Monday Business Edition

David Wei and Elvis Lee resigned as chief executive officer and chief operating officer respectively, accepting responsibility for “systemic breakdowns” that allowed the fraud to happen, the company said in a statement.

“The investigation confirmed that Mr Wei and Mr Lee and other members of senior management were not involved in any of the activities that led to the claims by buyers against fraudulent suppliers,” the statement said.

“We’re not looking for a government shutdown, but at the same time we’re also not looking at rubber stamping these really high elevated spending levels that Congress blew through the joint two years ago,” said Representative Paul Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee, told CBS News.

“We don’t want to accept these extremely high levels of spending while we negotiate how to continue funding the government.”

“The citizens of Iceland will get to vote on these new Icesave contracts,” President Olafur Grimsson told reporters in Reykjavik.

His announcement came after Iceland’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly voted in favour of the new Icesave deal and voted down by a slim majority the idea of putting the issue to a referendum.

“We have to make a break from nationalisations, they were necessary during the crisis but only during the crisis,” Michael Fuchs, economic spokesman for the ruling conservative CDU/CSU parties, told the Berliner Zeitung daily on Friday.

Fuchs said a desire to maintain the shareholder balance in EADS between French and German interests did not justify the government taking a direct participation.

From capital Lisbon to the northern city of Porto, home of the famous fortified wine, appeals to trade second-hand gold jewellery for euros are mushrooming.

“We buy used gold for cash,” read posters plastered on street corners and shopping malls. The solicitations are also made in page-long newspaper advertisements and radio spots.

French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde, who chaired the talks, said the accord marked the “first step” towards correcting these problems, thereby putting the global economy on track to more balanced growth and prosperity.

Lagarde told a press conference there had been a lengthy debate about the indicators, after reports that China, sensitive over its currency policy and trade balance, had held out to the last moment against a number of measures.

Hours after NBG unveiled a “friendly merger” proposal tabled on January 18, Alpha said the offer amounting to an “absorption” had been “unsolicited” and rejected it.

“The board of directors of Alpha Bank convened on 18 February 2011 and, following due consideration of the terms of the proposal, unanimously resolved to reject it, taking into account the uncertainties of the current environment, and the terms of the proposal itself, which were not deemed beneficial to the Alpha Bank shareholders,” Alpha said in a statement.

After a marathon floor debate running well past midnight, the Republican-controlled House voted Saturday to cut about $61 billion in government spending.

US President Barack Obama’s administration and leaders in the Senate, controlled by Democrats, immediately criticized the move.

Demonstrators who have camped out in the capitol dome since Tuesday insisted that they will not give up the fight against what they see as a broad plan by Republicans to undermine working people and the Democratic Party they support.

At least nine other Republican governors are considering bills that would curtail or eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers.

Leaders of the 17-member eurozone will hold a special Brussels summit on March 11 on the proposed pact aimed at reinforcing policy coordination at a time when the bloc is battling a debt crisis.

The move has raised eyebrows among the 10 EU members who are not yet a part of the euro club and have not been invited to attend the summit.

The aim of Nabucco is to bring gas from central Asia to Europe, bypassing Russia and Ukraine where repeated squabbles over prices have in the past left the 27-nation European Union without vital supplies of gas, sometimes in mid-winter.

Nevertheless, the consortium that will build and operate the major new energy corridor has yet to sign a single contract with any of a number of potential supplier countries.

“His chances have improved but it’s not in the bag yet,” Marco Valli, an economist at Italian banking giant UniCredit, told AFP, as the Jesuit-educated economist stepped up his campaign to take the top post in Frankfurt.

A columnist for the Financial Times daily was bullish this week, saying: “The ECB needs Draghi.” And The Economist said: “The next president of the world?s second-most-important central bank should be Mario Draghi.”

But the near-collapse of the impoverished war-torn country’s biggest commercial lender is very real, highlighting endemic corruption among Kabul’s elite and threatening major losses for thousands of ordinary people.

As President Hamid Karzai’s government and Western officials trade fresh accusations over the affair, it also underlines stormy relations between the two sides, five months before a limited withdrawal of international troops starts.

European equities fell on a combination of uncertainty over the future of the oil price, increasing signs that higher interest rates may be coming and more evidence of a surprisingly poor earnings season.

Together, they overshadowed reports of solid economic growth. U.S. markets were closed for a national holiday.

“Things are better than expected in terms of growth (and) unemployment,” Bini Smaghi told a business lunch in Hong Kong.

In a speech that focused on the financial turmoil in Europe and prospects for the euro currency, he said there were concerns in the financial markets about euro zone’s higher-than-expected inflation and warned that higher energy and food prices may be something economies have to get used to.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who chaired the Group of 20 talks, said the deal nevertheless represented a significant step toward better coordination of economic policies worldwide to help prevent another financial crisis.

