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Angela Merkel is Germany's first woman chancellor
Berlin: Angela Merkel became Germany's first woman chancellor Wednesday after the Bundestag, parliament's lower house, elected her in a historic vote as the country's eighth postwar ruler.

Merkel also became the first leader of a left-right "grand coalition" since the 1960s and also the first chancellor from the country's former communist east.

Ms Merkel's political career began in 1990, when she entered the Bundestag as a conservative legislator. She twice served as a cabinet minister under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Her rise through the ranks of the Christian Democratic Union was rapid, as she became the party's chairman in 2000.

Ms. Merkel is a divorced Protestant and a physicist by training, and has been chiefly responsible for shifting her conservative party's outlook towards economic liberalism.

The CDU and its close ally, the CSU, managed only a three-seat lead in parliament over the centre-left Social Democratic party though they had started the election process with a substantial lead in the opinion polls. Post results, however, she successfully faced down a challenge for the chancellorship from Gerhard Schröder, the incumbent chancellor and leader of the centre-left.

In negotiations to form a coalition with the SPD, Ms Merkel diluted her reformist manifesto and has given political opponents eight of the cabinet's 14 ministerial portfolios.As chancellor, Ms Merkel will head an awkward coalition, whose partners hold divergent views about economic policy.

Schröder stepped down as chancellor after seven years.
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Impasse at Geneva trade talks continues
Geneva: Even as trade officials from the United States, Europe and Brazil, India and Japan met here Tuesday they were unable to report much progress in global trade talks. "We are not there," said Kamal Nath, India's commerce minister, "because some countries want to continue with the trade-distorting support in agriculture."

In the meanwhile, a World Trade Organization report warned that failure to move ahead on agriculture risked jeopardizing the progress made in trade negotiations since July 2004.

The report by respected trade diplomat Crawford Falconer, a New Zealand diplomat, who is also chairman of the global trade body's agriculture committee, shed light on how far apart the countries remain on agricultural subsidies and tariffs, still the largest area of disagreement.

"You don't close divergences by taking time off to have a cup of tea," he wrote in the report, a draft version of a document that trade ministers will review in Hong Kong next month. "If you do so, you will find that everybody has moved backwards in the meantime."

The United States and developing countries say that the current EU offer does not go far enough. In return, Mandelson wants developing countries like Brazil to open their markets to European industrial goods, in the hope that it would persuade his critics in the EU, especially France, to back further cuts to farm subsidies.

The report said that rich countries had made progress on reducing the trillions of dollars spent annually to support their farmers. When the current round of trade talks began in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, the United States and Europe agreed to scrap most of the subsidies.
The major sticking point, the report said, was how to reduce the large tariffs that many rich countries, led by Europe, levy on agricultural imports.
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Internet advertising sales at record high
New York: Sales of Internet advertising have continued their upward climb, reaching a quarterly all-time high of US$3.1bn in September, according to a new study.

With this new high ad sales on the Web are on track to reach more than US$12bn for the year, up from US$9.6mn in 2004, according to trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual study conducted in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Third-quarter sales marked a 33.9 percent rise over the same period in 2004 and were part of almost 12 months of positive growth for online ads since the dot-com bust. Sales for the three months ended in September were also 4.7 percent higher than second-quarter sales of US$2.9bn.

Search engine marketing has been the biggest buoy to an Internet advertising turnaround, comprising almost half of annual sales in the last year. But sponsorships and commercial-like ads are also gaining traction as traditional advertisers adopt the Web for marketing campaigns.

Researchers attributed the growth to the Internet's popularity with consumers and its cost-effectiveness for marketers. "The continued strength in Internet advertising reflects, in part, the medium's unique ability to collapse the business cycle for advertising, marketing and branding, making it more attractive for traditional advertisers," Pete Petrusky, director of advisory services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in a statement.
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Gartner: Worldwide cell phone sales soar in record quarter
New York: According to a study released Tuesday by Gartner, sales of mobile phones continued to soar in the third quarter of 2005 even as Nokia continued to expand its worldwide market share lead. The study found a 22 percent increase in mobile phone sales in the third quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year, the research company said in a statement.

The increase is the largest for any quarter since the company started keeping such statistics in 2001, according to Gartner.

"Year on year sales grew in all regions as replacement sales in mature markets such as Western Europe and North America continued to drive growth while users in emerging markets joined mobile networks and acquired their first mobile device," Carolina Milanesi, Gartner's principal analyst for mobile terminals research, said in a statement.

Nokia's worldwide market share increased to 32.6 percent in the quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. However, the big winner was Motorola, which increased its market share from 13.5 percent to 18.7 percent. However, Samsung's market share decreased from 13.7 percent to 12.5 percent, according to the Gartner study. Sony Ericsson was in fourth place with a 6.7 percent market share in the just-completed quarter and LG was in fifth place with a 6.5 percent share.
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Hilton Group to sell another five hotels early next year
London: The Hilton Group, the hotel and betting shop operator, is to put a further £400-£500 million-worth of hotels up for sale, including the 1,058-room Hilton London Metropole, one of Europe's biggest hotel and conference centres.

The company, which separately is in talks to sell its entire hotel division to Hilton Hotels Corporation, its American marketing partner, expects to put a total of about five UK hotels on the market early next year, including the 794-room Hilton Birmingham Metropole.

In addition, it is seeking to sell a small number of overseas hotels, including the Hilton Luxembourg and the Hilton Durban, together worth an estimated £40 million. As with the British hotels, Hilton is looking to continue running them under a so-called sale and manage-back.
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