispersing from theaters of conflict such as Syria.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema