Monday Business Edition

The stock was also hit by a reported comment by Tokyo Stock Exchange president Atsushi Saito that Tokyo Electric Power Co. should file for bankruptcy protection, a move that could hit shareholders hard.

TEPCO stock fell to 206 yen mid-morning, down 80 yen or 28.0 percent from Friday, the maximum loss allowed for one trading day. It closed a shade better at 207 yen, down 79 yen or 27.62 percent.

Over 50,000 people, according to police estimates, thronged the capital’s central Syntagma square for a peaceful demonstration responding to calls for gatherings across Europe. Some 3,000 people also gathered in Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki, according to the police.

“Thieves, thieves,” the crowd chanted waiving Greek flags, but also flags from Spain, Portugal, Tunisia and Argentina.

Around 1,500 people marched to the capital’s main Syntagma Square, in front of the Greek parliament, with banners proclaiming: “No to the new memorandum” and “Resist!”.

It was the latest in a series of protests as anger grows over waves of spending cuts and tax hikes amid a deep recession and job layoffs, as the government battles to steer the debt-ridden country out of crisis.

And in a break from Apple’s usual practice of shrouding its events in an air of mystery, the California gadget-maker this time revealed ahead of time what it plans to announce at the event in San Francisco.

Sort of.

A European Union, International Monetary Fund and ECB ‘troika’ agreed after four weeks of tough talks to provide Athens with the next 12-billion-euro (17.4-billion-dollar) tranche of aid under a 2010 bailout so Greece can pay its bills in July.

At the same time, Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the eurozone finance ministers group, said member states could provide even more aid for Greece and crucially that private sector banks were set to help on a voluntary basis.

“Egypt announces the end of negotiations with the IMF and the clinching of an agreement with the fund to relaunch the Egyptian economy,” Radwan told reporters.

The two parties agreed to a “three-billion-dollar loan over 12 months… with an interest rate of 1.5 percent,” he said, adding that the loan would help partly offset a budget deficit of $28 billion.

Hotly anticipated games will build on established franchises with slick play mechanics, film-like graphics and increasing sensitivity to how much people love playing online with friends or on the go with mobile devices.

“E3 will be a strange combination of everything from blockbuster retail games like ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Battlefield’ all the way down to apps, social games, and digital downloads,” said TechSavvy Global analyst Scott Steinberg.

The clashes intensified with an assassination attempt on President Ali Abdullah Saleh that forced him on Saturday to seek treatment in neighbouring Saudi Arabia after his compound in Sanaa was shelled.

The escalation comes at a time when global demand for oil appears to be waning and as OPEC is expected to consider raising output for the first time in almost 30 months to curb high prices.

In a turnout of around 41 percent, 72.17 percent of voters rejected the government’s pension reform plan with just 27.83 percent in favour, according final but unofficial results from the election commission.

An two-year increase in the retirement age is among reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union to help Slovenia cope with its ageing population and ensure the sustainability of its public finances.

The economy added a paltry 54,000 new jobs last month, one quarter of the February-April pace, while the unemployment rate edged up to 9.1 percent, figures from the Labor Department showed Friday.

While the White House and economists cautioned that the poor data were likely a monthly blip, they fueled allegations that Obama’s economic policies are failing, 18 months ahead of the next presidential election.

The takeover comes two years after Fiat took a 20 percent stake in exchange for sharing its technology and providing trusted leadership as Chrysler emerged from a government-backed bankruptcy.

President Barack Obama celebrated the news with a visit to a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, where he told workers that the government’s unpopular decision to bailout Chrysler, General Motors and their suppliers had paid off.

The bonds are to be issued by the majority Muslim Russian republic of Tatarstan in the Volga region, which has embarked on an ambitious drive to attract foreign investment.

“Russia will show that it can be interesting for Muslim countries,” one of the project’s backers, Linar Yakupov told AFP.

The area has been chosen for a vast port complex that is the latest example of how foreign investment from Asian allies like China and Thailand is transforming the military-dominated nation despite Western sanctions.

Some believe the 10-year, $8 billion Dawei Development Project, led by a Thai industrial giant, could invigorate the country’s impoverished economy and revolutionise regional trade.

In Sydney, demonstrators carried banners reading “Say yes to cutting carbon pollution” and “Price carbon — our kids are worth it” while similar rallies attracted crowds in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Hobart and Canberra.

“This should send a clear message to the government to set an ambitious price on carbon that will kick-start investment in clean energy,” said rally organiser Simon Sheikh, national director of the activist group GetUp.

