EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission is optimistic about market economy reforms in China, saying the Asian state has made "significant progress." But some are wary of Brussels sunny outlook on China's trade development.

In a commission assessment report presented to trade experts from EU member countries recently and seen by EUobserver, the EU executive says "China has made significant progress towards market economy status" in the last three years, adding that the Asian state has "shown evidence that it is committed to significantly reducing state interference in the management of companies."

But China has completed only one out of five technical conditions necessary to be granted a market economy status (MES) by Brussels, the commission points out.

Conditions include less government influence on companies; laws to end the ripping off of EU intellectual property; an end to tax breaks and soft bank loans for Chinese firms and the opening up of its vast government procurement sector to outsiders.

According to the commission's assessment, new laws in China could take the country closer to gaining MES.

Russia's threat to aim weapons at Europe if the US sets up a missile defence shield there was "unhelpful and unwelcome", Nato has said.

The US says it wants missile defence in eastern Europe to counter threats from states like Iran and North Korea.

On Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Iran was not a threat to the US, hinting that Russia was the target.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will have "frank" talks with Mr Putin this week about the threat.

'Stormy summit'

Washington wants to deploy interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic to counter what it describes as a potential threat from "rogue states" such as Iran and North Korea.

It insists the shield is not aimed at Russia.

The Bush administration's plans to bring detainees at Guantánamo Bay to trial were thrown into chaos yesterday when military judges threw out all charges against a detainee held there since he was 15 and dismissed charges against another detainee who chauffeured Osama bin Laden.

In back-to-back arraignments for the Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national, the US military's cases against the alleged al-Qaida figures were dismissed because, the judges said, the government had failed to establish jurisdiction.

Article continues Yesterday's decision by Colonel Peter Brownback to dismiss all charges against Mr Khadr on technical grounds has broad implications for the Bush administration's system of military tribunals because the technicality appears to apply to all 385 prisoners held at Guantánamo.

The dismissal of the case also undermines the administration's efforts to show that the military tribunals are based on sound legal practice and can provide detainees with a fair hearing, detainee lawyers said.

In his decision yesterday, Col Brownback said the Pentagon had merely designated Mr Khadr, a Canadian citizen facing charges of murder and terrorism, as an "enemy combatant", not an "unlawful enemy combatant", the term used by Congress last year in authorising the tribunals.

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for "green" fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia's population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world's worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.

Article continues Several companies were collaborating by falsifying deeds to claim ownership of the land, said Andres Castro, the general secretary of Fedepalma, the national federation of palm oil producers.

"As a consequence of the development of palm by secretive business practices and the use of threats, people have been displaced and [the businesses] have claimed land for themselves," he said. His claim was backed up by witnesses and groups such as Christian Aid and the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.

The revelations tarnish what has been considered an economic and environmental success story. The fruit of the palm oil tree produces a vegetable oil also used in cooking, employs 80,000 people, and is increasingly being turned into biofuel.

Turkey's foreign minister asserted his country's right to act against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq on Monday, just before rebels fired rockets and grenades at a Turkish military outpost, killing eight soldiers. The army sent attack helicopter and reinforcements to Tunceli Province in southeastern Turkey after three people thought to belong to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rammed a vehicle into the military post and opened fire with automatic weapons and rockets, local media reported. Eight soldiers were killed and six more wounded. Soldiers returned fire, killing the vehicle's driver, the military said.

The gendarmerie is a paramilitary force responsible for security in rural areas of Turkey.

"Turkey places great importance on Iraq's territorial integrity and has no secret agenda regarding its neighbor," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said in Ankara shortly before the attack in Tunceli. "But Turkey undoubtedly has the right to take all kinds of measures when it comes to terrorist activities at the border," he told European Union officials visiting Ankara.

At the same news conference, visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose country currently  holds the rotating EU presidency, said: "Mr. Gul told us the Turkish government naturally wants to protect its own people and that there is therefore a need to take action against terrorist activity.

But "I received no indication an action is planned with a view to a military intervention in northern Iraq," he added.

One of the lessons journalists should have learned from the 2000 election campaign is that what a candidate says about policy isn't just a guide to his or her thinking about a specific issue -- it's the best way to get a true sense of the candidate's character.

