"We had to suspend this meeting and that is a disappointment," Canadian Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew told reporters late Friday night.

U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, the chairman of the meetings, had called a session of all 135 countries for later in the evening to announce the next steps.

But officials from some countries said they understood that the WTO would try to restart the negotiations next year in Geneva, where the WTO is headquartered.

The announcement represented the latest in a string of failures for the WTO sessions, which the Clinton administration had hoped would launch a new round of global trade talks.

The meetings were disrupted on Tuesday and Wednesday with huge protests that turned violent, forcing Seattle police to use tear gas and declare a civil emergency.

Word circulated quickly among protesters, who were being kept away from the convention center by police and National Guard troops, called out to restore order on Wednesday.

The protesters, who had vowed all along to "Shut down the WTO," which they saw as an embodiment of everything wrong with the global economy, reacted with cheers as news of the failure of the talks was spread by cell phones and bullhorns.

Outside the Westin Hotel, where President Clinton stayed when he visited Seattle to promote the WTO negotiations earlier in the week, a group of about 50 protesters cheered, high-fived each other and began dancing in the street.

"We've won. We really disrupted it," said Tracy Katelman with the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. "Obviously, we haven't won the whole battle. But we've made a pretty big impact. I think the corporations will be shaking in their boots."

Maude Barlow, with a Canadian watchdog group called Council of Canadians, said, "The system collapsed and for the right reasons. This has been a victory for democracy, a victory for the civil society we live in."

Protesters had claimed all week that the WTO was neglecting its demands to seek better protections of workers' rights and the environment in future trade negotiations.

Inside the negotiating rooms, exhausted delegates who had stayed up trying to reach agreement on a complete package to launch a new round of talks, said in the end the differences were just too wide to bridge during four days of discussions.

"For something like this to gel, you need everything to pull together and more time is needed," said Peter Guilford, a spokesman for the 15-nation European Union.

The negotiators had worked through the night Thursday and for most of Friday, struggling to overcome differences between nations. Four working groups covering different areas of the proposed negotiations had managed to produce a 15-page draft document.

That document, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, indicated that if all countries agreed, the WTO was ready to launch a limited round of talks.

However, the draft showed that the United States had failed to succeed in winning agreement to include in the talks the top item on Clinton's wish list, linking future trade deals to minimum protections of core labor standards, such as a ban on child labor and guaranteeing the right to join labor unions.

Clinton, who had visited Seattle earlier in the week to personally lobby delegates to accept U.S. negotiating stands, had continued focusing on the talks Friday, including making a personal phone call to Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.

The failure to reach a broad agreement on a new round could mean that delegates will be forced to the fall back position they always had — simply agreeing to start talks on agriculture and services, the two big areas where very little was done to remove trade barriers in the last global negotiations, the Uruguay Round, which ended in 1993.

Because of the failure in those two areas, the WTO countries committed to launching new talks in 2000. However, the United States and many other countries had drawn up a much broader wish list of agenda items that they wanted to include in the discussions.

The discussions inside were overshadowed at the start by huge street demonstrations. Some 40,000 people paraded through downtown Seattle on Tuesday, the opening day, to show their opposition to the WTO.

The protesters believe the WTO puts the desires of big multinational corporations for lower trade barriers above such concerns as protection of the environment and the safeguarding of basic rights of workers, including the right to form labor unions.

A small band of violent protesters smashed windows, set fires and looted shops, leading authorities to declare a state of emergency, call out the National Guard and impose a 24-hour curfew in the area immediately around the convention center. The city remained quiet on Friday, although police by then had made some 600 arrests.

Clinton condemned the violence but said the WTO should listen to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators demanding reforms.

The U.S. negotiators, responding to pleas of American labor unions, pushed hard for the WTO to create a working group on labor.

However, Third World nations, already opposed to the idea, turned even more vehement after Clinton gave an interview to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in which he said the working group should lead to adoption of core labor standards and those standards should be enforced by trade sanctions through the WTO.

That statement, which the administration spent the rest of the week trying to back away from, enraged trade ministers from developing countries. They contended that it confirmed their worst fears that the United States was looking for a way to impose high tariffs on their products and take away the comparative advantages they enjoy with lower wage scales.

"The inability of countries here to expand the reach of the WTO, which had been their objective, represents a victory for us," said Lori Wallach, head of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Global Trade Watch.