China has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to innovation, not least when compared with the host of the five-day Computex fair, the small but savvy island of Taiwan, which punches above its weight in technology.

“There’s no denying the Chinese have carved out niches in some items, like computer casing and power systems,” said Chang Li, deputy secretary general of the Taipei Computer Association, the co-organiser of Computex.

Tunisia, used to posting at least five percent annual growth, faces stagnation this year as the authorities try to meet rising aspirations, hold elections and limit the fallout from unrest in neighbour Libya.

Unemployment, which ultimately drove the unrest against the old regime, could reach 20 percent of the workforce this year, up from 13 percent in 2010, the government admits.

The world’s leading oil exporter finds itself in the odd position of being flooded with petrodollars and seeing remarkable ruble strength — two prime conditions for local investment — while also bleeding capital at record rates.

The outflow of investor money abroad reached $30 billion by the end of April to nearly match the 2010 total. The May figure is expected to approach $8 billion and a slowdown is not anticipated for some months.

Southern Cross has caused shockwaves after deciding to cut rental payments to landlords by a third for the next four months as it struggles to meet a £230 million (262 million euros, $378 million) annual rent bill on its 750 care homes.

British Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to step in and offer a “guarantee” that Southern Cross residents — representing one in 10 of all elderly people in care — will not lose out if the firm collapses.

“We can hardly afford meat now, it’s too expensive,” Li, 67, tells AFP, explaining that they now only enjoy that privilege two or three times a month. Apples are also too dear.

Chinese authorities say reining in inflation is their top priority for the year, and have taken a raft of policy measures to cool prices. But those moves are not yet trickling down to help low-income households like Li’s.

The Aratiri project, owned by Zamin Ferrous, a London-based minerals company, will cost an estimated $2.5 billion (1.7 million Euros), the largest mining project ever in South America, and equivalent to more than six percent of Uruguay’s gross domestic product.

For the past two years, the company has been permitted to prospect for iron on 120,000 hectares (460 square miles) of land around the village of Cerro Chato in the center-east of the country.

Unease is growing within Papandreou’s ranks about the consequences of waves of budget cuts demanded under successive deals with the European Union and IMF — and this could turn into alarm after at least 80,000 Greeks crammed a central Athens square to vent their anger over the nation’s dire state.

As the government struggles to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debt, the Socialist cabinet will discuss informally on Monday the medium-term economic plan which will impose 6.4 billion euros ($9.37 billion) of extra austerity this year alone.

Japan’s government, however, reiterated there would be no such restructuring of the operator of the quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which it has said should remain solvent and listed as it battles to restore power output and compensate victims of the nuclear crisis.

Tokyo Stock Exchange head Atsushi Saito, who used to head a state-backed turnaround body, said temporary nationalization for the troubled utility should be considered and that creditors would likely have to forgive loans.

The weakest U.S. jobs growth in eight months in May has knocked the dollar lower across the board and pushed down Japanese stocks to a two-month low, confirming for investors that the global business cycle has shifted to slower growth and a defensive stance in portfolios is desirable.

The falling dollar has in turn pushed up the euro, which despite no solution in sight for the euro zone’s debt crisis may find some traction this week and support commodity prices.

The price cuts, offered by both generic and branded drugmakers including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Johnson & Johnson’s Crucell and Sanofi-Aventis’ Sanofi Pasteur, should help the alliance narrow a $3.7 billion funding gap for its commitments up until 2015.

GSK said on Monday it would provide its Rotarix rotavirus vaccine to GAVI at a 67 percent discount to the current public price — bringing it to $2.50 per dose, or $5 to fully immunize a child. Merck said it will offer its Rotateq rotavirus shot at $5.00 a dose initially. “The RotaTeq price will decrease to $3.50 once the purchase volume increases to 30 million doses,” it said.

Airlines have criticized the planemaker’s one-size-fits-all policy that would see the mid-sized A350 built in three separate models all using the same engine, the Rolls-Royce Trent XWB.

Until now, Airbus and Rolls have defended the engine as an all-rounder capable of powering twinjet A350 planes carrying 270 to 350 people, competing with two different types of planes manufactured by rival Boeing (BA.N).

After a week filled with disappointing economic data, the debate is no longer over whether the economy has hit a soft patch but how long it will last.

Friday’s poor U.S. employment figures suggest demand will remain subdued in the world’s biggest economy. Europe is still struggling to put an end to its sovereign debt troubles.

Data indicating that economic recovery may be stalling in the West is worrying OPEC’s core Gulf members Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Saudi and its fellow Gulf producers will argue that oil prices are undermining the economic growth that fuels demand for OPEC crude and that more supply is needed to balance demand in the second half of the year.

