Monday Business Edition

Chancellor Angela Merkel said the decision, hammered out by her centre-right coalition overnight, marked the start of a “fundamental” rethink of energy policy in the world’s number four economy.

“We want the electricity of the future to be safer and at the same time reliable and affordable,” Merkel told reporters as she accepted the findings of an expert commission on nuclear power she appointed in March in response to the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima plant.

EBay quickly threw up a hurdle in the form of a lawsuit accusing Google of building the mobile payments platform with trade secrets swiped from the online auction titan’s PayPal financial transactions unit.

Apple, Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook are each believed to be working on ways to let people use smartphones to pay for items or services but Google was the first to introduce such a system, in the form of “Google Wallet.”

“Lockheed Martin detected a significant and tenacious attack on its information systems network,” the company said in a statement late Saturday night.

The company said the cyber-assault took place on May 21, and that quick action by its security team successfully repelled the attack.

The company’s information security team detected the attack almost immediately and took “aggressive actions” to protect all systems and data, a company statement said.

No specifics about the defensive action were provided. However, “as a result of the swift and deliberate actions taken to protect the network and increase IT security, our systems remain secure,” Lockheed Martin said.

The April hacker thefts of millions of customers’ personal records have been a bruising experience for the Japanese consumer electronics giant, not least because its network security failures have left it with a potential bill of up to $1 billion.

But also under threat is its core strategy of growing online revenues to replace income from appliances where it has been losing ground in areas such as televisions and portable music players.

Around 1,800 exhibitors from across the world will descend on Taipei for the Computex fair, which runs from Tuesday to Sunday, hoping to generate an estimated $23 billion of sales from 36,000 buyers, organisers say.

Under the slogan “Shaping the future!” the fair will showcase a cascade of new products designed to stir the interest of tech-savvy consumers.

Long demanded by Tokyo, the decision to launch preliminary talks on a trade deal and explore a new binding political accord, was announced at a summit between EU leaders and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

“We still have a long way to go, but the objective is now clear,” said EU president Herman Van Rompuy after talks in a history-packed castle nestling in parkland on the outskirts of Brussels.

Disaster-struck Japan, struggling to recover from a devastating March tsunami and nuclear meltdown, had pressed the European Union hard for a formal summit announcement of the launch of negotiations towards a free trade deal — an accord worth tens of billions to either side.

But after months of tough talking heightened by a history of trade friction, officials said no such deal would be formally inked as the two sides scrambled to agree wording of a joint text only 24 hours before the summit start.

He was speaking following talks with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a day after Greek political leaders failed to agree on further austerity measures.

The European Union has warned that time was running out to solve a problem threatening the euro currency.

“We need to limit as much as possible the amount of contagion that would arise from radical action on Greece,” Deutsche Bank economist Gilles Moec told AFP after days of what seemed sometimes like brinkmanship by European leaders.

He urged that Athens be allowed to make its case for a round of aid worth 12 billion euros ($17 billion) from the European Union and International Monetary Fund while countries like Ireland and Portugal work to “decouple from Greece and reduce market pressure.”

“We are lifting the grain export ban on July 1,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced in televised remarks.

The ban by the world’s third-largest wheat exporting country had originally been due to expire at the end of December but was renewed amid fears of another grain shortfall this year.

In a report to Congress, the US Treasury said it had concluded that China was allowing the yuan, whose official named is renminbi, to appreciate against the dollar and had shown willingness to continue promoting exchange-rate flexibility.

The Treasury Department cited “the ongoing appreciation of the renminbi against the dollar since June 2010” as well as “China’s public statements asserting that it will continue to promote RMB exchange rate flexibility.”

The riots over the announced closures of the Castellammare di Stabia and Sestri yards with the loss of 2,500 jobs coincided with a decidedly downbeat meeting of the Confindustria, Italy’s powerful employers’ federation.

The conference addressed sluggish growth, high youth unemployment and a renewed sense of unease about Italy on eurozone financial markets after ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit outlook last weekend.

The shared currency was down 0.4 percent and European shares were flat in anemic trade, although German utilities sagged after Berlin’s decision to shut all nuclear reactors by 2022 in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.

German utilities RWE (RWEG.DE) and E.ON (EONGn.DE) were among the biggest fallers, down by around 2.4 and 1.7 percent respectively, while shares in renewable energy companies rose.

Greece’s conservative opposition meanwhile demanded lower taxes as a condition for reaching a political consensus with the Socialist government on further austerity measures, which Brussels says is needed to secure any further assistance.

