NEW YORK, Nov. 19--The US dollar has remained weak against both the euro and the yen in Monday trading as worries about the strength of the US economy continue. The dollar fell to $1.4687 against the euro in Asian trade, and dropped to 110.59 yen, BBC wrote.
At the start of November, the dollar hit a record low of $1.4752 against the single European currency. The strength of the dollar had been undermined further by weak US economic data released on Friday.
As a growing number of US banks reveal their exposure to bad US mortgage debt, data on Friday showed the biggest drop in American industrial production since January.
Taken together, analysts say this suggests further cuts in US interest rates. “There are no fundamental reasons to buy the dollar,“ said Tsutomu Soma, senior manager of foreign securities at Okasan Securities.
The US Federal Reserve last cut interest rates in October to 4.5 percent, in an effort to kick-start the faltering housing and credit markets, as well as making borrowing cheaper to encourage consumer spending in the run-up to the key Christmas shopping period. It has signaled that it will adopt a wait-and-see approach to the future direction of interest rates.
Meanwhile, Oil jumped more than $1 to above $95 a barrel on Monday, as the dollar fell and some OPEC members pushed for action to stem their declining purchasing power.
US light crude for January delivery, the new front-month contract, rose $1.21 to $95.05 a barrel by 2:22 a.m. EST, and adding to Friday’s nearly 2 percent gains. Friday’s gains were partly fueled by forecasts for colder US weather that would boost demand, Reuters reported.
London Brent crude rose $1.07 to $92.69 a barrel.
The OPEC heads of state summit in Riyadh ended on Sunday without signaling whether the producer group would agree to pump more oil at its December 5 policy meeting, although members renewed their pledge to provide “adequate“ supplies to consumers.
Of greater interest to oil traders was the push by Iran and Venezuela for pricing oil against a basket of currencies.
While the weak dollar was omitted from the summit’s final statement, traders say the growing concern over the US currency’s predicament could prompt OPEC to seek a higher price.

A cyclone-affected elderly man rests on a bed near a devastated house in Choto Taltoli village, on the southern coastal area of Bangladesh on Monday.

LONDON, Nov. 19--Decades of development in Asia will be reversed by climate change, threatening the lives of millions of people, environmentalists and aid agencies warned Monday.
The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, an umbrella group of greens and aid groups, said Asia was on the frontline of the climate change threat, AFP reported.
“Asia is at a critical juncture as the home to almost two thirds of humanity. It has made real advances in reducing poverty but lies on the frontline of impacts from climate change,“ said co-author Andrew Simms.
“Now if it follows a fossil-fuelled Western economic development path, it will set in train an irreversible course of events that will guarantee a great reversal in its own progress,“ added Simms of the New Economics Foundation.
The coalition’s Up in Smoke report calls on industrialized nations to act “first and fastest“ to cut emissions, ensure technology transfer and increase adaptation funds to help Asia deal with the effects of global warming. “To prevent catastrophic global warming, the only feasible alternative is for wealthy countries to dramatically reduce their ’luxury’ greenhouse gas emissions, so that the ’survival’ emissions of people in poor countries do not cause disaster,“ said Simms.
Over half of Asia’s four billion-strong population lives near coasts, putting them in danger from sea-level rises, while more extreme weather patterns threaten the whole region, the report says.
The group said India and China, the region’s two biggest economies and emerging global giants, should move away from coal in favor of renewable power which could provide them with long-term energy security.
Chinese agricultural productivity will fall by 5-10 percent if no action is taken, with the production of wheat, rice and corn decreasing by up to 37 percent in the second half of this century, it noted.
Countries such as Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to climate change in the form of flooding and droughts.
India meanwhile could be threatened by energy and food supply insecurity, reduced fresh water supplies and increases in extreme weather events, the report says.
The Working Group comprises aid agencies and green organizations including ActionAid, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Oxfam and WWF.

