Russia's Gazprom energy giant issued a statement after the talks with Ukraine's Energy Minister Yury Boiko, saying an agreement had been reached by which "the current government of Ukraine takes under its control the solving of this problem."
Amid concerns about a possible re-run of a gas cut-off last year that caused knock-on disruption in EU countries, Gazprom's chairman, Dmitry Medvedev, said there was no need for concern.
"European consumers won't suffer," he told Russian news agencies. "For European consumers the situation will be absolutely comfortable."
Boiko also suggested that a resolution was in sight.
"I hope the situation will stabilise in the near future," he was quoted as saying after the talks.
On Tuesday, Gazprom threatened to cut gas supplies to Ukraine, a key gas transit route to EU countries, if arrears of over a billion dollars (700 million euros) were not paid this month.
On Wednesday, Medvedev said that the debt owed by Ukrainian "consumers" -- apparently a reference to industrial users -- exceeded 1.3 billion dollars (0.9 billion euros).
Around 80 percent of the gas shipped from Russia to western Europe transits through Ukraine.
Brussels on Tuesday urged a "speedy settlement" of the issue and on Wednesday a European Commission spokesman said that a meeting of EU experts would take place in mid-October to discuss the issue.
Russia and Ukraine would be invited to brief the EU gas coordination group, the spokesman said.
The assurance from Gazprom came after Ukraine's pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko , who has angered Moscow with his vows to join NATO , surprised commentators by reaching out to the Russia-friendly Regions party of Prime Minister Yanukovych.
Yushchenko offered the Regions party the possibility of joining a broad coalition government, despite results from a parliamentary election on Sunday that gave a slim majority to pro-Western forces.
"My main goal is that Ukraine should emerge united from these elections," Yushchenko said.
Commentators in both countries interpreted Gazprom's threat -- especially in its timing -- as a politicised response to the rising fortunes of the pro-Western parties in Ukraine, including Yushchenko's supporters and those of firebrand politician Yulia Tymoshenko.
Russia and its former Soviet neighbour have had tense relations as Ukraine has moved towards the West and Yushchenko has declared joining the NATO alliance to be a strategic goal.
"Victory by the 'oranges' cannot suit either Russia or Gazprom," said the Russian broadsheet Kommersant, referring to the pro-democracy Orange Revolution of 2004 that was spearheaded by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko.
The newspaper pointed out that Tymoshenko has previously called for a re-examination of the opaque arrangements by which Ukraine receives gas from Russia via an intermediary company, RosUkrEnergo.
The news website gazeta.ru quoted an expert, Dmitry Abzalov, as saying that Tymoshenko wanted to insert gas firm Itera, with which she has been "affiliated" in the past, into the Ukrainian-Russian gas relationship, an option which "does not suit Gazprom."
Analysts said that Russia had learnt from its mistakes after it unsuccessfully interfered in 2004 elections that led to the Orange Revolution and had been forced to adopt a more subtle approach.
But while Moscow 's official line this time around is that it will work with any Kiev government that emerges from the polls, Russian reaction to the possible leadership of Tymoshenko remains unpredictable, they said.
"There are... people who have not learnt anything" from past experience while others want to repair ties with Ukraine, said Viktor Kremenyuk, an analyst with the Moscow-based Institute of USA and Canadian Studies.
]]>DULUTH, Minn. - The recording industry hopes $222,000 will be enough to dissuade music lovers from downloading songs from the Internet without paying for them. That's the amount a federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay for sharing copyrighted music online.
"This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK," Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies that sued the woman, said Thursday after the three-day civil trial in this city on the shore of Lake Superior .
In closing arguments he had told the jury, "I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence here is great."
Jammie Thomas, 30, a single mother from Brainerd, was ordered to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs in all.
It was the first time one of the industry's lawsuits against individual downloaders had gone to trial. Many other defendants have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars, but Thomas decided she would take them on and maintained she had done nothing wrong.
"She was in tears. She's devastated," Thomas' attorney, Brian Toder, told The Associated Press. "This is a girl that lives from paycheck to paycheck, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheck garnished for the rest of her life."
Toder said the plaintiff's attorney fees are automatically awarded in such judgments under copyright law, meaning Thomas could actually owe as much as a half-million dollars. However, he said he suspects the record companies "will probably be people we can deal with."
Gabriel said no decision had yet been made about what the record companies would do, if anything, to pursue collecting the money from Thomas.
The record companies accused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas denied wrongdoing and testified that she didn't have a Kazaa account.
Since 2003, record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits over file-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores.
During the trial, the record companies presented evidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by a Kazaa user under the name "tereastarr." Their witnesses, including officials from an Internet provider and a security firm, testified that the Internet address used by "tereastarr" belonged to Thomas.
