JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Turning to the G8 summit, it is early Saturday morning in Okinawa, Japan. Let's go now to CNN's Andrew Stevens for a look at what's on the agenda for the summit participants. Hello, Andrew.</s>ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thanks very much, Judy. Well, just to recap what happened last night when the G8 first met, the traditional Friday night meeting is usually reserved for international security issues, so it gave the G8 leaders a good chance to listen to Russian President Putin talking about the latest North Korean offer to scrap its ballistic missile testing program in return for some sort of international help to get its space research plan up and running, and the G8 did listen to that. They made a statement later praising North Korea for that initiative, although fairly short on details. Interestingly, just before that meeting, Mr. Putin and President Clinton did meet as well. Missiles also on the agenda there, talked about the national missile defense system, which Russia is so vigorously opposed to. That did come up. U.S. officials said the whole meeting was quite useful and quite interesting, and the two leaders agreed at the end of that meeting to a statement saying that they would continue to cooperate on arms control. So the defense shield did come up, but it certainly didn't stop the push to toward cooperating on arms reduction. Now today we have know on the agenda. It's turning a little bit, the G8. We've done the economics here today. We've done the politics. Today it's looking at -- it's more humanitarian issues. We're talking about infectious diseases, and the spread of infectious diseases, particularly AIDS, for instance, how to combat that, also the Japanese initiative of technology, how to bring technology to the poorer countries in a bid to try and bridge this digital this divide that the Japanese have been talking about. So those two issues will be on the main agenda for the G8 meeting today here in Okinawa. I'm Andrew Stevens, reporting live from Okinawa.</s>WOODRUFF: Thank you, Andrew.
What's on the Agenda for the G8 Summit Participants