WASHINGTON, May 23 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. trade panel voted Friday to extend antidumping and countervailing duties on light-walled rectangular pipes and tubes from four foreign countries after the first five-year review of the measures imposed initially in 2008.

On 29 April at the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council summit in Minsk, where the presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia discussed the future of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), it was announced that the agreement to establish the EEU would be signed on 29 May in Astana. This is a project that can be traced back to 1994, when the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, proposed creating a Eurasian union.

India's Department of Commerce has recommended anti-dumping tariffs of USD 0.11-0.81 per watt on imports of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells, whether or not assembled into modules, from China, Malaysia, Taiwan and the United States. First Solar Inc. (Tempe, Arizona, U.S.) has received the lowest recommended duty rate of USD 0.11 per watt for its PV modules manufactured in the United States. All other U.S. PV makers would be subject to USD 0.48 per watt, and Chinese PV makers have received recommended duties of USD 0.64-0.81 per watt.

VIENNA, May 24 (Xinhua) -- The current negotiations between the EU and the United States over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will still take some time to reach a conclusion, an Austrian expert said Friday. Barbara Tasch-Ronner, foreign trade expert from the Austrian Federal Economic Chambers, said the negotiations were still in the early stages, Friday marking the last day of the fifth series of talks, Kurier newspaper reported.

(Reuters) - The European Union should consider the interests of European companies working in Russia when deciding on whether to impose sanctions on Moscow over its involvement in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin's top economic aide said on Saturday. The United States and European Union have already hit dozens of officials, lawmakers and companies close to Putin with sanctions and EU leaders are due to discuss next week further steps they could take against Russia if there are disruptions to Ukraine's presidential election on Sunday.

But if international negotiators working on the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement can get past the self-interest by those countries — and others — on the agricultural “untouchables”, then there is potential to create a huge trade boom in Pacific Rim countries. “If there is a breakthrough on sugar, a whole bunch of other things will come into play,” former US House of Representatives senior staffer Bruce Wolpe told an American Chamber of Commerce forum in Melbourne last week.

(Reuters) - India will impose anti-dumping duties on solar panels imported from the United States, China, Taiwan and Malaysia to protect domestic solar manufacturers, according to a government statement seen by Reuters on Friday. The order, almost certain to anger India's trading partners, sets duties of between 11 and 81 U.S. cents per watt and comes after a investigation which started in 2011. The ruling by a quasi-judicial body has to be published by the Finance Ministry before it takes effect.

On May 20, it was announced that the free trade agreement (FTA) between China and Iceland, which was signed on April 15 this year, will come into effect on July 1, 2014. The Iceland-China FTA is the first to be signed between China and a European country. Negotiations started in December 2006, but were aborted in 2009. In April 2012, the leaders of the two countries agreed to restart the talks, and, after a further two rounds, the final terms of the agreement were agreed in January this year.

May 22 (Reuters) - The United States has won a World Trade Organization case against China over duties slapped on U.S. imported cars, a person briefed on the case said on Thursday. China started levying punitive duties on sedans and sport-utility vehicles (SUV) with engines of 2.5 liters and above that were imported from the United States in 2011, in retaliation for U.S. trade policies, although the duties have since expired.

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday set preliminary dumping margins on Chinese refrigeration products whose technical name is 1, 1, 1, 2-Tetrafluoroethane, signaling that it may impose punitive duties on the products. The department made its preliminary affirmative determination that 1, 1, 1, 2-Tetrafluoroethane from China had been "sold in the United States at dumping margins ranging from 133.47 percent to 237.33 percent".