A Greenpeace activist protests against ICCAT on the beach with 56 blue fishbone stakes on Sunday in Antalya, Turkey.

ANKARA, Turkey, Nov. 19--An international commission designed to protect bluefin tuna stocks has effectively increased the fishing quota for 2008 from what was already an “unsustainable“ level, Greenpeace said Sunday.
“Countries are approving a bigger quota for a species that is on the verge of collapse instead of acting immediately to save it,“ said Sebastian Losada, Greenpeace Spain’s Oceans Campaigner, AFP reported.
The environmental pressure group said the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), held in Turkey had approved a nearly 1,000-ton increase in the 2008 catch.
Organizers issued no statement on the conclusions of the meeting--attended by a Greenpeace delegation--in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya.
The increases will add to an “already unsustainable quota that will again in 2008 be around 29,500 tons,“ Losada said.
Greenpeace said the 45-member ICCAT agreed to allow Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia to fish an additional 691 tons in 2008, 771 tons in 2009 and 985 tons in 2010 because their national quotas were not met in previous years. South Korea, meanwhile, could catch an additional 300 tons next year, it said.
The 2008 quota officially remained at 28,500 tons compared to 29,500 tons in 2007, but the additional allowances effectively brought it up to 2007 levels, Greenpeace said.
The quotas were established under a 15-year recovery plan adopted in 2006 that aims to cut the total hunt of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean by 20 percent by 2010.
Tuna fishing is an increasingly lucrative industry, particularly for developing economies that export to Japan, which consumes a quarter of the world’s tuna. Scientific research released in France in September showed that 50,000 tons of the fish were being pulled out of Mediterranean waters annually, far above the official quota and the 15,000-16,000 sustainable rate.
In Brussels, the European Commission said that ICCAT had also adopted at the Turkey meeting a new plan to trace all tuna catches down the market in a bid to eliminate illegal fishing and underreporting.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 19--Twenty-eight people were killed and 12 others are missing after a fire broke out on a gas pipeline in an oil-rich desert area of Saudi Arabia on Sunday, one of the worst of its kind in the kingdom.
But officials said the blaze has not affected oil or gas production in Saudi Arabia, the OPEC kingpin and world’s largest oil producer, AFP reported.
“Twenty-eight have lost their lives and 12 are still missing,“ Oil Minister Ali al-Nuaimi told reporters in Riyadh. Five employees of state oil conglomerate Saudi Aramco are among the dead, the company said.
The incident near a major gas plant in the oil-rich Eastern Province occurred while Saudi Arabia was hosting a rare summit of the oil producers’ organization in the capital Riyadh which wrapped up later Sunday.
The fire occurred “in a new gas line“ and has had no effect on either oil or gas production by the world’s top oil producer and exporter, Nuaimi said.
An Aramco statement said it had confirmed “the deaths of 28 workers, including five company employees, so far,“ suggesting the death toll may not be final.
Aramco said the blaze erupted on the Haradh-Uthmaniyah gas pipeline, 30 kilometers (18 miles) from a major gas processing plant at Hawiyah, as maintenance work was being carried out. There was no immediate suggestion of a terrorist link in the incident.
The fire broke out at 00:25 am (2125 GMT Saturday) and was later brought under control, said Aramco, which runs Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas operations.
A high-level technical committee has been set up to probe the incident, it said.
Aramco said the site was being operated by a contractor, and the incident did not affect production or distribution. “Necessary operational adjustments have been made to the gas system to normalize operations to ensure continuity of fuel supply,“ it added.
An industry source who asked not to be named said the gas carried in the pipeline is fed into the domestic network, like all of Saudi Arabia’s gas production, and is not for export.
The Hawiyah plant is one of the major gas processing facilities in Saudi Arabia, built in the desert near the Al-Ghawar oil field, the world’s largest, and south of the city of Dhahran, an oil hub.
The plant, which produces 1.4 billion cubic feet (39.6 million cubic meters) of gas a day and cost four billion dollars to build, was launched in October 2002 as the first to process only non-associated gas.

