senior position at Oracle.

At least 8,500 SYRIANS fled to Turkey after government troops backed by helicopters and tanks entered the restive town of Jisr al-Shughour, near the border. Demonstrations continued to spread across the country. Turkey castigated President Bashar Assad's regime. But the Russian and Chinese governments seemed likely to block a UN Security Council resolution condemning the crackdown.



The interim government in TUNISIA said that Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the ousted president, will stand trial in absentia on charges that range from conspiring against the state to drug-trafficking.



Consumer prices in CHINA rose at the quickest pace in three years, by 5.5% in May from a year earlier. Politically sensitive food prices surged by 11.7%. The People's Bank of China increased the reserve requirement for banks for the sixth time this year, the latest step in the central bank's effort to restrain credit and cool the economy. Separate data showed a sharp fall in new loans issued by Chinese banks in May compared with April.



America's headline INFLATION rate, including food and energy, rose by a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in May from April (or by 3.6% from a year earlier). Excluding food and energy, prices increased by 0.3%, the fastest clip since July 2008.



The IMF formally accepted the nominations of two candidates for the position of managing director: Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister and firm favourite for the job, and Agustin Carstens, the governor of the Bank of Mexico, who has asked emerging economies to back his long-shot bid. Stanley Fischer, a renowned academic economist who heads Israel's central bank, made a late entry into the field but was excluded from the final list because at 67 he is two years older than the maximum for candidates.



Nicolas Sarkozy sharpened his attack on SPECULATION IN COMMODITIES MARKETS, which he insists is an underlying factor in pushing up prices for raw materials. The French president said that the "gap between the reality of physical markets and that of financial markets has widened" and called for stricter regulations, on commodities trading, such as minimum deposits for derivatives trades and a global standard for clearing contracts.



APPLE settled a patent dispute with NOKIA, which demanded royalties for the use of its intellectual property in the iPhone. Apple will pay a one-off fee to Nokia and royalties from now on. The pair will enter into a patent-licensing agreement that ends all outstanding quarrels over patents between the companies, including the countersuit that Apple brought against Nokia.



As Apple and Nokia made up, tensions escalated between HEWLETT-PACKARD and ORACLE when HP sued Oracle, accusing it of purposely neglecting to fix software bugs for customers in a chip widely used in HP's servers in order to entice them to switch to Oracle's servers. The two companies have been at odds since Mark Hurd was forced out as HP's boss last year, only to take a senior position at Oracle.

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