G20 Hamburg

As the Hamburg G20 wraps up its second day, the main event has no doubt been the much anticipated first tete-a-tete between Russian president Vladimir Putin and US president Donald Trump.
But while Trump clearly showed great respect for Putin, he apparently has much less regard for Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Just prior to the start of a plenary session with all the G20 leaders, Trump struck up a conversation Brazil’s president Michel Temer, asking “How’s Brazil doing?”

Anti-capitalist and anti-globalist protesters, by the thousands, have greeted world leaders and their entourage in Hamburg, Germany, for the G20 summit. About 15,000 demonstrated on Thursday, July 6, 2017, and the riot police cracked down on them with water cannons set on armored vehicles.

As my colleague Adam Garrie has written, Qatar has rebuffed the insanely worded ultimatum served on it 2 weeks ago by the Saudi led coalition.  A meeting that coalition held thereafter in Cairo however failed to come up with any new measures.  Instead it announced – weakly – that the current ineffective blockade of Qatar would be continued indefinitely.

The US and Russia have confirmed that the first face-to-face meeting between US President Trump and Russian President Putin will take place during the G20 summit in Hamburg on 7th July 2017.

As my colleague Adam Garrie has rightly written, the meetings yesterday and today in Moscow between Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia are far more important than any of the other bilateral meetings which will be taking place this week during the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Unfortunately that includes the ill-starred meeting between President Putin and President Trump.