this time, to the Windsor Hotel at Lake Toya, Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan. And who are “we”? The Group of Eight of course; leaders of the eight richest countries and major industrial powers — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. Each year, the group meets at a beautiful location at some exclusive hotel, heavily guarded by huge numbers of security forces (a 21,000-strong force of riot police in Sapporo).
I had to add this to the category “comedy” because of the following sentence from an Agence France article: “Bush, who has argued that the summit is not the right forum to make hard decisions on climate change, said Sunday he would play a “constructive” role in efforts to curb carbon emissions.” It made me laugh to see that a French news agency put quotation marks around the word “constructive” when used in connection with Bush…
