Global business

Johnson & Johnson decided to pull out of the business for drug-coated heart stents, a market it transformed when it introduced a blockbuster product in 2003. Recently, its sales from stents have shrunk as rivals have brought out ever more innovative devices.

Glencore (which came under fire from French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his speech, without being named specifically) posted its first earnings since making its stock market debut last month. The commodities-trading company reported that revenue had increased by 39 percent and net profit by 47 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year.

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-time fee to Nokia, then pay royalties. 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.

Another Internet company made a much-heralded stock market debut. Pandora, an online music service, priced its initial public offering well above expectations at $16 a share. Plenty of analysts believe that many of the recent "hot" tech flotations may have been overpriced. Profitless Pandora faces stiffer competition as Apple and others expand their music services.

VF, a clothing and footwear company based in North Carolina that owns some of the world's most recognized apparel brands, including Wrangler, Lee, Vans, Nautica, JanSport and North Face, added Timberland to its range by agreeing to pay around $2.3 billion for the outdoorsy label. VF traces its roots to 1899, as a glove manufacturer in Pennsylvania.

Political economyIn Greece, trade unions held a general strike, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Athens to protest against forthcoming austerity measures. George Papandreou, the prime minister, reshuffled his government and sought a vote of confidence to get the measures passed. With negotiations continuing over a second bailout package for Greece, Standard & Poor's, a rating agency, downgraded the country's long-term sovereign debt to just above default status. It now has the lowest credit rating of any country covered by S&P.

Consumer prices in China rose at the quickest pace in three years, by 5.5 percent in May from a year earlier. Politically sensitive food prices surged by 11.7 percent. 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.

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.

The International Monetary Fund formally accepted the nominations of two candidates for the position of managing director: Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister and the favorite 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 he was excluded from the final list because, at 67, he is two years older than the maximum age for candidates.

Italy's government was trounced in four referendums, on nuclear power, legal immunity for government ministers and two on water privatization. The setback for Silvio Berlusconi came just weeks after the prime minister had seen his favored candidate defeated in a mayoral election in Milan, his hometown.

Argentina returned cargo to the United States that it had seized from an American military aircraft in February, including satellite equipment and morphine. Although the American government said the materials were intended for a police training course, Argentine officials had accused it of trying to smuggle the goods into their country.