Do you remember all the up-close-and-personals about George W. Bush, and what a likeable guy he was? Well, reporters would have had a much better fix on who he was and how he would govern if they had ignored all that, and focused on the raw dishonesty and irresponsibility of his policy proposals.

That's why I'm not interested in what sports the candidates play or speculation about their marriages. I want to hear about their health care plans -- not just for the substance, but to get a sense of what kind of president each would be. Would they hesitate and triangulate, or would they push hard for real change?

• Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Afghan President Hamid Karzai both said there was no evidence Iran supplied weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Gates said:

  We do not have any information about whether the government of Iran is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it is smuggling, or exactly what is behind it... But there clearly is evidence that some weapons are coming into Afghanistan destined for the Taliban, but perhaps also for criminal elements involved in the drug trafficking coming from Iran.

• Col. Peter Brownback, the presiding U.S. military judge, dismissed "without prejudice" the charges against Omar Khadr, "a Canadian held at Guantánamo Bay, saying he could not be tried under new laws governing military tribunals... because he was not classified as an 'unlawful' enemy combatant in previous hearings." The case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan was also thrown out.

• "China echoed the Bush administration's stance on global warming... refusing to set firm caps on its greenhouse-gas emissions and saying that economic growth remained its 'first and overriding priority.' Releasing the country's first plan to deal with climate change, the government rejected international demands that it should fix ceilings on Chinese emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases."

• "George W. Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are competing for control of the climate change agenda at the G-8 summit." Merkel plans to take a hard line. "Merkel refuses to allow her image as a vocal advocate of climate protection to be diminished, not even by George W. Bush". The Germans believe the Americans are "playing for time". "Merkel's advisors now fear that the Americans might try to focus on separate, and to them, acceptable agreements with environmental bad guys such as China and India -- in other words, climate protection writ small."

• "For the moment, skepticism about Mr. Bush's commitment still rules. After all, for six years Mr. Bush insisted the science was too iffy and the costs of change too high to justify more than mild steps to blunt growth in greenhouse gas emissions, which come mainly from using coal and oil, the fossil fuels that underpin modern economies. And his representatives in international climate talks, as recently as last month, rejected any new negotiations under international climate treaties."

• Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper is promoting Canada's own plan to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. "The Canadian plan to reduce emissions would see greenhouse-gas reductions of 20 per cent over 2006 levels by the year 2020. It is unclear how the Canadian proposal will fly, given Ottawa's history in not reaching its targets. Many European countries are already well ahead of their targets under Kyoto. Germany, for example, had reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 18.4 percent as of 2004, while Canada's production had increased by 27 percent over the same period".

• "George W. Bush began an eight-day trip to Europe on Monday with his popularity at home at a low point over the Iraq war and tensions abroad over global warming and missile defense. The centrepiece will be the Group of Eight summit in Germany, where Bush will hold a closely watched meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid deteriorating U.S.-Russian ties."

• NATO has described Russia's President Vladimir Putin threat to target Europe with nuclear missiles as "unhelpful and unwelcome".

• Russia's President Vladimir Putin stated "if the United States goes ahead with building the system in two former Soviet satellite nations, Russia could take 'retaliatory steps' such as targeting its own weapons on sites in Europe, much as it did during the Cold War. Experts say re-aiming missiles takes only minutes, making Putin's warning substantively empty."

• The Bush administration's missile shield in Eastern Europe is only one cause of the souring U.S.-Russia relationship. Russia does not want independence for Kosovo and the Bush administration wants Putin to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program. "Seeking a better footing in the relationship, Putin has accepted Bush's invitation for a July 1-2 meeting at his family's compound in Kennebunkport, Maine." George H. W. Bush likely trying to undo damage done to the Russia-U.S. relationship by his son.

• Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) indicted on 16 counts. Jefferson needs to resign like yesterday.

• Sen. Craig Thomas (R-WY) died at the age of 74. "He had been receiving chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia."

• If the men acting as president and vice president "can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts... The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration."