BEIJING, Nov. 19--China now has more than 5.5 million private enterprises, state media said Monday, suggesting they are further consolidating their position in the officially socialist economy, Xinhua said.
The figure, taken at the end of June, was released by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.
Private enterprises in China are defined as companies in private hands with at least eight employees.
A bigger category consists of individual enterprises, run by either one person or a family, and with a staff of up to seven employees, of which there were 26.2 million at the end of June, the China Daily said.
Comparable figures for the end of June last year were not available.
More than 70 percent of urban employees were now working in private enterprises or in individual industrial and commercial entities.
In the first nine months of the year, private enterprises paid 348.7 billion yuan ($47.0 billion) in taxes, or 9.4 percent of the country’s corporate tax revenue.

SINGAPORE,
Nov. 19--The Association of Southeast Asian Nations have put trade talks with India on hold until Indian officials come back with better concessions, Indonesia’s Trade Minister Mari Pangestu said on Monday.
“We’re postponing the negotiations for now until we can find a way forward,“ Pangestu told reporters in Singapore, where she is attending a meeting of ASEAN leaders, Bloomberg reported.
“Unless India can come up with a more progressive way forward, we’ll just wait.“
ASEAN and India are scheduled to hold talks on the agreement on Tuesday. India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath will lead the Indian delegation, Pangestu said.
The disagreement is over the number of items India wants tariffs placed on, including palm oil and petroleum products. That list extends to more than 400 products, Pangestu said.
ASEAN is also working on free-trade deals with China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
India-ASEAN relations, as they exist today, are in some ways, a reconfiguration of age-old ties that date back 2,000 years. Only the modes of trade have changed. Instead of the silk route, countries now use tech-oriented routes to link up, ibef.org wrote.
For a relationship that began warming up only about a decade ago, the India-ASEAN partnership has been trotting at quite a fast pace.
The deepening of ties is beginning to show in the intra-country trade figures. India’s trade with ASEAN countries rose to more than $30.64 billion in 2006-07.
According to the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS), Kolkata, India’s exports to ASEAN countries increased from $10.41 billion in 2005-06 to $12.56 billion in 2006-07, registering a growth of 20.67 percent.
India’s imports from ASEAN countries increased from $10.88 billion in 2005-06 to $18.08 billion in 2006-07, registering a growth of over 66 percent. ASEAN accounted for 9.49 percent of India’s imports and 9.95 percent of India’s exports during 2006-07.
This figure is likely to grow further after the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between India and ASEAN gets through.

KAMPALA, Uganda, Nov. 19--Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Sunday backed an interim trade deal reached between east Africa and the European Union to replace preferential tariff agreements due to expire this year.
“I do not see why we should fear doing trade with Europe. I agree with the EU that these (trade) negotiations should just not go on endlessly,“ Museveni told a press conference in Kampala, AFP reported.
“I want the East African Community (EAC) to sign the agreement as a bloc,“ he said, adding that was in contact with other members of the five-member EAC.
Under the accord reached on Wednesday, EAC states Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda will enjoy duty free, quota free access to the EU for all products--except sugar and riceÑfrom Jan. 1.
It will replace trade deals giving preferential market access to the African nations that will expire by the end of the year because the World Trade Organization has ruled they are illegal.
The new deal due to be signed on Nov. 24 opens up east African markets to European products as long as they do not affect “sensitive agricultural and industrial products“ in the region.
Burundi and Rwanda, who joined the EAC bloc this year, will be excluded from the deal until December 2009 to allow them to finish implementing the EAC customs union.
In addition, the deal offered a 25-year transition period to prevent loss of revenues among the east African nations.
Civil society groups opposed the one-year interim saying the EU “bullied“ its way into the interim deal that will undermine development in the five nations.
The new deal is designed to help EAC countries develop while diversifying their economies and meeting WTO requirements that they allow some access to European goods and services.