The Group of Eight (G8) is the coalition of eight of the world's leading industrialized nations: France, Germany (West Germany to 1991), Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, (the G6, 1975), Canada (the G7, 1976), and Russia (not participating in all events), as well as the European Union. The hallmark of the G8 is an annual economic and political summit of the heads of government with international officials, though there are numerous subsidiary meetings and policy research.
Effectively from 1997, at the instigation of then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, "Group of Seven" became the "Group of Eight," with the Russians attending most sessions rather than being invited along after dinner for coffee and cigars. It was a thank you to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin for pursuing economic reforms and for not kicking up a fuss about the eastward expansion of NATO. Because the original G7 are effectively the leading industrial democracies and the Russian economy (as well as democracy) is still struggling, there are still some G7 sessions on economic affairs in which the Russians do not participate.
Past G7/G8 Summits
The location of the summit meetings rotate anually among member countries in the following order: France, United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada (the order in which each nation joined the group).
A periodic table group is a vertical column in the periodic table of the chemical elements.
The modern explanation of the pattern of the periodic table is that the elements in a group have similar configurations of the outermost electron shells of their atoms: as most chemical properties are dominated by outer electron interactions, this tends to give elements in the same group similar physical and chemical properties.
The Roman numeral names are the original traditional names of the groups; the Arabic numeral names are those recommended by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to replace the old names in an attempt to reduce the confusion generated by the two older, but mutually confusing, schemes.
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