BERLIN, Dec. 31--German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has promised to fight for a debt reduction for countries devastated by an Indian Ocean tidal wave and is calling for rich countries to form partnerships with countries hit by the disaster, AFP reported.
"Germany, through the European Union, will push the United Nations and the World Bank to help these countries in an efficient and unbureaucratic way. For me, that includes reducing the debts of these countries," Schroeder said in an advance copy of the New Year's Eve speech he will give later on Friday.
He added, "I want there to be lasting aid for the region. I want us to feel a responsibility over a long period.
"All wealthy countries should enter into partnerships to undertake the reconstruction of certain regions."
Schroeder has already proposed a moratorium on debt owed by Indonesia and Somalia, but is now widening his appeal to include other countries.
French President Jacques Chirac on Thursday told his government to push the Paris Club of creditor nations to put a moratorium on debt payments owed by some of the 11 Asian countries which were hit by the disaster.
Canada on Thursday put in place a unilateral debt moratorium for nations hit by the Asian tsunami catastrophe with "immediate effect," said Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew. Canada billed the move as a signal to its partners in the Paris Club of creditor nations, ahead of its January 12 meeting in the French capital. It came hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell used an interview with AFP to back the idea of a debt moratorium for stricken nations already proposed by France and Germany.
In Rome Thursday Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called for a special meeting of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations to organize assistance efforts and to debate debt relief. He said he would discuss the idea later Thursday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose country will assume the presidency of the G8 in January.

2004

Î Feb. 27, KUALA LUMPUR--More than 100 countries sign an agreement on strict rules governing the export of genetically modified-foods, despite opposition from the United States, during a UN conference on biodiversity.

Î MAY 11, SYRIA--US President George W. Bush imposes economic sanctions on Syria for its alleged backing of terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction and helping destabilize Iraq.

Î May 19, SWITZERLAND--The European Union and Switzerland sign a treaty on offshore tax fraud under which Switzerland becomes part of the Schengen agreement on border controls but will not relinquish its system of banking secrecy for EU residents.

Î June 5, KOREA--North and South Korea sign an agreement to open two roads and test-run railways between their two countries as well as reducing tensions by ending loud-speaker propaganda broadcasts across each others' borders.

Î July 1, SPACE--The joint US-European space probe, Cassini-Huygens, becomes the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Saturn after a seven-year voyage through space across 3.5 billion kilometers and sends back spectacular pictures of the rings around the second largest planet in the solar system.

Î July 27, ALGERIA--An emergency plan is put into place in Algiers for nine countries in north and west Africa as plagues of locusts threaten crop harvests across the region.

Î August 11, BRITAIN--Scientific bodies give the go-ahead for cloning of human embryos for therapeutic purposes. Spain and Switzerland will permit research into stem cells from human embryos later in the year.

Î Oct. 22, UNITED STATES--The price of a barrel of crude oil hits an all-time high of $55.67 on the New York market before dropping back, but later that week, the price of Brent North Sea crude also reaches a peak of $51.94 a barrel on the London market.

Î Dec. 8, CHINA--Lenovo, China's biggest manufacturer of personal computers buys the PC division of the world's leading computer firm, IBM.

Î Dec. 8, PERU--Twelve Latin American countries, meeting in Cuzco, agree to found the South American Nations Community to promote economic and political integration int he region.

Î Dec. 19, RUSSIA--Yuganskneftegaz, the main asset of the Russian Yukos energy giant, is sold to a mysterious company called Baikalfinansgroup which turns out to be a front for the Russian state. The sale is officially to pay off $27.5 billion in back taxes against Russia's biggest oil producer but is seen as a
means for the Kremlin to reassert control of the strategic energy sector and crush a powerful political opponent, imprisoned Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

PARIS, Dec. 31--The European Union is set this week to launch the world's first-ever market to trade quotas of green house gases, a policy aimed at encouraging firms to cut dangerous climate-damaging emissions, AFP reported.
Experts say the market, which from January 1 will allow trading in carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other such gases, also promises to be lucrative for a number of financial institutions.
The European carbon market is one of three incentives under the Kyoto Protocol aimed at easing companies' costs of reducing CO2 pollution, the main culprit for global warming.
"The emissions trading scheme is one of the key policies ... to ensure that the EU and its member states limit or reduce emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases," said the European Commission this month.
The Kyoto accord, adopted in 1997, requires three dozen industrialized countries to reduce or stabilize their emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases between 2008 and 2012 relative to their 1990 levels.
EU nations agreed overall to an eight-percent cut in emissions while the bloc's governments have set individual emissions targets for 12,000 installations.
Under the new emissions market, a company that works hard to keep emissions low can sell their unused quotas on the carbon market to a firm requiring additional limits to avoid financial penalties for overshooting set targets.
Non-official trading of greenhouse gases is nothing new. Some 2.3 million tons exchanged hands in October on the informal CO2 futures market, as much as the first nine months of the year, according to market analysts.
"The market has been growing very quickly since the summer," said Atle Christiansen, a director of independent market analyst Point Carbon.
Currently on the unofficial carbon market, one ton of CO2 trades for an average price of 8.5 euros ($11), according to James Emanuel, a director for brokerage firm Evolution Markets.
The European Commission has said it has no view on what the price of allowances should be. "The price will be a function of supply and demand as in any other free market," it says on its website.
Analysts forecast a market worth 50 billion euros during the 2005-07 contract period, with 5.0 billion tons of CO2 being traded at an average price of 10 euros a ton.

