Financial Freedom. Best business news.

Germany

Russia abandoned one-time ally Moammar Gadhafi and offered Friday to mediate a deal for the Libyan leader to leave the country he has ruled for more than 40 years.

The striking proposal by a leading critic of the NATO bombing campaign reflects growing international frustration with the Libyan crisis and a desire by the Kremlin for influence in the rapidly changing Arab landscape.

With Gadhafi increasingly isolated and NATO jets intensifying their attacks, Russia may also be eyeing Libya’s oil and gas and preparing for the prospect that the lucrative Libyan market will fall into full rebel control.

Early on Saturday, two NATO air strikes shook the Libyan capital, Tripoli. It was not immediately clear what was targeted.

“He should leave,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said of Gadhafi. “I proposed our mediation services to my partners. Everyone thinks that would be useful.”

The proposal thrust Medvedev into the spotlight at a summit in France of Group of Eight rich nations. Talk of this year’s Arab world uprisings has dominated the summit.

Analysts question whether Russia still has any leverage over Gadhafi, and the leaders of France, Britain and Germany said there’s no point in negotiating directly with the Libyan leader himself.

“If Gadhafi makes this decision, which will be beneficial for the country and the people of Libya, then it will be possible to discuss the form of his departure, what country may accept him and on what terms, and what he may keep and what he must lose,” Medvedev told reporters.

Medvedev said he is sending envoy Mikhail Margelov to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi immediately to start negotiating, and that talks with the Libyan government could take place later. Margelov said earlier Friday that it’s necessary to negotiate with all “reasonable” representatives of the government, including Gadhafi’s sons.

In response, Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, said: “Russia is one of the traditional friends of Libya. … We don’t think that Russia will sway its position to side with NATO.”

He would not say whether Gadhafi had been informed of Medvedev’s proposal, but told reporters in Tripoli that the Libyan leader was constantly watching the news.

South African President Jacob Zuma is also using his party’s ties to Gadhafi to work out a peaceful outcome, heading to Libya on behalf of the African Union.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner called Russian, South African and U.N. mediation efforts with Gadhafi “constructive,” but said they needed to make clear that the Libyan leader must leave power.

“I don’t know if it’s up to the international community, given what Gadhafi has done against his own people, to prepare him any kind of easy exit or some kind of golden parachute to leave Libya,” Toner told reporters.

Asked what value the mediation might then hold, Toner said the efforts could be useful “to make him or his regime see clearly the writing on the wall.”

“There’s no way out,” Toner added. “He’s no longer the legitimate leader in the eyes of the international community, in the eyes of his own people. The sooner he accepts that and moves on, the better.”

It’s unclear what exactly Gadhafi _ known as the Leader of the Revolution or Brother Leader in Libya _ could step down from. He has no constitutional executive position, but wields power by force of his personality and presence, making it difficult to guarantee that he has given up power as long as he and his sons remain in the country.

The opposition wants Gadhafi exiled. Medvedev said he wouldn’t offer Gadhafi refuge in Russia but said with a grin, “such countries could be found” that would be willing to take him in.

Russian officials have been critical of Gadhafi but also say NATO is using excessive force quick guaranteed personal loans. Russia recently held talks with representatives of both Gadhafi’s government and the rebels.

Russia often straddles the divide between the Western nations with which it shares a table in the G-8, and the Arab nations that Moscow nurtured during the Soviet era.

Moscow offered to negotiate with Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the 1990s, and is a member of the so-called Quartet negotiating for Mideast peace, alongside the United States, European Union and United Nations.

Over the past decade, the Kremlin sought to revive its influence in the Middle East and saw Gadhafi as one of its partners in the region. Libya struck multibillion dollar deals to procure Russian-made weapons, and Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom has big investments in Libya that have been threatened by Gadhafi’s attacks on rebel forces.

Medvedev discussed the mediation offer with President Barack Obama at talks on the sidelines of the G-8.

“The Russians of course have long-standing relationships in Libya that frankly we don’t have,” U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Friday. “We are going to be in close touch with the Russians as they pursue their conversations with the Libyans.”

A Libyan rebel spokesman, Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga, said Russia’s offer should have come sooner. “It’s too late, and it’s not a big deal,” Ghoga, the vice chairman of the opposition National Transitional Council, told a rally in the eastern city of Benghazi.