“It wasn’t simple. There were obviously divergent interests but we were able to reach a compromise on a text that seems to us to be both balanced and demanding in its implementation,” she told a news conference.

Iceland, where the economy and financial system crashed in late 2008, owes Britain and the Netherlands money they used to bail out domestic savers who lost money in online “Icesave” accounts run by a failed Icelandic bank.

Icelandic President Olafur Grimsson said the new terms thrashed out over months of negotiation were better than the first deal, rejected by Icelanders last year.

Talks at a Group of 20 meeting in Paris centered round efforts, led by Germany and G20 presidents France, to persuade China to include its yawning current account surplus and undervalued currency in a list of measures aimed to start a process of rebalancing the global economy.

There was little public evidence that the United States itself had pushed Beijing hard on that issue, but Geithner reiterated that there was still some way to go in the steady appreciation of the yuan.

Wall Street posted its third consecutive week of gains with the S&P 500 now up 6.8 percent for the year and more than 20 percent in just six months.

“I’ve never seen a market like this,” said Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services in Charlotte, Vermont, a market watcher for 35 years.

Investors see potential in Mexico’s services sector and in enticing more companies to market, and are also bullish about new financial tools which could send billions of dollars into infrastructure and private equity deals.

Expected economic growth of about 4 percent this year, combined with inflation of about 3.5 percent, compares well to regional peers, many of which are tightening monetary policy to fend off surging prices.

The deal to create so-called BATS Chi-X Europe, announced on Friday, is the latest in a spate of merger plans rocking the world’s stock-trading market.

Dealer-owned BATS said it expects the combination should face little regulatory resistance, and should ultimately position it to expand into more profitable derivatives trading, and possibly a listings business.

The panel’s 14 recommendations for U.S. securities and futures regulators contained far-reaching ideas to overhaul the high-speed electronic market.

Yet many of the ideas issued on Friday called only for “consideration” or “further study” — potentially raising more questions as the first anniversary of the May 6 flash crash nears.

The awards “are intended to sharpen the executives’ focus” on long-term performance without excess risk, and align their interests with those of stockholders, the third-largest U.S. bank by assets said in a regulatory filing on Friday.

John Havens, the bank’s chief operating officer and a longtime confidant of Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, could get a $5.2 million bonus under the plan, and the sum could grow significantly higher if the bank performs well.

Earnings expectations have risen since October for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of big businesses, according to Thomson Reuters data. Lofty stock market indexes reflect that optimism.

Private surveys of manufacturers and small businesses show both confidence and hiring intentions improving.

With reports suggesting that over 200 people have been killed in clashes across the country, which have spread to the capital of Tripoli, investors are getting increasingly worried about the escalating violence in one of Africa’s biggest oil producers.

Those concerns were heightened by a statement from Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libya’s longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi. Blaming everyone from drug addicts to the media for the current turmoil afflicting Libya, he warned that civil war was a real possibility and that his father would fight until “the last bullet.”

Gov. Scott Walker made clear Sunday he won’t back off his proposal to effectively eliminate collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Senate Democrats who fled the state last week to delay the plan vowed not to come back to allow it to pass – even if they have to miss votes on other bills Tuesday. And union leaders said they would not let up on protests that have consumed Wisconsin’s capital city for a week and made the state the center of a national debate over the role of public employees’ unions.

That dynamic means it might take Republicans in the Legislature who believe Walker is going too far to try to break the impasse. One idea that has been floated by GOP Sen. Dale Schultz would temporarily take away bargaining rights to get through the state’s next two-year budget, then immediately restore them.

Now, as Congress careens toward a budget impasse, government insiders wonder if another shutdown is imminent – and whether Republicans again would suffer the most blame.

Leaders of both parties say they are determined to avoid a shutdown. But they have not yielded on the amount of spending cuts they will demand or accept. Meanwhile, shutdown talk is rippling through Washington and beyond.

The Dubai Financial Market closed down 3.66 percent, to 1,536 points, with developer Emaar Properties’ shares sliding 4.73 percent. The company was the force behind the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. In Kuwait, the benchmark index closed down 2.52 percent, to 6,394, and bringing its year-to-date losses to more than 8 percent.

The drops in the oil-rich Gulf region’s exchanges are largely linked to the unrest in Bahrain, where massive protests have roiled the island nation for more than a week as the Shiite majority presses the Sunni monarchy for greater rights and freedoms. Meanwhile, a bloody crackdown on protesters in Libya has further rattled markets as the unrest spilled over to the first major oil producer in the Middle East.

Coalition and Afghan officials plan to go to the Ghazi Abad district of Kunbar province, a hotbed of the insurgency, on Monday to investigate. Civilian casualties have been a constant source of friction between coalition troops and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Tribal elders told the provincial governor that air strikes hit a village in the area and that “women and children had been killed inside their houses,” said Nawrdin Safi, a member of the Kunar provincial council.