A traditional Taiwanese opera troupe performs outside the world's tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101 to mark its opening on Friday. (Rueters Photo)

TAIPEI, Taiwan,
Dec. 31--Taiwan Friday unveiled the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, after six years of construction and hailed the 508-meter (1,676 feet) skyscraper for resisting several powerful earthquakes in recent years, AFP reported.
"Taipei 101 has been through the challenges of the Sept. 21 and March 31 quakes," said President Chen Shui-bian at the opening ceremony.
"The glory and success of Taipei didn't belong to one single mayor but all of the citizens," he added.
Chen oversaw the start of Taiwan's largest engineering project when he was mayor of Taipei in 1998.
The light green building, the brainchild of Taiwan's noted architect C.Y. Lee, looks like petals of a flower unfolding or sections of a bamboo rising from the ground. Its structure is based on steel with reinforced concrete. The exterior wall is a glass curtain with double glazed heat reduction clear glass.
Construction cost 58 billion Taiwan dollars (1.8 billion US) and was financed by the Taipei Financial Center Corp.
Last year a five-storey shopping mall opened at the base of the building, which also features the world's fastest passenger elevators capable of traveling at 1,014 meters (3,346 feet) per minute. It takes just 37 seconds from the fifth floor to the observatory on the 89th floor.
Tourism officials hailed Taipei 101 as the capital city's new landmark and said it would prove to be a must-see for tourists traveling to the island.
Currently 33 percent of the building's 198,000 square meters office space has been contracted, largely by multinational and leading domestic enterprises.
Eventually there will be some 12,000 people working in the building, which is located in Taipei's bustling Hsinyi district.

New NEC 3G mobile

TOKYO, Dec. 31--The world's 26 major mobile phone operators and telecommunication equipment-makers have agreed to work on a global standard for a super fast mobile transmission technology, AFP quoted a newspaper report as saying on Friday.
The group included NTT DoCoMo and NEC of Japan, Britain's Vodafone Group, top US cellphone carrier Cingular Wireless, Alcatel of France and Siemens of Germany, said the Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily without quoting sources.
Using the new technology called Super 3G, the group planned to launch by 2009 global services for transmitting large volumes of moving images by mobile phones at a speed 10 times faster than the current 3G (third-generation) technology, the report said.
Super 3G can boost mobile transmission speeds to a range of 30 to 100 megabits per second to match existing landline fiber optic telecom technology, allowing movies, games or home videos to be played on handsets with a much higher resolution, it said.
The report said the cost of upgrading the mobile telecommunication network for Super 3G in Japan may top 100 billion yen ($975 million).
The report could not be confirmed with Vodafone's Japan unit, NTT DoCoMo Inc., or NEC Corp.

BEIJING, Dec. 31--China is expected to post an unprecedented 5.5 billion dollar agricultural trade deficit in 2004, as it struggles to feed its population of 1.3 billion people and with the removal of tariffs upon its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), state press reported Friday, AFP said.
Agricultural trade imports were expected to reach $28 billion and exports will come in at about $22.5 billion, the China Daily said, citing Ministry of Agriculture data.
"The country has become a net importer of agricultural products three years after joining the World Trade Organization," said Ke Bingsheng, director of the ministry's Research Center for Rural Economy.
The deficit was partly a result of wider market access to foreign commodities as the country consistently fulfilled commitments to reduce tariff rates on agricultural goods and implemented tariff-rate quotas, Ke said.
The record agricultural trade deficit was also due to markets in Europe and the United States offering hefty subsidies on agricultural products, which distorted market prices, he added.
In 2002, just after its WTO entry, China imported some $11.8 billion of agricultural products, while exporting 16 billion dollars' worth.
This jumped to $18.9 billion of imports in 2003, against $21.4 billion worth of exports, the newspaper said.
China is one of the world's top agricultural producers, but must feed its own 1.3 billion population, or 20 percent of the world's population, on only 7 percent of the world's arable land.

HAVANA, Cuba,
Dec. 31--Cuba on Thursday made a surprise move to tighten the government's grip on hard currency, on the heels of an oil find that breathes new life into President Fidel Castro's communist rule, AFP reported.
The Americas' only one-party communist government said in a statement that from January 1, all revenues from state-run businesses must be channeled though Cuba's central bank.
"Next year, there will be a considerable increase in financial in-flows from abroad," thanks to deals with China, Venezuela and an oil exploration and production deal with Canada's Sherritt, explained the note, signed by bank chief Francisco Soberon.
Castro announced on December 25 that oil reserves of at least 100 million barrels had been found off the north coast near Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana, which is to be developed by a Cuban state firm in cooperation with Sherritt.
Now, the new find--Cuba's first since 1999, and cleaner than other homegrown crude, according to Castro--catapults Havana toward energy self-sufficiency.
Cuba's future capital movements "must be tightly controlled to ensure their optimum use," Soberon's note stressed.
The shift would make the central bank the only Cuban institution authorized to move hard currency; state businesses would have to seek special authorization to do so.