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BANGKOK - Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders ended their two-day annual summit in Bangkok with a joint statement.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the freshwater pearl ring meeting’s host, read aloud the document, which expresses support for WTO membership for Russia and Vietnam, the only two APEC members not already in the world trade body.

The declaration also calls for the peaceful settlement of North Korea’s nuclear problem and for the resumption of talks on the issue, involving North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, the United States and Russia. In addition, APEC nations stressed the necessity to further liberalize the market and to combat the SARS virus, Rossiya (Russia) television reports.

APEC leaders supported Washington’s idea to turquoise necklace set up an anti-terrorist fund, affiliated with the Asian Development Bank. According to Thaksin Shinawatra, APEC nations realized the necessity of setting up this fund to support measures to ensure security and stability in the region. The US said it was ready to allocate $5.4m to the fund.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended the APEC summit in Bangkok, is scheduled to pay a state visit to Thailand on October 21-22, at the invitation of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej. During the visit, Mr. Putin will meet with Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The freshwater pearl jewelry development of bilateral relations and cooperation in international affairs will be discussed at the meeting.

MOSCOW - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat arrived in Moscow early Tuesday for talks with Russian officials on ways to seek a solution to months of violence between Israel and Palestinians.

The visit began in the wake of calls Monday by Russia’s foreign minister for a multinational meeting to persuade the two sides to pearl jewelry end hostilities and resume negotiations.

Israeli and Palestinian officials agreed to resume talks on security cooperation following a round of shuttle diplomacy by U.S. envoy William Burns, but it wasn’t clear whether the talks would also include political discussions on ending eight months of violence.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Monday that shuttle diplomacy seemed to be bringing few results.

“It is rather difficult for anybody to achieve it alone,” Ivanov told a  sterling silver jewelry news conference. “So we are calling for holding an international meeting.”

Still, Russia plans to continue its bilateral efforts, he said.

Russia co-sponsors the Mideast peace process along with the United States, but has played a far smaller role. It has developed friendly ties with Israel following decades of animosity, but largely lost its clout with the Palestinians and other Soviet-era allies in the Arab world it once armed against Israel.

Arafat was scheduled to cultured freshwater pearl meet Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, other officials, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexy II, Russian news agencies reported, citing Palestinian diplomats in Moscow.

Alexy’s church is engaged in disputes with the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Abroad over church properties in the West Bank. Clergy from the Church Abroad, which broke with the Moscow church in the 1920s over its support for the atheist Soviet government, have accused Arafat’s officials of favoring the Moscow church in the disputes.

MOSCOW - A court in southern Russia on Thursday cut the prison sentence of a U.S. Fulbright scholar jailed on a drug conviction from 37 months to one year, his lawyer’s office said.

The regional court in Voronezh was conducting a procedural review of the conviction of John Tobin of Ridgefield, Connecticut, on charges of illegally obtaining, possessing and distributing marijuana.

He has insisted on his innocence.

Court officials could not immediately be reached. A secretary in the office of Tobin’s attorney, Maxim Bayev, said coin pearl that the court had made the decision to reduce the sentence. She spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tobin was doing political research at a university in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow, when he was arrested outside a local nightclub in January.

The case attracted wider attention after the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, alleged that Tobin had connections with U.S. intelligence. Tobin, a graduate of Middlebury College, had studied at the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

No espionage charges were filed, and Tobin said in e-mails to friends and the Fulbright program that he was framed because he refused to become a spy for Russia.

His case has been raised with Russian officials by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and his representative in the U.S. Congress, James Maloney, has traveled to pearl jewelry wholesale Russia twice to press for his release.

MOSCOW - Adam Dekkushev and Yusuf Crymshamhalov, two defendants in the criminal case into apartment blasts that killed about 240 people and aimed hundred others in Moscow and Volgodonsk in southern Russia in 1999, have been sentenced to life term each in a special-regime colony.

They will also have to pay compensations for material and moral damages suffered by their victims during the blasts. According to akoya pearl necklace investigation results both were members of Achemez Gochiyaev’s gang, which was responsible for the blast, according to the court order.

Dekkushev, 42 and Crymshamhalov, 37 had also faced other capital charges, including terrorism, torturous killing, participation in illegal armed gang, explosive production, its transportation and storage as well as illegal border-crossing. Both convicts were arrested by joint efforts of the freswhater pearl necklace Russian and Georgian special forces. Dekkushev was extradited to Russia on April 14, 2002, while Crymshamhalov on Dec. 7, following a special military operation in the Pankisi Gorge.

