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WTO's Pascal Lamy lays out the agenda for HK ministerial
New Delhi: World Trade Organisation (WTO) director general Pascal Lamy has laid out an ambitious agenda for the WTO Hong Kong ministerial meet scheduled for December this year. This will be Lamy's first trade negotiations committee (TNC) meeting after assuming office.

Lamy has said that the Doha round would succeed only if "the development dimension is at the centre of the negotiations". On agriculture, the DG has spoken about an end-date for the elimination of export subsidies, as well as the issue of parallelism for state trading enterprises, export credit and food aid.

He also stressed that an "aid for trade" window can help us translate the development package of the round into reality. The IMF and the World Bank - which will hold their annual meetings in less than two weeks - have started focusing on this issue, as has the recent G-8 Summit in Gleneagles.
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Fuel prices push up US inflation — Katrina swells ranks of the jobless
Washington: US consumer prices jumped 0.5 percent last month as gasoline prices soared, but costs outside of energy barely budged, the government said on Thursday in a report largely unaffected by Hurricane Katrina.

A separate report, however, offered a different perspective on Katrina as the number of Americans filing initial claims for jobless aid shot up by 71,000 last week, the biggest jump in nearly 10 years.

A third report, offering an early view of the post-Katrina economy, showed factory activity in New York state slowed this month, but not as much as some economists had feared.

Prices for US government bonds rose as traders bet the benign non-energy price data meant the Federal Reserve, which meets on Tuesday to set interest rates, could soon end its more than year-long campaign to push rates up.

The so-called core Consumer Price Index, which strips out volatile food and energy costs, moved up just 0.1 percent in August, the Labor Department said. The lower-than-expected core inflation reading provided the latest sign that soaring energy prices had yet to spill over into other areas.
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