Japan, the world’s second-largest nickel user, called for Indonesia to remove restrictions on ore exports, saying it may make a complaint to the World Trade Organization should compromise talks fail. “The country’s unilateral measures aren’t appropriate,” Takayuki Ueda, director general of the manufacturing industries bureau of Japan’s trade ministry, said yesterday in an interview inTokyo. Should Indonesia proceed with a complete ban on exports as planned in 2014, Japan, which prefers to negotiate a solution, would consider complaining to the WTO, he said.

Yesterday, we found reports surfacing that corporate lobbyists working on behalf of foreign corporate entities were pressuring to adopt ACTA, SOPA and a host of other failed policies that are crumbling in other places in the world today. While the TPP might not currently match the laundry list of policies the lobbyists demanded, they might get a good portion of what they asked for through the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership).

China’s exports grew 15 percent in May from a year earlier. That was double the pace analysts expected, according to Bloomberg News. That’s good news for China. It’s not necessarily good news for the rest of the world, though.

For the first time since the World Trade Organization started monitoring the protectionist reaction to the financial crisis in 2008, its Director General, Pascal Lamy, has voiced "serious concern" to national negotiators over a marked increase in the introduction of restrictive trade measures in recent months. Lamy told delegates: "The implementation of new measures restricting or potentially restricting trade has remained unabated over the past seven months, which is aggravated by the slow pace of rollback of existing measures."

WASHINGTON — Japan may not be allowed to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks as soon as Canada and Mexico as the United States has yet to determine whether to accept all three candidates at once, a senior White House official has indicated. Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, told a think tank forum in Washington on Tuesday that the U.S. government has not made a decision "about (accepting) one, two or three" countries as new TPP members.

MOSCOW, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Russia would enter the World Trade Organization (WTO) in early August, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday. The Russian government approved the WTO accession protocol during a working session and it would now be submitted to parliament for further discussion and final ratification, the Kremlin press service reported. "The process has been drawn out for many years and it's good that, thanks to joint efforts, it is drawing to a close," Medvedev said.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, at their meeting in Kazan, Russia from June 4-5, 2012, pledged to achieve tangible results in regional trade and investment liberalization, and also to resist the risks of rising protectionist trends in world trade and investment. Firstly, the ministers welcomed the continuing progress made towards, APEC’s Bogor goals of free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region and emphasized that they remained firmly committed to their achievement.

BRUSSELS, June 6 (Reuters) - Russia will probably be in breach of global trade rules when it joins the World Trade Organisation this year, the EU executive said on Wednesday, signalling Brussels would feel justified in filing a case against the club's newest member. Russia is set to join the WTO once its parliament rubber-stamps its application. But the European Commission said in a report that Moscow will be in breach of its obligations in several areas if it does not take steps to dismantle the trade barriers it has put up.

(Reuters) - The United States and eight other countries negotiating a free trade pact in the Asia Pacific region remain undecided on a nearly seven-month-old bid by Japan, Canada and Mexico to join the talks, the U.S. Trade Representative's office said on Tuesday. Trade "ministers again welcomed the interest of Canada, Japan, and Mexico in joining the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and discussed the progress of each TPP country's respective bilateral consultations with Canada, Japan, and Mexico," USTR said in a statement from Kazan,Russia.

HANOI, June 5 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese seafood exporters are confronting numerous difficulties for their business, local media reported Tuesday.