The union’s healthcare fund, known as the UAW’s VEBA trust, is considering a range of options to cash in on its 45.7 percent stake in Chrysler at a time when the value of that investment is rising, these people said.

The options could include selling shares to an outside investor, including Chrysler’s majority owner Fiat SpA (FIA.MI), or selling in an initial public offering if the stock is eventually listed. Fiat owns 52 percent of Chrysler.

Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, just over a third of what economists had expected.

However, analysts saw little chance the economy would slide back into recession, given that temporary factors like high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from the earthquake in Japan were constraining growth.

“One of the industry’s most highly leveraged buy-outs — lined the pockets of Tribune’s former shareholders with $8.5 billion in cash at the expense of Tribune’s creditors and precipitated Tribune’s careen into bankruptcy,” said Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, one of the plaintiffs.

The unit of Deutsche Bank AG filed lawsuits in several courts on Thursday in its capacity as trustee for senior notes.

Last Friday’s figures showing that the U.S. economy generated only 54,000 jobs during May, a third of what was anticipated, sent shockwaves through stock markets and prompted a big dollar reverse. The data prompted renewed speculation that the U.S. Federal Reserve will maintain its super-loose monetary policy, including benchmark interest rates of near zero percent, for longer than previously anticipated.

A speech Tuesday from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke on the U.S. economic outlook could well be the market highlight of the week.

Then there’s the 2011 recovery.

The U.S. economy is moving ahead, however fitfully. Yet state and local governments are still stuck in recession. Short of cash, they cut 30,000 jobs in May, the seventh straight month they’ve shed workers. Rather than add to U.S. economic growth, they’re subtracting from it.

Social Democrat leader Pedro Passos Coelho scored an emphatic win at the ballot box Sunday, with his party collecting 39 percent of the vote to 28 percent for the second-placed Socialist Party, which had governed for the past six years.

Passos Coelho takes over as prime minister later this month with Portugal in the middle of a financial storm. His new government inherits a record jobless rate of 12.6 percent and an expected economic contraction of 4 percent over the next two years.

Though the severe debt-reduction measures are expected to pitch the country into deep recession and bring sharply lower living standards in what already is one of western Europe’s poorest countries, parties that support the effort to restore fiscal health collected around 80 percent of the vote.

That outcome is reassuring for European leaders keen to draw a line under the continent’s debt crisis which they have battled to vanquish for more than a year, especially as Greece’s financial woes continue to worry investors.

If sprouts from the farm in the village of Bienenbuettel, between Hamburg and Hannover, are confirmed as the only source of the highly aggressive, “super-toxic” strain of bacteria, it could solve a mystery that has puzzled authorities for weeks. Suspicion for the cause of the deadliest known E. coli outbreak had fallen on lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, initially from Spain.

Even so, authorities say the danger is not over yet. More cases of the illness, which has hit Germany hardest, are likely for at least another week because the contaminated sprouts may have already been delivered to restaurants and grocery stores across Germany and could infect consumers.

As scientists scramble to find the source of an E. coli outbreak linked to raw vegetables that has killed 18 in Europe and sickened nearly 2,000, consumers are swearing off lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes just in case.

“Cook it or don’t eat it,” Hamburg kidney specialist Rolf Stahl told reporters at a press conference about the epidemic on Friday. “That’s my personal recommendation.”

Eager to avoid unrest over the rising cost of food, several island governments are giving away seedlings and gardening kits while promoting a grow-it-yourself approach, just as the U.S. did during World War I and World War II by encouraging citizens to plant “victory gardens.”

In a gritty slum in Jamaica’s capital of Kingston, Beatrice Buchanan is among those who have planted vegetables and fruit as insurance against spiraling food prices.

But those plans have stalled in Hawaii, Pennsylvania and South Carolina without anyone hired, any plants constructed or any electric cars assembled.

The South Korean electric car and golf cart manufacturer has apparently abandoned its pledge to the three states – without notice – and deserted its new U.S. markets amid financial difficulties, The Associated Press has learned.

Most companies are hoarding cash after two-plus years of cost-cutting. The members of the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index are sitting on a record $960 billion in cash on their balance sheets. All told, companies now have more than 10 percent more cash than the previous peak in 2004. While the days of mass layoffs and eking out another year from ever-older computers might be largely over, few companies are expanding.

But there are exceptions, those companies that are bold – or some might say, crazy – enough to invest for the next boom while others remain cautious.