It marked the second time in three weeks that Egypt’s banks have reopened after a state-ordered closure, highlighting the uncertainty that prevails in the country more than a week after mass demonstrations toppled longtime President Hosni Mubarak. An earlier attempt to open the banks and establish a semblance of normalcy during the height of the anti-government protests lasted only a week before the lenders were ordered shut.

Reopening the banks is a critical step in returning to business as usual in a country where the sense of hope sparked by Mubarak’s ouster is tempered by the frustration that comes with crafting a new political framework while also trying to allow people to move on with their lives.

G-20 finance ministers and central bankers meeting in Paris agreed on a list of technical indicators to track those imbalances – caused by some countries consuming more while others tend to hold on to their money – but left the more tricky questions of when those imbalances actually become dangerous and what to do to mitigate them for later.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, whose country holds the G-20 presidency this year, said the all-night talks had been “tense” at times, indicating the clash in national interests between countries that find themselves on completely divergent growth trajectories after the 2008 financial crisis that plunged the world into its worst economic recession in 70 years.

Processing raw ore into rare earths is an intensive operation that has been associated with radioactive water spills. But with China slashing exports of rare earths and Washington concerned the U.S. military could face a shortage of materials for lasers, smart bombs, guided missiles, night-vision goggles and jet engines, Don Ranta is optimistic about his Black Hills National Forest mine proposal.

“Everything we’ve seen so far looks very, very bullish for it to be a commercial project,” said Ranta, CEO of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Rare Element Resources. If approved and if it goes into production, the mine would be located about 15 miles from Devils Tower National Monument, the nation’s first national monument.

She also spends time making sure other people stay out.

“We don’t have open doors, ever. They’re always locked,” said Melchor, whose Gray Area Foundation for the Arts sits at the convergence of the Tenderloin and Mid-Market, two of the city’s most downtrodden neighborhoods. “We must see 100 crimes every week out of these windows, and although the city wants it to change, it hasn’t happened.”

Let’s clarify that: Lassiter, a media adviser for political campaigns who lives in Cherry Hill, N.J., is still with his partner of nearly eight years, Greg Lehmkuho. But since Thursday, when Facebook expanded its romantic-status options, Lassiter’s profile there echoes his relationship’s legal status: “Domestic partnership.”

It may not be a life-altering change. After all, you can call yourself anything you want on a social network. And Facebook is merely that.

The musicians said no further meetings with management had been scheduled, but both sides said they remained committed to talks to end the more than four-month strike. The musicians said the 3-year, $36 million proposal – dubbed a final offer by management – would have saddled them with unacceptably higher heath care deductibles and travel costs.

“Today’s decision reflects our deep disappointment at the inability of the executives to be upfront and honest with people,” Gordon Stump, president of the Detroit Federation of Musicians, said in a statement.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Friday seized Habersham Bank, based in Clarkesville, Ga., with $387.6 million in assets; Citizens Bank of Effingham, based in Springfield, Ga., with $214.3 million in assets; Charter Oak Bank of Napa, Calif., with $120.8 million in assets; and San Luis Trust Bank, based in San Luis Obispo, Calif., with $332.6 million in assets.

SCBT National Association, based in Orangeburg, S.C., agreed to assume the assets and deposits of Habersham Bank. HeritageBank of the South, based in Albany, Ga., is acquiring the assets and deposits of Citizens Bank of Effingham.

Passage early Saturday of the $1.2 trillion bill, covering every Cabinet agency through Sept. 30, when the current budget year ends, sent the measure to the Senate, where it faces longer odds, and defied a White House veto threat.

The largely party-line vote of 235-189 was the most striking victory to date for the 87 freshman Republicans elected last fall on a promise to attack the deficit and reduce the reach of government. Three Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the measure.

Under a deal announced Friday, Sollers will build Fords at Russian plants, helping boost a struggling local industry. Ford will have access to a huge market that could bolster its revenues.

Financial details weren’t disclosed, but the automakers said they will have equal stakes in their joint venture called Ford Sollers. Ford declined to give production or sales targets for the venture.

He also called on nations with persistent trade deficits like the United States to narrow their budget shortfalls and save more.

Both steps would help balance trade and investment flows among countries, Bernanke said in a speech at a financial conference in Paris. Many countries worry about speculative money flooding their economies and inflating assets like real estate or stocks.

The quarterly decline was expected, but it came with some other bad news from the food maker. The outlook for the rest of the year is cloudy enough that Campbell lowered its full-year earnings and revenue guidance for the second time in about three months.

The Camden, N.J., company said Friday that its income fell 8 percent and sales were down 1 percent.

The spokesman for the sitting president, Laurent Gbagbo, read a decree on state TV late Thursday saying that the banks closed without giving the three months notice required by Ivorian law.

Ahoua Don Mello said the government would take over the offices of Britain’s Standard Chartered, France’s BNP-Paribas and Societe Generale along with U.S. bank Citibank. He also said that the government was imposing a citywide curfew, as panic spread.