SOME pre-negotiation jabbing turned into a potentially damaging diplomatic incident when Brazil’s foreign minister said rich countries’ deception in trade talks reminded him of tactics used by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

A joint US-European Union proposal to liberalise trade in green goods and services such as solar panels would boost the availability of technology to battle global warming, a top US trade official said today.

World Trade Organisation members have shelved more than five years of free trade talks as differences over farm aid proved unbridgeable.

Global commerce talks at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva collapsed today as top powers failed to agree on steps towards liberalising trade in farm and manufactured goods.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela were heading today to a European summit amid criticism of recent moves making it tougher for foreign energy firms to do business in their countries.

Latin American leaders head for a meeting with the European Union this week amid disputes that threaten some of the Western Hemisphere’s political and trade alliances.

Anti-globalisation protesters battled with riot police today and tried to storm a convention centre in Hong Kong where World Trade Organisation negotiators raced against the clock to reach a compromise they hoped would rescue the talks from being a flop.

A draft agreement under discussion by World Trade Organisation trade negotiators in Hong Kong today suggested eliminating all farm export subsidies by 2010.

Global trade talks remained deadlocked in Hong Kong today after leading delegates meeting late into the night failed to reach agreement on setting a date for ending export subsidies on farm goods – again blaming European countries for blocking progress.

The 35-page final document that world leaders are set to adopt at the end of a UN summit devotes just one paragraph to the issue that consumed the 191 UN member states for months but proved so divisive that it had to be shelved - expanding the powerful Security Council.

The hunt for the would-be suicide bombers who tried to strike London intensified today after police named two of the suspected attackers.

Hundreds of relatives and friends of the Brazilian shot dead by police in London after being mistaken for a terrorist marched along the cobbled streets of his home town, demanding the arrest of the officers who fired the fatal shots.

THE parents of the Brazilian man shot dead on a London Underground train yesterday wept as they recalled how he was trying to save enough money by working abroad to return to his homeland to become a cattle rancher.

SENIOR British police officers last night insisted there would be no change to a controversial shoot-to-kill policy after an innocent man was gunned down.

NOT surprisingly, Britain’s Muslim community is fearful of the shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the death of an innocent Brazilian not linked to the London terror attacks.

The staid conference room in Brussels could not have seemed further from the bloodstained streets of Baghdad.

World Trade Organisation members have approved a plan to end export subsidies on farm products and cut import duties across the world, a key step toward a comprehensive global accord under discussion since 2001, trade officials said.

A new round of negotiations on an international tobacco-control treaty opened today amid fears by health campaigners that it will be too weak to prevent cigarette-related deaths rising to 10 million a year by 2030.