G-8 Kicks Off with Talk of Missiles, Climate

By Don Gonyea

Published June 6, 2007 at 4:00 PM EDT

President Bush is in Germany for three days of meetings at this year's G-8 summit. Formal sessions begin Thursday morning at a resort town on the Baltic.

The United States and Europe are at odds over how to approach climate change. There are also rising tensions between the United States and Russia, primarily over a missile-defense system the United States plans to extend into Eastern Europe.

On Wednesday, President Bush had lunch with his host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been trying to drive the agenda on the environment, seeking a strong commitment from all G-8 members to a program to combat global warming.

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Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.

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