Google searches for “cancer” and “cellphones” spiked this week. And some people vowed to get headsets to shield themselves from radiation. But most seemed to either dismiss the warning as too vague, or reason that if the most useful device in modern life poses a slight health risk, then so be it.

“I was watching the news about it, and I thought, `I’m already screwed because I’ve been talking on the phone for seven years,'” said Genevieve Chamorro, a 31-year-old New Yorker who was shopping for a phone.

The loan announcement comes days after the government unveiled a draft budget that projects the deficit swelling to nearly 11 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, as officials look to boost social services spending to meet persistent demands by a population that complained of gross economic inequity under the former regime.

The 12-month standby arrangement spans fiscal year 2011-2012, which begins in July, and carries a 1.5 percent annual interest rate – a level which Finance Minister Samir Radwan said fell far below the international borrowing costs Egypt would have had to agree to had it turned to the open market for assistance. The loan, which must still be approved by the IMF’s executive board in July, is to be repaid over five years, with the payments due to begin three years and three months after its disbursement.

The drug, called crizotinib, would be the first targeted treatment for the roughly 50,000 people who get this cancer each year worldwide. It might eventually produce annual revenue for Pfizer exceeding $2 billion.

The first overall survival data for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer treated with the drug, called crizotinib, showed 74 percent were still alive after a year and 54 percent after two years, researchers announced at a huge cancer specialists conference.

In one study, an experimental drug showed so much benefit so quickly in people with advanced disease that those getting a comparison drug were allowed to switch after just a few months.

The drug, vemurafenib, targets a gene mutation found in about half of all melanomas. The drug is being developed by Genentech, part of Swiss-based Roche, and Plexxikon Inc., part of the Daiichi Sankyo Group of Japan.

Those interests have come together in a burgeoning and unorthodox partnership, as China lends and invests tens of billions of dollars in countries around Latin America in return for a guaranteed flow of commodities, particularly oil.

Recent deals have made China a key financier to the governments of Venezuela and Argentina. At the same time, Chinese companies have secured a decade’s worth of oil from Venezuela and Brazil, and steady supplies of wheat, soybeans and natural gas from Argentina.

Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski called the election a year before the end of his four-year term, following the opposition’s walkout from the legislature. It was sparked by the jailing of a popular television channel’s boss and the freezing of his bank accounts.

Gruevski was in line to be re-elected for a third term, according to preliminary results, and he declared victory at his party’s headquarters. Final results will be known Monday.

In one study, an experimental drug showed so much benefit so quickly in people with advanced disease that those getting a comparison drug were allowed to switch after just a few months.

The drug, vemurafenib, targets a gene mutation found in about half of all melanomas. The drug is being developed by Genentech, part of Swiss-based Roche, and Plexxikon Inc., part of the Daiichi Sankyo Group of Japan.

Iraqis have been struggling to rebuild their damaged electricity grid and improve power stations and lines. Blackouts are still common. Last summer, power shortages spurred demonstrations that turned deadly when security forces fired into crowds.

Turkey’s TPAO-led consortium will develop the 4.6 trillion cubic feet Mansouriya field in eastern Iraq for $7 per barrel of oil equivalent. It plans to reach a peak production of at least 320 million cubic feet per day.

The new report by the International Energy Agency showing high emissions from fossil fuels is one of several pieces of bad news facing delegates from about 180 countries heading to Bonn, Germany, for two weeks of talks beginning Monday.

Another: The tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster in March apparently has sidelined Japan’s aggressive policies to combat climate change and prompted countries like Germany to hasten the decommissioning of nuclear power stations which, regardless of other drawbacks, have nearly zero carbon emissions.

But down here, for the last few hundred miles before it splays out into a vast delta, much of the river is as nature designed it – broad, lazy, broken up with shoals and islands where pelicans nest, its banks anchored by weeping willows that drip water even on sunny days.

The Danube is a watery thread 2,857 kilometers (1,775 miles) long that binds the diverse peoples of 19 nations sharing its basin, weaving together economies and cultures from the richest nations of Europe to the poorest.

A magic healer promised an inexpensive cure through chanting while pinching his side where the kidney stones were lodged, but it only made it worse. His condition became life-threatening, and doctors said he would need surgery for a fourth time.

The operation cost him – and his extended family – their home.

The new tanks should help prevent further environmental damage in the evacuated area around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant by providing a secure place to store the contaminated water being used to cool the reactors as workers continue their battle to bring them under control.

Radioactive water has been leaking from the plant since it was struck by the March 11 disasters, with tons having already flushed into the sea and more continuing to pool across the complex.