• "Prosecutors... began playing the wiretapped telephone conversations at the heart of the terrorism case against José Padilla, including several in which a co-defendant discussed sending satellite phones, military tents and other equipment to "brothers" in Chechnya in the mid-1990s." Padilla's "voice is heard on only seven of the 300,000 or so calls that the F.B.I. recorded from 1994 to 2001."

• Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) "remains openly frustrated with the four-month battle over Iraq funding, condemning the process as a 'retreat' and 'utter collapse'":

  I know that [Reid] wants to take stronger action... And I think he definitely wanted to keep the heat on. But at some point his members simply wouldn't come along... [Reid] is having a serious problem with members of his own caucus who simply are buying into these ridiculous arguments of... Dick Cheney that somehow we're trying to take funds away from the troops under Feingold-Reid... That's absolutely false.

• Congress is seeking to increase funding for veterans' mental health treatment and post-traumatic stress disorder. The House Veterans' Affairs Committee is seeking an "increase of nearly $150 million, or about 5 percent, over the [Bush] administration's request of $3 billion." The Senate Veterans' Committee is wanting "an extra $500 million, or 18 percent, over the administration's request." "I'm not convinced we're prepared for the next 50 years of mental health problems so many of our veterans face from this awful war," Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said.

• "The FBI reported that the number of violent crimes nationwide went up by 1.3 percent last year, following a 2.3 percent increase in 2005. That had been the first rise in four years and the biggest percentage gain in 15 years. The report showed that murders in big cities jumped last year by 6.7 percent. Robberies, an important indicator of crime trends, increased 6 percent nationwide." Bush has failed to make America and the world safer.

• House Democrats want to "trim" Bush's "non-war defense spending and foreign operations" and "increase social spending in the Labor-Health and Human Services... by almost 9 percent more than Bush".

• The wind-energy industry lobby wants a 10-year extension to "the 1.9 cent kilowatt-hour tax break that helps wind to compete with coal and other traditional power sources, such as natural gas and nuclear." Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) is drafting legislation that would have the "Fish and Wildlife Service to issue regulations regarding wind power development" and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) "is likely to sponsor anti-wind language" in the Senate. Rep. Coal Mine and Sen. Nuclear Industry are trying to kill wind power.

• Charles Taylor, Liberia's former president, refused to participate in his war crimes trial. "'I cannot participate in a charade that does no justice to the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone,' Taylor said in a letter read by defence lawyer Karim Khan, who later walked out saying Taylor now wanted to conduct his own defence."

• "South African police have fired rubber bullets and stun grenades at striking nurses in the port city of Durban. The union activists were reportedly trying to prevent nurses from working."

• Eta, the Basque separatist group, will end its cease fire with the Spanish government on Wednesday.

• The PKK has been blamed by the Turkish government for a raid that "killed at least seven Turkish soldiers when they opened fire on a military outpost" in Pulumur in eastern Turkey.

• "Relatives of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre have filed a case against the Dutch state and the UN, saying they allowed it to happen. The Bosnian town of Srebrenica was a UN safe haven under the protection of Dutch peacekeepers at the time."

• "French President Nicolas Sarkozy has named Rachida Dati, a woman with Moroccan and Algerian roots, to be justice minister... It's... the first time that a woman tied to France's former North African colonies has been given such a high-ranking government position."

• Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair called for imams in the UK to be British educated, so British Muslims could better "integrate into mainstream" British society.

• London's Olympic Committee unveiled, perhaps, the ugliest, most hideous logo ever for the 2012 games.

• "The Vatican City State is to get a solar energy installation, craftily sited on the roof of one its few large modern buildings."

• The Nimrod spy-planes of Britain's RAF have fuel leaks, which is causing safety concerns for those flying the ageing planes.

• If you're dead, you can ride the tram all night long in Croatia.

• Sarah Brown, wife of incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, "plays the demure charity-circuit wife to perfection, yet not so long ago she was running one of Britain's most powerful PR agencies and dating a dope smuggler."

• "One of the greatest collections of historical letters ever amassed has been found in a laundry room." The collection of Albin Schram has almost a thousand letters including those from Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, Elizabeth I, John Donne, John Calvin, Charlotte Brontë, Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Ernest Hemingway, Frederick the Great, Charles Darwin, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Alexander Pushkin, Claude Monet, Mohandas Gandhi, Daniel Defoe, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others.

