Word: summiteer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited three feuding Arab leaders to a reconciliation lunch this week. The rulers of Syria, Qatar and Egypt, in Kuwait for an economic summit, turned up at King Abdullah's residence in Kuwait City for some Saudi hospitality. But it will take more than meze and grilled lamb to heal the gaping divisions in the Arab world. "If these breaches are so easy to solve by having lunch, then they should be having breakfast, lunch and dinner," said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Center of Lebanon at the American University of Beirut...
...That left an opening for Hamas' supporters. On Jan. 16, as the Israeli assault on Gaza still raged, Qatar, which has forged a role as regional mediator by deftly balancing relations with Syria and Iran as well as the U.S., stepped in to host a summit. Saudi Arabia, which resents being upstaged by its tiny neighbor, refused to attend. Egypt and Jordan stayed away too, ensuring that most of the participants were firmly in the Hamas camp...
...summit, Syrian President Bashar Assad demanded the scrapping of the Arab peace initiative, a seven-year-old Saudi plan that offers collective Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of occupied territory and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Assad's call was intended to signal anger toward Israel, but it also served as a swipe at the Saudi architects of the initiative, with whom he is feuding...
...More than that, Masdar City and the WFES as a whole show the triumph of a kind of techno-environmentalism that would be all but unrecognizable to the crunchy nature lovers who once dominated the green movement. A walk through the summit's cavernous exhibition area, where models push mini-wind turbines, reveals booths dedicated to thin-film solar arrays, geothermal pumps and carbon-trading consultancies. There's little about trees or wildlife, nothing about environmental sacrifice - this is about the business of getting the carbon out of our energy supply as quickly as possible. And even in the middle...
...renewables - mostly rooftop solar panels - Masdar will be a car-free city. Instead, the designers will build a personal-rapid-transit (PRT) system, an automated cable-car-like network that will whiz residents around the city's streets. Planners unveiled a model of a PRT car on the summit's first day. With the sleek silhouette of a racing motorcycle, but with room for four passengers, the PRT seems to have escaped from the movie Tron. It's enough to turn green-tech nerds giddy, even though it looks like the kind of sci-fi project that may have gotten...