Moves to plug a looming funding gap for 2012 and 2013 were accelerated after the International Monetary Fund said last week it would withhold the next tranche of aid due on June 29 unless the EU guarantees to meet Athens’ funding needs for next year.

Conservative leader Antonis Samaras called for a flat 15 percent corporate tax and rejected government plans for hiking taxes to tackle Greece’s budget deficit and please fiscal inspectors mulling the next, key tranche of a 110 billion euro bailout.

“You want to raise taxes and reach consensus with us, who have set reducing taxes as a priority? Don’t even think about it,” Samaras said in remarks addressed to the government.

S&P said it had lowered the long-term credit rating of Tokyo Electric, one of the most active bond issuers in Japan, to B+ from BBB, while cutting the rating on the utility’s secured bonds to BB+ from BBB.

The ratings agency said it viewed a default on the utility’s 5 trillion yen ($62 billion) in corporate bonds as less likely than a restructuring of its bank debt.

The Fitch move means all three major ratings agencies now have their fingers poised on the trigger to downgrade Japan’s credit status unless they see moves by the government to strengthen the country’s finances.

Fitch cut its outlook to negative from stable and affirmed its AA minus local currency rating, its fourth highest and the same level as S&P’s but one notch below Moody’s Aa2.

Lockheed Martin Corp, the U.S. government’s top information technology provider, raised concern about cyber hacking at the weekend, complaining of a pattern of frequent attacks on it from around the world.

Australian Attorney-General Robert McClelland’s comments also came after the outgoing head of Australia’s biggest oil and gas company, Woodside Petroleum, said cyber hacking attacks were now coming “from everywhere”.

The power price rise, which excludes residential users, will add to inflationary pressures but revive profit margins at power producers.

That should prompt an increase in electricity supplies from loss-making power plants that had failed to keep up with rising demand. Higher prices should also discourage excess power consumption.

Samsonite will join companies such as L’Occitane (0973.HK) and luxury brands such as Prada SpA and Coach (COH.N) that have targeted Hong Kong to raise their profile among Asian consumers or tap deep-pocketed investors to fund expansion in the region.

China’s rapid growth has created a new class of consumers in major cities as well as in the countryside that have snapped up everything from luxury shoes to handbags and jewelry.

The hike in the deposit rate, the central bank’s main tool for influencing money-market rates and liquidity, follows growing official concern over capital outflows that have exceeded $50 billion in the past seven months.

The Bank of Russia raised the overnight deposit rate by 25 basis points to 3.50 percent. However, it held its key refinancing rate at 8.25 percent and the repo rate at 5.50 percent.

High input prices, supply chain disruptions from the tsunami disaster in Japan and slowing demand from China have combined to brake manufacturing momentum in Europe, the United States and Asia in recent months following a steady run of robust growth.

Just how sharp the slowdown is will become clearer this week with the release of data from factory purchasing managers in major economies across the globe.

With important manufacturing and jobs data due this week, it could start to get even riskier.

That means nervous investors are likely to keep a lid on equity prices this year as they grapple with slowing global growth and a host of geopolitical risks from the Arab Spring to debt defaults in the euro zone.

“If I’m someone who is starving and an oil well has been drilled next to me, do you think I will remain quiet?” said sheikh Rashash, a former Iraqi army general, who is now a leading figure in the al-Imara tribe in southern Iraq.

“I swear by God I will take it to pieces. We have told them anything can happen, these are the marshes.”

Consumer spending increased 0.4 percent for a 10th straight month of gains, the Commerce Department said on Friday, after rising 0.5 percent in March.

But prices rose 0.3 percent, leaving spending up just 0.1 percent and incomes stagnant when adjusted for inflation.

But at the same time, the International Monetary Fund urged rapid action to force the world’s biggest banks to hold a lot more capital than new minimum requirements due to come in from 2013.

Berlin and Paris have pushed for flexible treatment of some types of bank capital including controversial hybrid bonds as the EU grapples with new rules that are designed to make banks shock-proof in an economic dip, an EU source said on Friday.

Nearly 20 percent of shareholders rejected the new payout proposals, which include lower caps on long-term incentive share payouts — only a marginal improvement on the nearly 25 percent of investors that voted against its 2010 report.

Europe’s largest bank received a bigger pushback on pay than its British peers, despite a year of lobbying to get shareholders on board with its new policy, which was ultimately approved.