Business Highlights

GENEVA — Global commerce talks at the World Trade Organization collapsed Monday as top powers failed to agree on steps toward liberalizing trade in farm and manufactured goods.

Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath said the talks had been suspended and added that "it could take anywhere from months to years,” to restart the negotiations. "This is a serious setback, a major setback,” said Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim.

EU trade chief Peter Mandelson blamed the failure on the United States.

"The United States judged that it would be better for the process to be discontinued at this stage,” he said. "This action has led to the round being suspended.”

But U.S. officials said the fault lay with other countries.

"Unfortunately things became clear yesterday that ’Doha light’ seems still to be the preferred option of some of the participants,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters at the World Trade Organization on Monday.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said the proposed steps forward from other countries "appeared to be getting lighter and lighter in the last few weeks.”

"Today truly represents a failure,” Johanns said.

He blamed Brazil and India for being inflexible on their refusal to cut barriers to industrial imports and the EU for refusing to open up its farm markets.

"There was just simply nothing there,” Johanns said.

Johanns said the United States indicated it could increase its offer to cut subsidies to American farmers, but he would not say whether the U.S. team had made a concrete proposal.

Mandelson said the United States showed little willingness to compromise.

"The U.S. was unwilling to accept or indeed to acknowledge the flexibilities being showed by others in the room and as a result felt unable to show any flexibility on the issue of farm subsidies,” he said.

540,000 New Yorkers at risk of identity theft after computer breach

ALBANY, N.Y. — The names, addresses and Social Security numbers of as many as 540,000 injured workers have been lost, and the state and a contracted company are trying to protect the workers from identity theft.

In New York, company and state officials said Monday that the data was on computer hardware that is missing from a secured facility of the company, Chicago-based CS Stars, an independent insurance brokerage.

Most of the workers are New Yorkers from across the state who are in two special funds of the workers’ compensation system. One group is all workers who have a second injury and another is all workers who have a past injury that creates new problems, said state Workers Compensation Board spokesman John Sullivan.

The state-owned personal computer provided to the contractor, CS Stars, "cannot be located,” according to a letter the company sent to the people whose information was lost.

CS Stars had been using the computer to move the data from the state to the company’s computerized claim system, according to the letter.

The FBI is investigating, said Mike Kachel, spokesman for CS Stars’ New York City office. He declined to release details that he said could hamper the investigation, including when the computer went missing.

"At this time, we have no indication that any of the data stored on the missing hardware has been used inappropriately,” Kachel said. "That doesn’t lessen our desire to do what is right.”

The company is offering the people identity theft insurance, 12 months to get free credit reports and access to fraud resolution specialists.

It was the latest report in a rash of government data on individuals being compromised, from a stolen Veterans Affairs laptop containing information on 26.5 million veterans to a hacker in the Nebraska child-support computer system who may have gotten data on 300,000 people and 9,000 employers.

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