Summit Conferences

Rebuffing criticism of the warm greetings he exchanged with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, President Obama said Sunday that the United States, with its overwhelming military superiority and need to improve its global image, could afford to extend such diplomatic "courtesy." In a news conference capping a three-day meeting of leaders from the Western Hemisphere, Obama also said the U.S. must engage other countries through humanitarian gestures, not only military intervention.

Manoel Silva de Cunha, leader of a group of 200,000 Brazilian forest-dwellers, was blunt about why he traveled this week from the Amazon to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Summit. The rubber tappers, nut gatherers and fishermen who live off tropical forests want money from American corporations to help them preserve the trees that cool the planet. "These companies have polluted a lot," he said. "They have to make up for it." Many of the 1,200 delegates who crowded into Century City's Hyatt Regency this week came with similar hopes: to cash in on California's expertise, its technology and the multimillion-dollar carbon trading market it plans to launch in 2012.

The People's March had just reached the edges of Steel City's downtown, at the halfway point in the three-mile protest, and Robert Shepherd's feet ached with each step. The gray-haired former bookstore clerk was one of several thousand peaceful demonstrators who took to the streets of Pittsburgh on Friday to call attention to a host of ills they attributed to the economic policies of the world leaders convening at the Group of 20 summit. It had been four decades since he had marched across college campuses to protest the war in Vietnam and to fight for civil rights.

At a time when the U.S. and other traditional economic powers are weakening, China is flexing its muscles, signaling it will seek a much more assertive role in shaping the future of the world financial order. The apparent shift in Beijing's approach is likely to be displayed at the Group of 20 nations' summit today in London, as China presses for changes in a global finance system long dominated by the U.S. and Western Europe.

Addressing leaders of the world's most important economies early Thursday, President Obama wasted no time in proclaiming a new day for U.S. policy on climate change. "I know that in the past, the United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities," he said. "So let me be clear: Those days are over."

Finance officials from the world's top economic powers endorsed a plan Friday aimed at preventing another financial crisis like the credit and mortgage debacles that erupted in the United States and quickly sent tremors around the globe. "Rapid implementation" of the plan "will not only enhance the resilience of the global financial system for the longer term but should help to support confidence and improve the functioning of the markets," the Group of 7 officials said in a joint statement.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe skipped a regional summit Saturday addressing the deepening crisis over the country's contentious presidential election, giving southern African leaders little chance to step up the pressure on him. The summit reflected Mugabe's growing isolation, as well as cracks in the usually uniform solidarity with him exhibited by the Southern African Development Community.

As leaders of the world's major developed nations meet this week in a tranquil mountain resort in Japan, their gathering probably will be overshadowed by the turbulent global economy and deepening unrest over soaring oil and food prices. And the question on many minds is whether the Group of 8 leaders will be able to do anything about it.

So many world leaders have converged on the United Nations over the last week that at one point billionaire Bill Gates was left cooling his heels on East 46th Street in a "pedestrian freeze" while a presidential motorcade whizzed the wrong way down 1st Avenue. The founder of Microsoft was on his way to a U.N. summit to donate $167.8 million to eradicate malaria. Which makes you wonder: Which president was that anyway?

President Bush, under pressure from allies, Saturday agreed to host a summit of world leaders before leaving office, to work on responses to the global financial crisis, including more rigorous international oversight of markets. But Bush, flanked by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as he announced the meeting, emphasized his view that toughened financial regulations should respect free and open markets.