Like stars aligning in the night sky, top world leaders of industrialized nations gathered this week as the Group of Eight (as well as heads of the EU, China and India) for a three-day summit in a resort near a white castle on the north German Baltic coast. Hopes were high -- as was security.

Photo: AFP

After nearly 1,000 people, slightly fewer police than protesters, were injured on the pre-G8 weekend in semi-organized riots outside the summit area, roads to Heiligendamm were blocked, either by security forces or the protesters themselves.

The Jewish Claims Conference is investigating whether the resort was seized during the Third Reich, reports Der Spiegel.

For the recent foreign policy engagements of US President George Bush, LA Times columnist Ronald Brownstein gives him high marks for doubling funding to fight AIDS/HIV in Africa as well as his "toughness" on state-driven genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan but laments Bush's reluctance to agree to common climate control standards, even with fellow conservative Angela Merkel. "There is virtually no chance G-8 leaders will convince Bush to accept binding emissions reductions this week. They can confect a communique that hides their disagreement with Bush behind sugary language about 'frank discussions' and 'common goals.' Or they can clearly state — in the communique or the separate chairman's statement that Merkel will publish — that they believe Bush's pathway of voluntary reductions is a dead end," Brownstein says, concluding that the first step toward a "genuine partnership" would be to acknowledge that this supposed partnership doesn't yet exist.

Now feisty Russia, equal parts friend and fiend to the US, UK and next-door neighbour Germany, was "first admitted to the Group of Eight as a gesture of goodwill and support for reform", explains The Economist. "Several things have happened since those friendlier days. America has been weakened by the war in Iraq. Russia has grown richer on oil, and Mr Putin angrier over the expansion of NATO to his borders and especially the pro-Western “orange revolution” in Ukraine in 2004."