A Palestinian shopkeeper sets up a gas-powered lamp as customers enter his shop after the electricity supply was cut off in his area of Gaza City on Friday.

GAZA CITY,
Occupied Palestine, Aug. 18--Power was cut in most of the Gaza Strip from 1500 GMT on Friday because of a lack of fuel deliveries from Israel, the director of the Palestinian electricity company said.
“We were forced to stop three out of the station’s four generators,“ Rafiq Maliha, the director of the company, told reporters in Gaza, AFP reported.
Gaza has a single 140-megawatt power plant that provides some three quarters of the territory’s electricity needs. All of the fuel for the plant comes from Israel.
“We have not received fuel since Thursday morning,“ he said. Maliha warned that if fuel was not delivered into the impoverished territory before Sunday morning, “electricity production will stop entirely.“
He said Israel had stopped fuel deliveries because of security conditions at the Nahal Oz crossing between the coastal strip and the Jewish state. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli authorities.
“We call on the European Union and the Palestinian Authority to intervene quickly as this will have negative consequences for Gaza, especially for hospitals,“ Maliha said.
At least 600,000 people were affected by the blackout, which blanketed large swaths of the strip in darkness.
Home to some 1.4 million people, Gaza is one of the world’s most densely populated places.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev (r) and Chinese President Hu Jintao converse while sitting in plush chairs in Astana, Kazakhstan on Saturday.

ASTANA, Kazakhstan, Aug. 18--Chinese President Hu Jintao and Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev pledged to expand energy ties at a state meeting on Saturday at the end of Hu’s week-long tour of the region.
The leaders discussed a series of projects including completing an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to western China and a gas pipeline linking Turkmenistan with China. “We agreed that Kazakhstan should provide detailed and specific plans that will be financed from a joint Chinese-Kazakh fund,“ Interfax cited Nazarbayev as saying.
The two met as Kazakh voters went to the polls in parliamentary elections, and was seen by analysts as Nazarbayev’s effort to remind voters of his international clout.
The Kazakh president, who cast his own vote before the meeting, said he hoped bilateral trade would reach $12 billion (nine billion euros) in 2008, up from an expected 10 billion in 2007, Interfax reported.
The pair were meeting for the third time in three days as part of Hu’s week-long tour of ex-Soviet states in the region.

BERLIN, Aug. 18--Germany on Friday said it saw no need for an emergency meeting of the Group of Seven wealthy nations over turmoil in world markets stemming from a crisis in the US home loan sector. “In the view of the government, it is not necessary to schedule an extraordinary meeting,“ a spokesman for the government in Berlin, which holds the rotating presidency of the G7, told reporters, AFP reported.
He confirmed that Chancellor Angela Merkel had received a letter from French President Nicolas Sarkozy in which he called for the G7 states to take steps to improve transparency in world markets.
Sarkozy also said in the letter that he was confident the fallout from turmoil in US credit markets would have no long-term effect on growth.
Japan’s Jiji Press reported Friday that the G7 nations had begun discussing measures to cope with plunging stock markets and wild foreign exchange fluctuations caused by US credit turmoil.
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States are considering an emergency meeting of their finance ministers and central bankers to try to help stabilize the markets, according to the report.
Another option is to issue a joint statement without a meeting, but the G7 nations are cautious that such moves could further fuel investor anxiety, the report said without naming its sources. Japan’s finance ministry did not confirm or deny the report. The next G7 finance ministers’ meeting is scheduled for October.
World stock markets had a harrowing week which saw a fierce global sell-off sparked by fears that US housing market woes could infect the world economy.

ISTANBUL, Turkey, Aug. 18--Turkey climbed up to third place among global gold markets in the second quarter of 2007 by surpassing the US for the first time, said general manager of Turkey’s World Gold Council Murat Akman in a written statement.
Gold demand in the second quarter increased by 37 percent and hit a record $14.5 billion globally. Major increases occurred in key gold markets such as China, India, Middle East and Turkey, Zaman reported.
The reason behind the demand increase in Q2 was the stabilization of gold prices, the acceptance of a 6 percent hike in gold prices over last year and strong economic performance in key markets. Gold (ingot) and gold jewelry sales increased to their highest level ever and broke records in India, Russia and Turkey. Gold demand in Turkey increased by 14 percent in Q2 compared to the same period last year, to 20.5 tons.

SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 18--The UN warned that North Korea’s food situation will worsen after record rains wracked the country’s agricultural heartland, and an aid group said Friday the numbers of dead and missing from floods has risen to more than 300.
South Korea, the US and Germany offered aid to help Pyongyang cope with the storms, which have prompted an unusual amount of candor from the usually secretive regime over the scale of the damage. The North has said a week of storms has destroyed 11 percent of its rice and corn fields, AP reported.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization estimated Friday that would mean 200,000-300,000 tons of cereals may have been lost to floods. It said the situation could change, depending on the weather over the next few months.
Some 87 percent of the country’s annual production of cereals is harvested from October to November and the rains arrived at a critical development stage, the agency said.
Cereals are the main staple in North Korea. “The country’s already tight food supply situation will deteriorate“ with this year’s anticipated shortage, the agency said in a statement.
The impoverished North, which has been unable to provide for its people without outside help since a famine that began in the mid-1990s, already faces an annual shortfall of about 1 million tons. The famine was prompted by mismanagement of the country’s economy and the loss of its Soviet benefactor, and was exacerbated by 1995 floods that North Korea said swept away 2 million tons of crops.
This year’s floods have already left more than 300 dead or missing, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said Friday.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug. 18--The World Trade Organization’s top official predicted Friday that poor nations will win satisfactory concessions from rich ones by the end of talks on a new global trade accord. “My sense is that ... developing countries will at the end of the day get a large part of what they are asking for in this negotiation,“ WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said at a question-answer session organized by Malaysia’s trade ministry, AP reported.
The current round of global trade talks, known as the Doha Round, has come to a standstill because of differences between the United States, European Union, Brazil and India on eliminating trade barriers to agricultural produce and manufactured goods.
Lamy said the developing nations will likely get “at least a large degree of satisfaction in areas such as agriculture,“ and stressed that a deal is still achievable. “Completing the Doha Round is not only technically possible, it is also a political must,“ Lamy said, calling on countries to show more trust and compromise. “Of course trade negotiators are clever tacticians and they only go the extra mile if they feel this will be reciprocated by their counterparts. Like many economic challenges at the end of the day it is a matter of trust between partners,“ he said.
Lamy has said that Washington must lower its agricultural subsidies further, while the EU needs to ease access to its farm markets. He has also called on Brazil and India to offer deeper cuts in industrial tariffs.
Divisions on these issues among the WTO’s four biggest powers caused their talks in Germany in June to collapse.
The global talks aim to add billions of dollars to the world economy and lift millions of people out of poverty through new trade flows. The talks have floundered since their inception in Doha, the capital of Qatar, six years ago, largely because of the issues surrounding the four powers.

An Iraqi vendor displays a model of a cellular phone to a client at an electronics store in central Baghdad.

AMMAN, Jordan, Aug. 18--Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said on Friday that of the five firms competing for long-term licenses in auctions worth US$3.75 billion (2.8 billion euros), Atheer, owned by Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company, AsiaCell, a consortium including Persian Gulf nations and Korek Telecom, a local operator based in Iraq’s Kurdish north, won contracts to provide phone services.
He pointed out that Egyptian telecommunications firm Orascom Telecom was the only mobile phone company in Iraq not to have its service license renewed. He added that Orascom withdrew from the action in the 18th round when the amount reached US$1.25 billion (0.9 billion euros) per contract, saying it couldn’t pay the amount, AP reported.
Al-Dabbagh said it was unclear what would happen to Orascom’s Iraqna network, which last year announced it had 2.5 million subscribers, but there will be a transitional period during which it can either sell its infrastructure or join another firm. Officials from the company could not be reached for comment.
The other company that did not obtain a license in the auction, which began in the Jordanian capital Amman on Thursday and ended early Friday morning, was Turkish mobile operator Turk Cell.
The contracts are for 15 years and the winning firms will have to pay the Iraqi government 18 percent of their annual revenues.
Mobile use, nonexistent under the previous government of Saddam Hussein, has since jumped to some 9 million subscribers according to the Iraqi government.
In 2003, temporary contracts were awarded to Atheer in the south, Iraqna in the center and AsiaCell in the north of the country. The three services were later allowed to spread throughout the nation.
The Kurdish capital of Irbil and nearby city of Dahuk were the only areas covered by Korek, which can now extend its service to the rest of the country.
Operating mainly in the more volatile center of the country, Iraqna, which reported having 2.5 million subscribers in September, has had at least ten of its workers and engineers kidnapped since 2003.
According to its Web site, Orascom operates GSM networks in Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Zimbabwe with over 56 million subscribers as of March 2007.

NEW YORK, Aug. 18--Pfizer Inc. has lost a preliminary bid to gain reissuance of one of the US patents protecting its Lipitor cholesterol medicine, but still could ultimately prevail in the effort to extend the blockbuster franchise.
Should the ruling stand, Pfizer would face US generic competition to Lipitor, the world’s top-selling drug, in March 2010, when the basic patent for the drug expires, rather than in June 2011, when the patent at issue would expire, Reuters reported.
A Pfizer spokesman confirmed on Friday that the company had seen a posting on the US Patent and Trademark Office Web site of the non-final rejection but has not yet received a letter from the patent office informing the company of the decision.
Company spokesman Bryant Haskins said it is not unusual in such situations for a company to receive an initial rejection from the patent office only to later get the patent reissued.
Pfizer’s sales for Lipitor reached $12.9 billion last year, including $7.8 billion in the United States.
UBS analyst Roopesh Patel said he still assumed Pfizer would ultimately be successful in its bid, and said the entire process could take another 12 to 18 months. “We assume a successful reissuance, which would protect Lipitor’s US exclusivity until June 2011,“ Patel said in a note.
Last August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit invalidated the patent at issue in a legal fight with generic competitor Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd., moving up the patent expiration.