But the timing may be propitious.

Libya’s rebels have consolidated their position, and NATO pounded Tripoli with its heaviest strikes yet this week. Fuel and food shortages in the capital are starting to take a toll.

“The world does not see (Gadhafi) as the Libyan leader, and this is the position of not only the G-8 but also of all the African states that attended today’s summit,” Medvedev said.

A Moscow-based Middle East expert expressed doubt that Gadhafi will agree to step down after Benghazi-based opposition leaders rejected a cease-fire agreement proposed by the African Union in late March.

Gadhafi “will fight to the end with unpredictable consequences for everyone involved,” Yevgeny Satanovsky, head of the Moscow-based Middle East Institute, told The Associated Press.

On Friday, rebel fighters clashed with government forces to the south and west of the insurgent-held city of Misrata. Dr. Mustafa Omar of Hikma hospital said five rebels were killed and 26 wounded. It was unclear if any government soldiers were killed.

While rebel fighters have pushed Gadhafi’s troops to Misrata’s outskirts, the city, Libya’s third largest, has been under siege for months, receiving food and medical supplies only by sea.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, hosting the G-8 summit, said Friday there is “great unanimity” about an “intensification of the military intervention” to protect civilians.

He did not say how, but France and Britain said this week they are ready to deploy attack helicopters in the campaign.

British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters in Deauville that the deployment of helicopters was “part of the process of turning up the pressure” on Gadhafi. He said the campaign is entering a “new phase.”

So far, the NATO campaign has relied largely on strike jets dropping munitions from an altitude of about 15,000 feet (4,600 meters). The helicopters, flying much lower and slower, could more accurately identify targets in densely populated areas while risking fewer civilian lives. But such flights would also expose the helicopter crews to greater risks.

Source

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has threatened to ban some foreign media organizations from working in the country after what he described as alarmist coverage of the deepening financial crisis.

Lukashenko directed his harshest criticism Friday at the Russian media, since many Belarusians watch Russian television.

He also ominiously criticized Belarusian journalists working for foreign organizations and ordered the government to “make sure those media organizations no longer work on our territory.”

The National Bank this week cut the value of the Belarusian ruble against the dollar almost in half, which set off panic buying.

Belarusians are buying up goods and lining to get dollars or euros in an attempt to protect their savings.

Source

Union leaders fear up to 2,000 jobs will be lost at General Motors of Canada after the automaker

A major international mission to investigate Japan’s flooded, radiation-leaking nuclear complex opened Tuesday as new information emerged on just how serious the crisis was in the early days after the March 11 tsunami.

The team of U.N. nuclear experts met with Japanese officials and were to inspect the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in coming days to investigate the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986 and assess efforts to stabilize the complex by Tokyo’s self-declared deadline of early next year.

The Japanese government, which has pledged to cooperate with the experts from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, also announced its own probe into the crisis, appointing a Tokyo academic to head an investigative panel.

The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., released new analysis suggesting that fuel rods in the plant’s Units 2 and 3 mostly melted during the early days of the crisis, which had been suspected but could not be confirmed and which suggests the severity of the accident was greater than officials have acknowledged.

TEPCO announced similar findings last week about Unit 1.

Fuel in three of the plant’s six reactors started melting after the March 11 tsunami knocked out cooling systems, prompting huge releases of radiation into the atmosphere. The plant is still leaking, but at much lower levels than immediately after the accident, and Japanese officials hope to bring the entire plant into “cold shutdown” _ halting all radioactive leaks _ by January at the latest.

In the meantime, 80,000 people remain evacuated from homes around the plant. Many are living in school gymnasiums, uncertain of when they will be able to return. A handful of stalwarts have defied government orders and refused to leave.

“TEPCO caused such a horrible disaster. Leaving my home means I have lost to TEPCO,” said Naoto Matsumura, a 51-year-old rice and vegetable farmer who has stayed at his home despite radiation concerns and a lack of electricity and running water.

“Certainly, the life is not comfortable at all,” he said payday loan. “But I will not give up.”

Violators of a 12-mile (20-kilometer) exclusion zone could face fines up to 100,000 yen ($1,200) or detention of 30 days, but no officials have moved to arrest him.