Toder said in his closing argument that the companies never proved "Jammie Thomas, a human being, got on her keyboard and sent out these things."
"We don't know what happened," Toder told jurors. "All we know is that Jammie Thomas didn't do this."
Copyright law sets a damage range of $750 to $30,000 per infringement, or up to $150,000 if the violation was "willful." Jurors ruled that Thomas' infringement was willful but awarded damages in a middle range; Gabriel said they did not explain the amount to attorneys afterward. Jurors left the courthouse without commenting.
Before the verdict, an official with an industry trade group said he was surprised it had taken so long for one of the industry's lawsuits against individual downloaders to come to trial.
Illegal downloads have "become business as usual. Nobody really thinks about it," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which coordinates the lawsuits. "This case has put it back in the news. Win or lose, people will understand that we are out there trying to protect our rights."
Thomas' testimony was complicated by the fact that she had replaced her computer's hard drive after the sharing was alleged to have taken place — and later than she said in a deposition before trial.
The hard drive in question was not presented at trial by either party.
The record companies said Thomas was sent an instant message in February 2005 warning her that she was violating copyright law. Her hard drive was replaced the following month, not in 2004 as she said in the deposition.
"I don't think the jury believed my client regarding the events concerning the replacement of the hard drive," Toder said.
The record companies involved in the lawsuit are Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.
UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.
UC Berkeley began experimenting with broadcasting classes online as early as 1995 and joined dozens of other colleges last year in distributing free podcasts through Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store. Now the school hopes to attract an even larger audience by establishing a dedicated channel on one of the most-trafficked sites on the Internet.
"YouTube is an extension of our reach," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley.edu , the program that gathers the lectures and makes them available online. "We feel strongly as a public institution that we should be providing a window into the intellectual riches of our university."
Other institutions have used YouTube to broadcast occasional classes, but UC Berkeley is the first to offer full courses online, school officials and YouTube said Wednesday.
But you can't earn your degree in your pajamas just yet: The YouTube courses don't offer credits.
Some 200 clips have been uploaded to YouTube so far, representing eight semesterlong courses, including Marian Diamond's human anatomy class and Richard A. Muller's Physics for Future Presidents.
Because the school uploads the videos manually, they all come from lectures given last year or in the spring. Hubbard said the school hopes to automate the process by next fall, so the lectures can go up on YouTube faster, as well as add at least three more courses on the site before the end of this year. On webcast .berkeley.edu , lectures are available in a matter of a day or two.
"If you have a good attention span, you can learn a lot," said Paul Adem, an architect in Southern California who became one of the new channel's earliest subscribers. The 1989 UC Berkeley graduate said he watched a Peace and Conflict Studies class and Diamond's human anatomy course on YouTube.
UC Berkeley already was posting videos on Google, which acquired YouTube last year for $1.65 billion.
Before the videos were shifted to YouTube, they were viewed 1.3 million times and downloaded 700,000 times. On UC Berkeley's local site, the school's lectures were seen 4.3 million times last year. And on iTunes, some 2 million podcasts have been downloaded since April 2006.
The school has equipped 20 classrooms to record lectures and captures about 50 classes each semester, or about 3 percent of the course catalog.
Professors who use the classrooms are asked to participate.
Muller, one of the earliest professors to do so, said his lectures have been seen or heard by people in 72 countries as far flung as Tibet and Croatia.
And to keep his students from simply skipping class and just getting his lecture online, he gives occasional pop quizzes.
"I have a deep belief we're on the edge of something," Muller said. "The technology in the past wasn't quite there, but now it's here and it's going to transform a great deal in education."
Chris Anderson, an applied science and technology graduate student, said he occasionally watched lectures online last year if he missed class.
"It's a great resource to put the lectures online, not just for students but for the community at large," he said. But at the same time, he suspects that attendance dipped because students knew they could catch up online.
"I know several students who would have come to class more if the class hadn't been Webcast," he said. "When a class has a lot of interaction, it's nice to have as many students there as possible. That takes away from that experience when people aren't there."
UC Berkeley has become the first university to offer full courses on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Topics include bioengineering, peace and conflict studies - even Physics for Future Presidents.
Some 200 clips, representing eight semesterlong courses, are available at y outube.com/ucberkeley .
Additional lectures are available at the university's own site, webcast.berkeley.edu . Audio and video podcasts of classes also are available on iTunes.
]]>That's not going to change. But change is coming to some of the California tomatoes that produce that ketchup.
A 25 percent increase in the price Heinz pays for corn syrup, a ketchup ingredient, has pushed the U.S. company's researchers to produce tomatoes that are 5 to 10 percent sweeter than any of the varieties it typically uses.
