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Bush to arrive in Australia early for APEC: Howard
2007-08-09
U.S. President George W. Bush will arrive in Australia two days early to attend a meeting of 21 Asia-Pacific leaders, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said on Friday. Howard said Bush would arrive in Sydney on Tuesday evening, September 4, and would hold a series of bilateral meetings with Howard and other leaders before departing at the weekend as the three-day APEC summit was still underway. "He will have to leave in the middle of the weekend because he has to be in Washington to prepare for the Petraeus report to Congress on the situation in Iraq," Howard told local radio. "He has got that and he has also got on September 11 the commemorations of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and it's essential to be in the country when those commemorations take place." More than 4,000 troops, police, federal agents and private security guards will be deployed in Sydney to guard Bush and other leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, China's President Hu Jintao and Russia's Vladimir Putin. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum draws together leaders of 21 economies accounting for more than a third of the world's population, about 60 percent of global GDP and 47 percent of world trade volume. APEC accounts for 70 percent of global economic growth. Members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan (under the name Chinese Taipei), Thailand, United States and Vietnam.
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