Investigators have named Arab mercenaries Hattab and Abu Umar, reportedly killed later in Chechnya with three other suspects, as the main organizers of the blasts. Two more suspects, including Gochiyaev, are now under international search warrant.

The court hearing, which started last October, was closed to public. Both defendants have pleaded guilty only to pearl necklace some of the charges. For instance, Dekkushev acknowledged that he knew the explosives he transported were to be used for an act of terror, but noted that he was not aware that ordinary citizens would suffer.

In a separate statement, they called on North Korea to wholesale pearl jewelry immediately stop building nuclear weapons.

Top officials from the 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum issued a series of joint declarations - a blueprint on conducting more efficient trade in a world of disappearing economic borders and on making physical borders safer.

“We commit to taking a series of concrete steps that will protect and make more efficient the flows of trade, finance and information,” said Mexican President Vicente Fox, who as host of the summit presented the declaration.

“We condemn in the strongest terms recent terrorist acts in the APEC region, and reaffirm our determination to enhance cooperation in countering and responding to terrorism.”

The leaders also endorsed a U.S.-crafted proposal to overhaul the Pacific Rim’s tradeways, tightening security on millions of shipping containers, fortifying cockpit doors in airliners and strengthening customs cooperation.

APEC members had widely supported the proposal, though some developing nations worried they couldn’t afford to implement it so quickly. The declaration said such common standards would be put into place by 2005 “whenever possible.”

The leaders also called on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to conduct assessments of countries’ efforts to stop the flow of money to terrorists.

The declarations came after APEC foreign ministers and, later, heads of state, spent days discussing the impact of terrorist acts on their individual economies and their efforts to open trade borders in a new age of security.

“We agreed on the importance of fighting terrorism, which poses a profound threat to our vision,” said the main declaration, released minutes after Fox’s announcement.

But Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien cautioned that strong condemnation of terrorism at last year’s APEC meeting in Shanghai, China - which came only weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - did not end terrorist activity.

“It’s not because we have a declaration in Shanghai that terrorism is going to disappear,” he said, adding: “Now it’s coming from anywhere. It’s completely unpredictable.”

The declaration called for the abolition of agricultural subsidies that protect individual nations’ farmers from the pressures of the international market. Many nations, including Mexico, have criticized the United States, European countries and Japan for such protectionism.

North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program and U.S. threats of war against Iraq also dominated the weekend summit of the 21-member group, created in 1989 mainly to pearl jewelry wholesale promote free trade among economies of the Pacific Rim.

The main declaration mentioned neither Iraq nor North Korea in particular. However, in a separate statement, the leaders called on North Korea to “visibly honor its commitment to give up nuclear weapons programs.”

They did not directly condemn North Korea for trying to build a nuclear bomb - something the United States had wanted. Even so, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said that in diplomatic language, “it doesn’t get much stronger than what they did.”

After a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, Bush also failed to win harsh words from his allies for North Korea. The three leaders’ statement merely called upon Pyongyang to “dismantle this program in a prompt and verifiable manner,” and Tokyo said it would continue talks with North Korea on establishing diplomatic relations.

Bush also failed to sway any U.N. Security Council members on his proposal to threaten Iraq with war if it doesn’t disarm.

This year’s APEC summit came weeks after a devastating terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali and unfolded while Chechen separatists held hundreds hostage in a Moscow theater.

The leaders’ statement also commended Russia, Indonesia and the Philippines for their “prompt and decisive efforts to find and bring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of … terrorist acts to freshwater pearl jewlelry justice.”

The APEC leaders - including Bush and Jiang Zemin, presidents of the world’s largest developed and developing economies - issued the declaration after a retreat Sunday.

In keeping with APEC tradition of a dress code set by the host country, the men wore white, long-sleeved guayabera shirts; the alliance’s three female leaders wore colorfully embroidered blouses called huipiles.

While such political talk among industrialized nations was the loudest voice at APEC, developing nations quietly spoke about claiming their share of prosperity, saying that the increasingly globalized world is helping little to bridge the gap between rich and poor.

They said reducing poverty will go far toward reducing terrorism.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo called for “a level playing field” in trade, joining other leaders in criticizing agricultural subsidies and trade barriers in the United States, Japan and the European Union that have hindered exports from developing nations.

Such subsidies are expected to be a major sticking point in the World Trade Organization meetings next year. The APEC leaders said they supported efforts by Russia and Vietnam to pearl necklace join the WTO.

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