demonstration at the G8 summit press centre, less than a mile
from the Gleneagles Hotel in Gleneagles, Scotland, today
Group of Eight negotiators, barricaded against protesters in a luxury hotel in Scotland, sought last-minute deals this evening on climate change and aid for Africa amid pressure to avoid watered-down compromises.
Celebrity anti-poverty campaigners joined world leaders at the Edinburgh summit to press them to double aid to Africa to $50 billion a year, open markets to African goods and cancel debt.
"It's all to play for in the next 24 hours. One last push. I really do believe we can get the 50 (billion dollars)," said U2 lead singer Bono, who along with Bob Geldof has led the campaign to end global poverty.
But diplomats, who met to finalise the texts of communiques while their leaders ate dinner with Britain's Queen Elizabeth, said no new money would be committed to Africa, and accords on climate change would contain no specific targets for action. "No one is offering more money here.
It is a question of honouring past commitments," said top Italian diplomat Cesare Ragaglini. He indicated that only Britain and France were pushing to hit the $50 billion figure for Africa.
Mr Blair dampened expectations for a breakthrough accord on tackling global warming because of strong United States opposition to the Kyoto treaty, which requires mandatory caps on harmful emissions that Washington says will hit its economy.
"What I hope at this summit is that we can set a different direction of travel that gives us a possibility, when Kyoto expires in 2012, of getting an international consensus (on action)," he told reporters.
"The prime minister goes in to this negotiation with the biggest democratic mandate ever assembled on one single issue in history," said Geldof after meeting Mr Blair ahead of the G8 summit.
G8 leaders were flown by helicopter to the luxury Gleneagles hotel complex, over the heads of hundreds of demonstrators who massed against a steel fence protected by mounted police.
In the town of Stirling, hooded activists smashed car windows and fought riot police. Others set up impromptu barricades on the roads around the heavily guarded G8 complex.
Police made 100 arrests as anti-capitalist and anarchist groups captured the protest spotlight from the hundreds of thousands who have pressed in peaceful marches for an end to poverty in Africa.
Diplomats said Mr Blair was likely to trumpet a previously agreed deal to write off more than $40 billion in debt to 18 mainly sub-Saharan African states, with another 20 countries potentially eligible later.
Aid agencies argue that is insufficient and will be disappointed at the failure to get fresh pledges of aid.
Mr Blair has already abandoned an ambitious initiative to fund long-term development via financial markets, which the leaders of France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, Canada and the United States all oppose.
Mr Blair's officials said they were nearing an accord that recognised climate change as an urgent problem but contained no specific targets to curb it.
To secure agreement from the United States, the stress will be on finding a "pathway" to a global accord to succeed the Kyoto Protocol that will bring in key developing nations.
Mr Bush offered at least a new emphasis in US policy by acknowledging more explicitly than before that humans were at least partly to blame for climate change, and said it was in Washington's interests to respond.
"I recognise the surface of the Earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem," he told a news conference ahead of the summit. That apparent softening mollified other G8 nations. "France ... wants an agreement on this issue and we're pretty hopeful of reaching one," Jerome Bonnafont, President Jacques Chirac's spokesman, told reporters.
"President Bush's declarations show that there is movement." Italy's Ragaglini said measures would be outlined that could lead to a cut in greenhouse gases:
"There will be no numerical targets in it. It is an action plan, and represents a first of its kind for the G8."