Heinz says it will never produce ketchup without additional sweeteners, but a sweeter tomato, allowing the company to offset some of the use of sweeteners, will lead to a savings of millions of dollars annually, said Reuben Peterson, director of Heinz's global tomato supply chain.
Peterson is in Stockton, where he does business with four ketchup processors who contract with about 150 growers in the San Joaquin Valley. They grow the Heinz 9557 and Heinz 9663 varieties and others few outside the Heinz network have ever heard of. But the company expects that in about two years, new sweet varieties will join their ranks and will be released commercially if they pass muster for viscosity, crop yield per acre, and other key characteristics and considerations.
"Thick and rich is part of our heritage, and so the work continues" to help growers produce tomatoes that produce thick and rich tomato paste, said Michael Mullen, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh food company, which has a 60 percent market share of the U.S. ketchup business.
Overall, Heinz's costs for ketchup ingredients rose 4.7 percent in the quarter that ended Aug. 1, and the company in turn raised prices 2.8 percent, said Mullen. Chief among the increases is the higher cost of corn syrup, which like so much else in agriculture is rooted in the ethanol boom and the rising demand for the corn to feed it.
Tomatoes are the main cost of a bottle of ketchup, but high fructose represents 10 percent of the cost, Mullen added.
However, don't expect an especially sweet-tasting shock to the taste buds, Heinz said.
"We will not do anything that will be adverse to consumers' impression of our product," said Peterson.
"One of the keys in all the work we do is to enhance flavor for customers," said Mullen.
Rather, the new tomatoes will, if all goes well, produce thicker and richer paste, which, to Peterson, refers to "the texture, the experience, the mouth feel," even while the tomato that is to be used is higher in soluble solids, or sugar.
The new varieties are expected to join the about 2,750 genetic varieties of the noble fruit. Currently, the varieties being developed are among the more than 700 new tomato varieties Heinz evaluates annually, said Peterson.
All tomatoes grown for Heinz in the United States come from the San Joaquin Valley. The 1.25 million tons it buys represents about 12 percent of the processed tomatoes produced in the state, said Ross Siragusa, president and chief executive of California Tomato Growers Association, a service association for growers of processing tomatoes.
But instead of the 10 million tons that have been grown for tomato processing in California in recent years (the fresh market is comparatively tiny, at 400,000 tons), there may be 12 million this year, grown on 293,000 acres, said Siragusa. That's an improvement in tomato production - a 10 percent increase, from 36 tons per acre to 40 tons per acre over last year, he said.
But tomato economics, as Heinz is experiencing, are volatile. From 2001 to 2005, growers were paid $49.50 to $50 per ton. In 2006, the price climbed to $58 per ton, Siragusa said, largely the result of leaping prices for energy, including diesel, as well as rising costs of fertilizers, chemicals, water and labor.
This year, growers are being paid $63 per ton, for a crop grown from early July to mid-October, and by year's end they will have received between $720 million and $750 million, according to the growers association.
"We see the price of tomatoes going up, but to what level I don't know," Siragusa said.
"The price for many years remained in a fairly tight range, because even though costs were going up, productivity was going up," Peterson said. "But productivity gains have not kept up with cost increases over the last few years."
Heinz has been involved in variety development since the 1930s, Peterson said, and has been selling seeds since about 1992.
The cost of tomato seeds has skyrocketed: Sold in packets of 100,000, the cost has tripled since 2005, from $300 to $900, said Siragusa.
There is no genetic engineering or modification at the Heinz research facilities near Stockton, only classical breeding technique: Pollen from one variety is used in the pollination of another variety, and the seeds of the fruit that is produced are used to grow the new variety.
"It takes several years of evaluating those new varieties to determine if they have all the characteristics we are looking for," said Peterson. "Once you have made that cross, it could well take three to five years to bring that new variety to the commercial level. We have to make sure it performs the way we expect it to for the farmer, for the processor and for consumers."
The price paid to tomato growers has swelled by more than 25 percent the past two years. The cost per ton:
2001-06+$49.50-$50
2007$58
2008$63
Source: California Tomato Growers Association
]]>The amount it has borrowed is now equivalent to half the government's annual transport budget.
The Bank of England has extended the unlimited credit facility to the Northern Rock as lender of last resort at an undisclosed penal rate, believed to be about 7%.
The Newcastle mortgage lender, which has deposits of about ￡22bn compared with a loan book of ￡113bn, is in discussions with two US private equity houses, JC Flowers and Cerberus, about competing takeover plans. Any new owner would be faced with more than ￡12bn in funding obligations up for renewal in the next four months. It has taken Citigroup on as adviser in the hope the investment bank can marshal a suitable refinancing package to meet the ailing lender's challenges.
