Also in this edition: Wolfensohn Recommends to Russia to Better Use Its Human Potential; Obesity Rising Among Poor In Developing World-Study; and Briefly Noted…

“Russia has immense opportunities and great resources, and everything has to be done in order to activate human and entrepreneurial capital,” Wolfensohn said at an international conference on corporate governance in Moscow. Many people think that the Russian economy is only based on the great oil resources of the country, but in fact, Russia also has “hidden resources, for instance human, which have to be deployed in order to guarantee a breakthrough of the economy”, Wolfensohn added. As far as corporate governance is concerned, the World Bank president called for an improvement of the Russian legislation in order to attract investors, although he acknowledged the quality of the exiting basis. “It is important that people trust the quality of the companies they are linked to in the long run,” Wolfensohn underlined.

Obesity Rising Among Poor In Developing World-Study.Obesity, once a problem chiefly in the world's richest countries, is increasingly prevalent among poor and less educated women in developing nations, Reuters reports a study released on Wednesday said.

The findings from 37 developing countries including China, Brazil and India, revealed a major shift in the populations hardest hit by obesity, researchers said. In the past, experts found excess weight was a problem mainly for people living in wealthy nations such as the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan. The poorer residents of those countries typically were heavier than richer ones. The opposite was true in developing countries, where only the richest were overweight and the poor could not get enough food to become fat. The new study by researchers in the United States and Brazil, found poor and less educated women around the world now struggling with obesity, which raises the risks of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, some cancers and other health problems. In many poorer nations, obesity has become more prevalent than malnutrition, said Barry Popkin, a nutritionist at the University of North Carolina and one of the study's authors.

Briefly Noted…The World Trade Organization's 147 member states locked horns Wednesday to discuss the thorny issue of farm trade, with three groups offering their own answers on how to move talks forward by an end-July deadline, reports AFP. Tim Groser, New Zealand's ambassador to the WTO who is chairing the three days of consultations, said there were signs of a desire to devise a framework for agriculture negotiations by July 31. But he warned participants against holding back until the last minute.

US aid experts are this week visiting 16 low-income countries selected to receive aid as a reward for good governance in a multibillion dollar program that has won high praise for the Bush administration, notes the FT. The administration has in effect created a new category of countries eligible for US aid through the Millennium Challenge Account. It is meant to be free from bias in allocating the money, $1 billion this year and $2.5 billion requested from Congress for 2005. Paul Applegarth, head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which administers the fund, said the project was about "government leadership", adding that the 16 selected countries must now propose their own projects and administer them.

Agence France Presse notes that the African Union and UNDP have signed a $4.2-million agreement to promote the continent's participation in world trade negotiations, according to a AU statement on Wednesday. "The UNDP is expected to contribute $1.65 million of the cost of the project over the next three years and the balance will be contributed by participating partners," the statement said. The partners include the UN Economic Commission of Africa (ECA), World Bank, Britain's Department for International Development (DfID) and Nordic countries. The facility will assist African countries participating in the Doha Round of the WTO global free-trade talks.

Robert Mugabe was accused Wednesday of attempting to censor Zimbabwe's email traffic after his government ordered service providers to stop any correspondence that the regime deemed "malicious," reports The Guardian (UK). A new contract, which must be signed for the companies to have access to telephone lines, states that the "use of the network for anti-national activities" will be regarded as "an offence punishable under Zimbabwe law". The service providers have been told to promptly report the senders of offensive messages to the government. The firms regard this as an impossible task.

South Africa is leading a five-country project to harness the vast, but barely tapped, hydroelectric potential of the Congo river, reports the FT. Eskom, the state-owned utility, has joined its counterparts in Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo in a scheme to rehabilitate and upgrade the Inga plant near the river's mouth. Company managers speak of knitting together the continent's four regional power pools into a single pan-African grid, with Inga at its heart. The rapids at Inga, if fully exploited, could generate twice the power of China's Three Gorges dam, enough to light up Africa and export to Europe as well.

