International news reports from AFP and Reuters on G-8 talks on global warming.

Anti-globalisation demo gives Trieste a taste of Seattle

TRIESTE, Italy, March 3 (AFP) -

Several thousand environmentalists, students and leftwing protesters marched through the streets of this Adriatic port city here Saturday, shadowed by squads of helmeted riot police, as a Group of Eight (G8) ministerial meeting unfolded.

In a powerful show of strength, the Italian authorities brought in around 3,000 police to barricade the streets surrounding a historic palace in the port where the environment ministers were meeting.

The local press predicted Saturday that the talks could be overrun by thousands of \"Seattle people,\" opposed to globalisation, who were being stealthily organised through the Internet.

Police dogs, teargas grenade launchers and dozens of buses and Land-Rovers, filled with backup police in full anti-riot gear, were held in reserve, but were unneeded.

The march was noisy but good humoured and there were no reports of violence. There was a brief moment of tension near the venue when a handful of protestors launched firework rockets into the sky and tossed a few coloured smokebombs at police to make their views known.

\"There are the criminals, there are the people responsible,\" shouted an activist from the radical group Tute Bianche through a massive loudspeaker system, placed on the back of a truck which crawled through the rain-soaked streets, blasting out rap and reggae music.

Five demonstrators, dressed in sombreros, taunted the police with a Mexican-style rendition of the theme music to the Laurel and Hardy movies.

Raffaela Bolini, a member of an Italian grass-roots environmental group, Arci, said she came from Rome to express her concern about the world\'s deteriorating environment and what she said was the undemocratic clout of the rich industrial nations.

\"We believe that the G8 is not a democratic, legitimate organisation to govern the world. We have a legitimate organisation, which is the United Nations,\" Bolini said.

A young woman who gave her name as Georgia, a 16-year-old student from Trieste, said that
environment questions were the biggest concerns of today.

\"We can try to save the world by acting at the grass roots, making even the smallest contributions count,\" she said.

The three-day G8 meeting was to end Sunday. The group comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

TRIESTE, Italy (Reuters) - Several thousand demonstrators protested on Saturday as environment ministers from G8 countries got down to the nitty-gritty of how to fight climate change.

The anti-globalisation demonstrators staged a loud but mostly peaceful protest near the venue
of the talks, throwing coloured smoke bombs and sending flares into the sky over the heads of
security forces.

But police, who were decked out in riot gear and brandishing tear gas guns, stayed calm as the demonstrators passed within about half a kilometre from the venue and then moved on to hold a rally near the train station.

More than 3,000 police and special bomb and marine units moved into the area over the past two days to prepare for possible clashes.

The talks have been marked by concerns that uncertainty over the U.S. position may weaken
consensus when they end on Sunday.

The new administration of President George W. Bush -- represented in Trieste by environment policy head Christine Todd Whitman -- has said it wants to move ahead in tackling global warming and will attend key talks in Bonn in July.

Far less clear is how much baggage the United States wants to carry over from failed U.N. global
warming talks in The Hague last November, where it fell out with the European Union, forcing the talks to be suspended.

\"It was a very frank and open discussion. It\'s clear there\'s a consensus among everyone at the table that global climate change is enormously important issue that has to be confronted in each country\'s policy discussions,\" Whitman told Reuters as she left the discussions on climate.

FIRST ATTEMPT SINCE NOVEMBER

The Trieste meeting is the first time ministers have met since the session at The Hague, which tried to move the world forward on implementing the 1997 Kyoto agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Italian Environment Minister Willer Bordon, speaking during a break in the closed-door meeting, tried to put a positive spin on uncertainty surrounding the U.S. position.

\"I can say with certainty that there will not be a negative message coming out of Trieste. There will be no backtracking. That doesn\'t mean that everything that happened at The Hague (before talks were suspended) will be accepted en masse,\" he said.

\"This means that there will be no rethinking of the principal objective -- the reduction of greenhouse gases. This is the fundamental point and today everyone confirmed their maximum commitment and Whitman made a very positive contribution,\" Bordon said.

Whitman said on Friday the United States planned to completely review the Clinton administration\'s stance on global warming before re-entering international climate talks in Bonn.

She said Bush would not automatically offer the same compromises the Clinton camp hammered out with European countries at The Hague.

A U.N. scientific panel has said the average global temperature is likely to rise by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.5-10.4 Fahrenheit) over the next 100 years. Sea levels could rise by as much as 88 cm (35 inches).