Leaders
The G8 is an unofficial annual forum for the leaders of Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The G8 summit was the first for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. It was also the last for U.S. president George W. Bush, whose term-limited office denies him an opportunity to return to future G8 summits. Fukuda resigned as Japan's Prime Minister on September 1, he being the first of the G8 leaders at the summit to leave office.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy observed, "I think it is not reasonable to continue to meet as eight to solve the big questions of the world, forgetting China -- one billion 300 million people -- and not inviting India -- one billion people." Japan and the United States announced opposition to Sarkozy's implied suggestion.
Read more about this topic: 34th G8 Summit
Famous quotes containing the word leaders:
“When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“These semi-traitors [Union generals who were not hostile to slavery] must be watched.—Let us be careful who become army leaders in the reorganized army at the end of this Rebellion. The man who thinks that the perpetuity of slavery is essential to the existence of the Union, is unfit to be trusted. The deadliest enemy the Union has is slavery—in fact, its only enemy.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)