The IAEA team conferred Tuesday with Japan’s trade minister, whose ministry oversees the nuclear industry, and will visit Japan through June 2 before reporting to an international conference in Vienna on June 20.

Michael Weightman, leader of the IAEA team, said he hoped the world soon “can start learning the lessons from the information we gather.”

Goshi Hosono, director of the Japanese government’s nuclear crisis task force, said the IAEA team submitted a “long list” of questions.

“We will do our best to answer their questions,” Hosono said.

The government also said it was appointing University of Tokyo professor Yotaro Hatamura, an expert on industrial and other accidents, to head a panel of outside experts to investigate the Fukushima accident.

The crisis has raised serious questions about the lax oversight of Japan’s nuclear industry and prompted the country to scrap plans to rely on nuclear power for one half its electricity needs _ up from its current one third.

The quake and tsunami, which left 24,000 people dead or missing, also damaged farms, ports and hundreds of suppliers, helping to push Japan’s economy back into recession.

A clearer picture of the extent of damage at the plant emerged Tuesday after an analysis of data from Units 2 and 3 suggested that fuel rods in those two cores had almost certainly mostly melted as well.

“We have analyzed data, which showed that it was highly likely that most of the fuel rods have melted. But it is unlikely that melting fuel rods could worsen the crisis because the melted fuels are covered in water,” said Takeo Iwamoto, a company spokesman.

Source

Mexico central bank Governor Agustin Carstens will be presented as a candidate for managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the Finance Ministry said in an e-mailed statement today.

The process to choose a new leader at the IMF should be “open, transparent and based on merit,” the ministry said. Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero will present Carstens’ candidacy, the statement said. The government will likely nominate Carstens tomorrow, said Ricardo Ochoa, head of international affairs at the ministry, in a phone interview.

With Carsten’s nomination, Mexico joined Australia, China and other nations in calling for the new managing director of the lender to be chosen because of merit and not the convention that the position should go only to Europeans. Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said May 22 the position shouldn’t be “limited” to any one nation or continent.

The Washington-based fund plans to complete its search for a managing director by June 30 to replace Dominque Strauss-Kahn who was indicted May 19 in New York on charges including attempted rape. Carstens served as deputy managing director of the fund from 2003 to 2006.

Carstens became central bank governor in January 2010 after Guillermo Ortiz stepped down. Carstens, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, served as finance minister starting in 2006, where he led the nation’s response to the global financial crisis. Mexico was the first nation to request a flexible credit line from the IMF, a mechanism to help support economies seeking strong macroeconomic policies.

Voting Power

Mexico leads a group of eight countries with 117,045 votes, or 4.66 percent of the total IMF voting power, according to the multilateral lender’s website faxless pay day loans. The group is the seventh largest, measured by voting power, behind the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, the U.K. and 10 nations led by Belgium.

Carstens, a Chicago Cubs baseball fan, led Mexico’s response to the global financial crisis as finance minister since 2006. As chief economist for the central bank from 1994 to 1999, he co-wrote a paper in which he pushed for market participants to have broader access to central bank data. Under Carstens, the central bank published the minutes of policy meetings for the first time this year.

Flexible Credit

The IMF renewed and boosted Mexico’s flexible credit line to $72 billion in January, replacing the one-year $48 billion facility. Mexico first sought the line in 2009 to bolster confidence in the economy, which contracted the most since 1995 that year. Colombia and Poland were the only other two nations to enter similar agreements with the IMF, which the lender said were reserved for nations with strong economic policies.

The economy grew 5.5 percent last year, the fastest growth in 10 years, and may expand as much as 5 percent this year, Carstens said on May 11. Policy makers boosted their forecast for growth this year without changing their forecast for inflation of 3 percent to 4 percent. Annual inflation slowed to 3.36 in April, near the 5-year low set in March and half that of Brazil. The central bank has a target of 3 percent inflation.

Mexico has been buying as much as $600 million dollars monthly through dollar options since March 2010, boosting foreign reserves rose to a record $125.8 billion this year, according to the central bank.

Source

The government has cleared the way for a terminal in southwestern Louisiana to export part of the U.S.’s burgeoning supply of natural gas.

The Energy Department said this is the first time an exporter has been allowed to send natural gas from the lower 48 states as liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to all U.S. trading partners.

