MOSCOW, Oct. 1--Russia has played one of its last political trump cards -- the Kyoto Protocol--in hopes of winning European support for its membership in the World Trade Organization, the Russian press said Friday, AFP reported.
Most Moscow newspapers pointed out that the cabinet's decision Thursday to endorse the global warming treaty was a political decision reached quickly at the highest levels of the Kremlin, perhaps by President Vladimir Putin himself.
Several top ministers who for years argued against the treaty's merits spoke Thursday in favor of Kyoto, which should be ratified by Russia within three months by a vote in the pro-Kremlin lower house of parliament.
"Russia has to yield European pressure. We have not yet entered the World Trade Organization, and the recent reforms (of Putin) to reinforce his powers have prompted a negative reaction in the West," Vremya Novostei said.
Russia's backing of the Kyoto Protocol displays Moscow's will to "be a loyal and civilized political player on the international scene," the liberal daily said.
The respected Izvestia daily said Russia, which holds the swing vote on the treaty's implementation after the pact's rejection by the United States, billed the cabinet's move as "political ecology."
And even the state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which cautiously treads the official line, said Russia had an interest in "going a step toward the EU".
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister John Howard refused Friday to bow to renewed pressure to back the Kyoto Protocol on global warming after Russia ended years of hesitation by moving to become the latest signatory to the pact.
Howard said Australia intended to meet the emissions targets set by the protocol, but under existing rules the country would be disadvantaged if it were to sign the climate change treaty.
"The difficulty by ratifying, through ratifying under the present conditions, is that countries like China and Brazil and Indonesia would not be subject to the emissions targets we'd be subject to," he told a Melbourne radio
station.
His remarks followed renewed demands by the opposition Labor Party backed by a coalition of environmental groups in the last days of campaigning for the October 9 election, for Australia to join the international community in signing the accord.
Earlier, the United States on Thursday stood firm in rejecting the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The State Department had no comment on the decision by the Russian cabinet to submit the document to the Duma for approval but said Washington remained committed in its own way to battling climate change.
"The United States' position on the Kyoto Protocol has not changed," spokesman Richard Boucher said.

WASHINGTON,
Oct. 1--IMF and World Bank policymakers meeting here Saturday seek to preserve a global recovery that risks losing momentum next year, dragged down by rising energy costs, lackluster activity in Europe and huge deficits in the United States, AFP reported.
Delegates, central bank governors and finance ministers for the most part, are also under pressure to act more decisively to ease the debt burden carried by the world's poorest countries.
The annual two-day meeting of the policy-setting committees of the two institutions comes as the world economy, according to the IMF, is in its best shape in nearly 30 years, with growth this year expected to hit five percent.
"The challenge is to keep the recovery going and to keep it going for as many years as possible," IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato said this week.
The IMF sees a slowdown setting in next year as the pace of global expansion slips to 4.3 percent.
Rato said national economies may well have to adjust to higher interest rates along with rising oil prices, which reflect tighter supply capacity, robust demand and uncertainties brought on by fears of terrorist disruption.
The IMF estimates that with each annual increase of $5 a barrel, 0.3 points is shaved off world growth.
With its surging economy, China has developed a voracious appetite for oil and other commodities and its task now is to engineer a soft landing, an easing in its growth pace that does not cause undue hardship to neighboring countries dependent on the Chinese market as an export outlet.
The IMF has warned that while Chinese authorities have taken steps to tighten credit and investment conditions, the risk of overheating remains.
"The question increasingly is not a hard or soft landing but whether China will land at all," commented IMF research director Raghuram Rajan.
But the burden of maintaining world financial stability does not rest with China alone, and Rato in the past several weeks has repeatedly urged the United States to curb its budget and current deficits, which he has said are threats to global economic health.

SINGAPORE, Oct. 1--Oil prices held steady above $49 on Friday as market unease persisted over supply security in Nigeria, despite peace talks, while the world's richest nations suggested oil resources were scarcer than first thought, Reuters reported.
US light crude eased 19 cents to $49.45 a barrel, after climbing back above $50 on Thursday, to stand just $1 below this week's record high at $50.47.
London's Brent crude for December dipped 15 cents to $45.35 a barrel, while the November contract was untraded after settling 30 cents higher at $46.38.
"Despite talking about peace, and the truce, there is still a lot of nervousness about Nigeria," said David Thurtell, a commodities strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, referring to concerns of supply disruptions over the weekend. Talks between a rebel warlord and the president of OPEC member Nigeria aimed at preventing an explosion of violence in the oil-producing Niger Delta resume on Friday, an organizer said, but the oil markets remained concerned that the talks were not making progress.
Traders paid scant attention to YUKOS's vow to resume full deliveries of crude to China after Russia's largest oil exporter had briefly suspended deliveries of about 100,000 barrels a day to the China National Petroleum Co. (CNPC).
Worried over high oil prices around the $50-mark, a G7 official said ahead of a meeting on Friday in Washington that there was now "a recognition that oil resources were scarcer than was thought a few years ago."
The G7 official suggested the rise in oil costs was not only driven by speculation, but had more structural causes linked to levels of supply being over estimated.
Thurtell said G7 countries had so far put up a calm front in the face of soaring oil prices to steady equities markets, but with current levels around $50, their concerns were starting to show.
Thurtell said the overnight drop in the dollar had also pushed up prices of commodities across the board, supporting oil prices.
The dollar stayed under pressure on Friday after technically driven selling overnight pushed the US currency to its lowest level against the euro since mid-July and it remained weak versus the yen.