Simon Ward, an economist at fund management group New Star, said "other assets" on the Bank of England's balance sheet - the category that includes the Bank's "lender of last resort" support to Northern Rock - rose by a further ￡2.9bn in the week to October 3, following a ￡4.9bn gain in the previous week. Other assets had increased by ￡10.7bn since September 12, just before the run on the troubled mortgage lender.
Mr Ward argued the central bank's capital reserves ought to be increased if it is to be expected to conduct emergency operations on the scale of Northern Rock.
Meanwhile, in the wholesale money market - where banks lend on a short-term basis to one another - the rate for three-month money has been easing back from recent highs and is well below the penal rate at which Northern Rock has been borrowing from the Bank of England. However, there has been little appetite for lending to the troubled bank.
Shares in Northern Rock rose 9.9p, or 6.5%, last night to close at 161.7p. They had been changing hands for 177p earlier in the day. Some analysts have suggested that, should a takeover deal not be secured, the closure of Northern Rock to new business and an orderly run-off of its mortgage book would leave the business worth about 130p a share.
Yesterday the group stopped offering two-thirds of its mortgage product range, ditching lower-margin deals.
]]>But if we also budgeted $100 for going to the movies and spent $150, we'd be wise to count the $50 reserve for eating out and come out even.
Also, if we have a $300 car insurance premium due in six months, it's smart to set aside $50 every month for it. It's also smart to budget monthly savings toward long-term goals, including retirement.
These are all basic budgeting principles, the foundation of financial success. So I am pleased that, to varying degrees, these ideas are at the core of recently released 2008 versions of two popular personal finance software programs, Quicken and Microsoft Money.
Provided you are computer literate and to a large extent that you have an Internet connection, it's quicker and easier than ever to use these programs to set up a realistic budget and save money. While both programs also offer highly sophisticated investment and tax-related features, the recent and welcome trend has been back to the basics.
"Clearly, many people are living beyond their means. ... Our concern this year is about saving money," said Jim Del Favero, senior Quicken Group product manager. Quicken's main competitor, Microsoft Money, is promoting its new "Money Plus" with access to information about coming bills, account balances, spending and cash flow from the computer's desktop, without having to open the program.
"Everyone is busy these days, and sometimes you just need to know your account balance or check out whether you have enough extra cash" to splurge on something you like, said Chris Jolley, group manager of the financial products group at Microsoft.
I consider both programs excellent with the caveat they are not for computer novices and that learning all features can take hours, if not days. But then, you may just want the basic versions. Product details are available at http://www.quicken/. com and http://www.microsoft.com//money.
One more caveat: To save time, both programs download information from financial institutions' Web sites and assign categories to transactions. For example, an expenditure at a grocery store is assumed to be for groceries, even if you bought a DVD. If you want complete and totally accurate information, you'll have to enter at least some transactions yourself, particularly if you buy a lot of things with cash. I actually prefer to enter all my transactions by hand.
I find Quicken easier to use, possibly because of familiarity. (I've used it for almost 20 years.) I also prefer Quicken's approach to savings, focusing on discretionary expenses as areas where we can make a difference and including the concept of rollover reserves.
Microsoft Money recommends limiting "committed" expenses to about 60 percent of gross income and tracks whether you're meeting that goal. In this context, committed expenses include anything from the mortgage to music lessons you are committed to giving your children.
While focusing on the big picture to prevent overspending is practical advice, I disagree with the contention by Microsoft Money advisers that tracking what you spend in specific categories is not that important. To me, it's everything.
The utility has begun an effort to give away 1 million compact fluorescent light bulbs in October. The bulbs last far longer than their incandescent predecessors and use far less power, which means lower utility bills for you. It also means less strain on power plants and fewer global-warming gases entering the atmosphere.
San Francisco's PG&E will be giving away the bulbs at various community events, including those listed below. The company doesn't have a complete list yet, but updates will be available at PG&E's Smarter Energy Line: (800) 933-9555.
The limit is one bulb per customer. Bulb giveaways in San Francisco this week and weekend:
Thursday
2191 Union St., 7:30 to 9:30 a.m.
18th and Castro streets, 8:30 to 11:30 a.m.
Safeway, 15 Marina Blvd., 3 to 8 p.m.
LGBT Center, 1800 Market St., 4 to 6 p.m.
Friday
S.F. Food Distribution Bank at Boeddeker Park, 240 Eddy St., 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Saturday
Crissy Field, Marine Sanctuary Visitor Center, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Sunday
Castro Street Fair, between 18th and 19th streets, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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