In a surprising show of confidence, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Wednesday that he expected his deeply divided cabinet to give its approval on Sunday for his broad plan to withdraw Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, reports The New York Times. A solid majority of Israelis back the plan, according to opinion surveys, but Sharon is still struggling to get the support of his 23 cabinet members, who are split 12 to 11 against it, according to the Israeli news media. It is not clear that any of the cabinet ministers have changed their positions in recent days.

The most influential host on Russian television was fired in a dispute over censorship of his popular Sunday-night political news program, resurrecting concerns about state control of the media under President Vladimir Putin, reports The Washington Post. Leonid Parfyonov had long been seen as one of the last independent voices on a major Russian network, and his dismissal late Tuesday night by NTV was criticized by journalists and opposition figures. It is "another landmark in the destruction of freedom of speech in Russia," said Igor Yakovenko, head of the Union of Russian Journalists.

Macedonia's parliament late Wednesday voted in a new government, led by ex-interior minister Hari Kostov, after a three-day long debate, Agence France Presse reports. Kostov, an economist by training who has no political party affiliation, replaces Branko Crvenkovski in the post. Crvenkovski vacated the PM's role when he was elected president of Macedonia last month.

Reuters writes the World Bank said on Wednesday it had granted a loan of $48.87 million to Croatia for the protection of the former Yugoslav republic's Adriatic coastline against pollution. The World Bank statement said it would be used to finance a project called Coastal Cities Pollution Control, which will monitor the management of wastewater and sewage.

Britain and Spain will today discuss the merits of appointing Javier Solana the next president of the European Commission, amid signs that London is swinging behind the European Union's foreign policy chief as an alternative candidate to Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian leader, reports the FT. Tony Blair, prime minister, will meet Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister, in London for talks that will focus on Europe. Bertie Ahern, Ireland's prime minister, yesterday began a final round of talks on the proposed constitution and a successor for Romano Prodi, president, with a visit to Paris. He is to meet Blair today.

Dow Jones reports that about 63,000 Cambodian children die every year from preventable diseases such as malnutrition and diarrhea, and a group of international health experts wants to tackle the problem. The Global Child Survival Partnership - comprising several foreign donors - and the Cambodian government agreed at a three-day meeting in Phnom Penh to coordinate their projects to fight child and maternal mortality. Immunizing children, encouraging mothers to breast-feed to avert diarrhea and treating pneumonia with antibiotics are among solutions immediately available, Kul Gautam, deputy executive director of UNICEF, said after the meeting that ended Wednesday.

The Press Trust of India notes that the World Bank has approved two separate projects aimed at poverty reduction through community-led and managed initiatives in Nepal. A $25.3 million credit was approved to extend water supply and sanitation to over 8,00,000 people in rural areas of the country. A second $15 million grant was also approved to the Poverty Alleviation Fund, a pilot initiative created to bring increased opportunities for income generation and access to basic services and infrastructure to poor communities in rural areas. Poverty is pervasive in the Himalayan Kingdom with about 40 per cent of the population living below the poverty line.

The Panafrican News Agency (PANA) reports that about half of people with serious mental disorders in the US and several European countries are not receiving treatment, and the situation is even worse in some developing countries, according to major studies by the World Health Organization (WHO). The first WHO World Mental Health Survey was conducted from 2001-2003 in the Americas (Colombia, Mexico, United States), Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Ukraine), the Middle East and Africa (Lebanon, Nigeria), and Asia (Japan, separate surveys in Beijing and Shanghai in the People's Republic of China). The six countries classified as less developed by the World Bank are China, Colombia, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, and Ukraine.

At the end of February 2003, a Norwegian-brokered cease-fire agreement took effect between Sri Lankan government forces and Tamil rebels. That prompted the World Bank to commit $1 million to a new mine removal project led by the U.N. Development Program in a country where an estimated 700,000 to 2 million mines are buried, The Washington Post reports.