Employees seen working at a call center in Bangalore in this June 2003 file photo. (Reuters Photo)

BANGALORE, India, Oct. 1--India's outsourcing industry faces a major "talent challenge" as a lack of skilled employees threatens its global success, company officials and analysts say, AFP reported.
While call centers are flourishing in India, they represent only a small portion of the global outsourcing market and nearly 97 percent of future work will involve high-end analytical processes such as banking and marketing applications.
Avinash Vashistha, managing director of NeoIT, an outsourcing advisory and consulting firm, said India is not ready to meet new demands and the industry could be badly hurt if supply shortages are not overcome soon.
"Outsourcing as defined by call centers is only three percent of the global pie," he told AFP. "The rest lies in core analytical processes like banking, human resources and order-to-cash process which has not been offshored yet."
"We're not ready to address this market. Most of it is going to Israel, Ireland, central and eastern Europe," he said.
The Indian industry wants universities and IT institutes to set up separate training departments for the high-end outsourcing industry where students would learn advanced mathematics, sciences and marketing.
For example, said Srikanth Kannapan, a senior vice president at Symphony Services, "in the marketing analytics industry, what's required is a unique blend of mathematics, business, software and language competencies."
For such work, "we need people with advanced degrees in marketing, econometrics, statistics and related fields who are sometimes hard to find."
In a report this month, the UN Conference on Trade and Development estimated investment in offshore "business processing" would balloon to $24 billion by 2007 from 1.3 billion in 2002. It said among the world's 1,000 largest companies, 70 percent have still not outsourced any business processes to lower-cost countries.
Outsourcing advisor Vashistha said there was a huge demand from global clients to do work in cheaper destinations such as India, where engineers cost one-seventh of their US counterparts.
India's revenues from outsourcing are forecast to leap 40 percent in the financial year ending March 2005 to $5.1 billion. The National Association of Software and Service Companies, India's leading IT body, projected in a recent report the nation's outsourcing industry would face a shortage of 262,000 professionals by 2012.
Gartner, a top global IT consultancy, last month said emerging nations in southeast Asia and central Europe could eat up nearly half India's 80 percent share of the booming outsourcing market if the nation fails to draft a long-term strategy to stay ahead.

SHANGHAI, China, Oct. 1--Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell Friday vigorously denied that its withdrawal from a politically sensitive gas project in the East China Sea was due to pressure from the Japanese government, AFP reported.
"The project did not meet our commercial criteria," Nick Wood, a Shell spokesman told AFP, explaining that the decision was purely a commercial one.
According to a report in the Mainichi Shimbun, Japan told the oil majors via Washington that their investment would be risky as the planned gas field was located in an area disputed between Tokyo and Beijing.
Japanese officials declined comment on the report in Tokyo. "On matters that involve private firms, we would like to refrain from commenting, including whether there was such contact as reported," said a Japanese foreign ministry official dealing with energy issues. He declined to be named.
A US embassy spokesman also declined comment in Tokyo.
Pecten Orient, a Royal Dutch/Shell subsidiary, and Unocal Corp. said earlier this week it would not go ahead with five contracts to explore, develop, and market natural gas resources in the Xihu trough, citing commercial reasons.
The area is near Japan's territorial waters or exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and Tokyo has voiced concern that China's project could draw resources in Japanese territory via underwater pipelines.
Tokyo in turn has launched a controversial survey for natural gas near the Chinese project and a group of disputed islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.
Japanese Trade Minister Shoichi Nakagawa has said Japan will continue its project.
"I understand that (the firms) have decided to pull out because the project would not pay," he told reporters earlier this week. "Japan would not be affected by their decision and the survey within our EEZ will continue."
Chinese officials were not immediately available for comment on the reports during a public holiday here.

NEW YORK, USA, Oct. 1--Merck & Co Inc. pulled its arthritis drug Vioxx off the market on Thursday after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke. The move sent the company's shares plunging almost 27 percent and erased $25 billion of its market value, Reuters reported.
The withdrawal, which led Merck to cut its 2004 earnings forecast, could expose the drugmaker to billions of dollars in legal liabilities at a time when it is already experiencing slower profit growth. It also calls into question the ability of Chief Executive Raymond Gilmartin to lead the company out of its troubles, analysts said.
"This company is on the scientific ropes and it just took a body blow in the marketplace," said Jim Hall, president of the life-sciences unit at Wood Mackenzie Inc. "There's no easy way for them to deal with this."
Merck shares closed down $12.07 at an eight-year low of $33.00 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Vioxx, which has been used by 84 million people around the world since 1999, is Merck's fourth-biggest drug. It had sales of $2.55 billion last year, accounting for more than 10 percent of annual revenues. It is part of a class of drugs known as COX-2 inhibitors. Pfizer Inc.'s Celebrex and Novartis AG's experimental drug Prexige are also members of the class.
While Celebrex and others have not been shown to cause cardiovascular damage, some observers say the withdrawal of Vioxx casts a cloud over the entire class. The US Food and Drug Administration said it would watch other COX-2 inhibitors closely.
"This has implications for all members of this class," said Garret FitzGerald, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Investors are concerned the risk may also extend to Merck's newer drug, Arcoxia, a COX-2 inhibitor that is already sold in 47 countries but is still awaiting approval in the United States. An FDA decision on the drug is expected by Oct. 30.
"We are going to be more interested in looking at long-term data on new products that come down the pike," said Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Concerns over Vioxx have been building for several years after earlier studies showed higher risk of heart attack and stroke, but Merck has always maintained that the drug was safe.