Cheniere Energy Partners LP, based in Houston, said Friday it will be allowed to export up to 803 billion cubic feet of gas a year from its Sabine Pass LNG terminal. The gas will be carried on tankers after being chilled to super-low temperatures to become liquefied natural gas, which makes it easier to transport by ship.

The terminal went into service in 2008 to handle imported natural gas during shortages. That was before domestic supplies skyrocketed as vast amounts of gas in shale rock formations became easier to extract. The Energy Department reported Wednesday that the U.S. has nearly two trillion cubic feet of natural gas in underground storage and supplies have been steadily growing.

Exports are expected to begin in 2015. Cheniere, which did not provide a cost estimate for expanding the terminal for exports, said a final investment decision will be made after it determines how many exporting contracts it can obtain, along with financing and final regulatory approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Cheniere said that under the Energy Department decision, it will have seven years to begin exports after FERC approval. The terminal will maintain its current ability to import LNG.

“The ability to export natural gas will further stabilize production for U.S. consumers, stimulate the economies through job creation and provide a boost to American global competitiveness,” said Cheniere Partners CEO Charif Souki. “Exports will promote domestic production of U.S. energy and help reduce our country’s reliance on foreign sources.”

Cheniere Energy Partners is a limited partnership formed in 2007 by Cheniere Energy Inc.

Cheniere Energy shares jumped $2.35, or 30.6 percent, to close at $10.04. Shares of Cheniere Energy Partners rose 87 cents, or 5.1 percent, to close at $17.90.

Source

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the selection of the next chief of the International Monetary Fund should be done through an open process that leads to a speedy succession.

Separately, John Lipsky, the IMF’s acting managing director, said Thursday that he deeply regrets the circumstances that temporarily placed him in the top position.

Lipsky took over this week after former chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Strauss-Kahn, who is has denied the charges, resigned late Wednesday. That set up a scramble to choose his successor.

Traditionally, the head of the IMF has been a European while an American has run the World Bank. Developing countries have long chafed at that arrangement and are pushing for officials from their countries to be considered this time.

The United States will play a critical role in the selection. The U.S. has the most votes among any individual country, although collectively Europe carries the most weight.

Geithner’s statement was ambiguous and leaves open the possibility that the U.S. could support a candidate from either group. Some analysts said the U.S. government will make its preference clearer behind the scenes while keeping a more impartial stance in public.

The IMF is heavily involved in delicate negotiations over financial assistance to troubled European countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland. The European governments are coalescing behind French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde.

Source

If St. Louis hopes to build up its biotech industry, it will need both cash and brainpower. Now the people who are trying to grow it here are using a little of the first to tap a lot of the second.

The BioGenerator, an arm of the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences, said Tuesday that it is investing $50,000 from its Spark Fund into a new firm designed to help drug startups grow. SARmont will be a contract research organization (CRO) housed at BioGenerator’s Central West End facility. It will work with researchers and investors who are trying to bring new drugs to the market.

“Our sweet spot is in all of the work that needs to get done before a company starts clinical and manufacturing work,” said Chief Executive Randy Weiss. “Our core expertise is drug design.”

That expertise largely comes in the mind of Dr. John Talley, SARmont’s chief scientific officer and the lead inventor of several big commercial drugs, including $3 billion arthritis medicine Celebrex. SARmont will essentially be offering the skills and experience of Talley and his team to consult with others who are trying to do what he has done.

“That’s part of our special sauce. We’ve actually seen molecules go from the lab all the way to the pharmacy,” Talley said. “There aren’t that many folks who can say they’ve done that.”

SARmont is starting small

Lowe’s Cos.’ first-quarter net income fell 6 percent, pressured in part by bad weather and difficult economic conditions.

The Mooresville, N.C., home improvement retailer also cut its full-year outlook on Monday.

Lowe’s earned $461 million, or 34 cents per share, for the three months ended April 29. That’s down from $489 million, or 34 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue dipped 2 percent to $12.19 billion.

Analysts expected earnings of 36 cents per share on revenue of $12.54 billion.

For the full year, Lowe’s now expects earnings of $1.56 to $1.64 per share and an approximately 4 percent revenue increase. It previously forecast earnings of $1.60 to $1.72 per share on a 5 percent revenue rise.

Analysts predict full-year earnings of $1.70 per share on revenue of $50.9 billion.

Source