• The Taliban plans "massive" operations against American and NATO troops in Afghanistan and warned Afghan civilians to keep away from convoys and bases. "Foreign forces have already warned civilians to avoid their military convoys in the face of rising Taliban suicide attacks against them. These attacks have resulted in a series of mistaken killings of non-combatants by the foreign troops."

• Hundreds of protesters from the Gujjar tribe, "torched buses and attacked police with rocks in New Delhi... demanding they be included among India's 'scheduled tribes', the lowest category in India's complex social hierarchy, so they can benefit from job quotas reserved for low castes."

• Gen. Pervez Musharraf "has signed into immediate effect measures to increase" his control over the media in Pakistan; including television, the Internet, and mobile phones.

• 4 million people in Wuxi, China, a "prosperous industrial town... have been deprived of drinking water for nearly a week, as a carpet of algae scum makes" Lake Taihu's water undrinkable. "Wu Lihong, an environmental activist from Yixing," and "the lake's most vocal defender... is languishing in police detention on what his wife says are trumped-up charges brought by vengeful local officials."

• A candlelight vigil that drew "an unusually large crowd" in Hong Kong marked the "18th anniversary of the Chinese military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations". Tiananmen Square, itself, "was quiet" and "under tight security".

• "Philippine troops defused a powerful bomb found in a packed bus in a southern town, after the U.S. Embassy warned that terrorists might carry out attacks in bus terminals".

• "A Komodo dragon has killed an eight-year-old boy in the first fatal attack on a human by one of the giant lizards in 33 years. It mauled the boy in scrubland in a national park on the eastern Indonesian island of Komodo."

• A "mudslide erased the pearl of Kamchatka and a part of the UNESCO world heritage site at Geyser Valley in just three minutes". The cause of the mudslide is unknown, however likely either a "glacier melted because of the untypically warm weather" or an earthquake.

• "An al-Qaeda-linked militant group in Iraq" claimed it had killed two U.S. soldiers "captured in an ambush last month". No proof was offered, but a video included "images of the military identification cards and other personal effects of two missing soldiers."

• "Fighting between Islamist militants and the Lebanese army has spread to the southern refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh as Fatah Islam's deputy commander predicted that other Sunni fighters would join the confrontation." Two Lebanese soldiers were killed in Ain al-Hilweh "in fighting with another militant group. Separately, a bomb exploded on a bus in Beirut, injuring seven people." Over 100 people have been killed in the two weeks of fighting.

• "Women working in Palestinian television in Gaza have been ordered to avoid walking alone in the street after" the "extremist fringe group Swords of Truth" of "radical Islamists threatened to slit their throats if they do not dress in religious garb while on air."

• "The Canadian dollar... was at 94.45 cents US in afternoon trading, up 0.20 cents US from Friday's close."

• The atelopus toad, which is black with "fluorescent purple markings", six types of fish, 12 kinds of dung beetles, and one ant species "were among two dozen new species discovered in the remote plateaus of eastern Suriname... in rainforests and swamps about 80 miles (128 kilometers) southeast of Paramaribo, the capital of the South American country". Two bauxite mining companies sponsored the expedition by Conservation International. It is unknown how the discoveries will impact the plans to mine.

• Bush has 594 days left. 3,480 U.S. confirmed deaths in Iraq. Over $431,756,000,000 spent on the Iraq war.

Harare/Johannesburg - Inflation in crisis-ridden Zimbabwe could reach a staggering 24,136 per cent by December, official media reported Sunday.

At 3,714 per cent, Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate is already the highest in the world.

But an economist writing in the state-controlled Sunday Mail newspaper predicted the rate would rise much, much further, if current trends continue.

'If the month-on-month inflation rate persists at around 58.6 per cent,' economist Brains Muchemwa said, 'then the year-on-year will be ringing 24,136 per cent come December 31, 2007.'

'Even if month-on-month inflation can be tamed to 45 per cent, the annual inflation rate will still top 11,730 per cent by year end,' said Muchemwa, who is employed by a local investment bank.

[...]

But in a gloomy forecast unusual for a state-controlled newspaper usually forced to toe the government line, Muchemwa said that inflation was feeding on itself because retailers and businesses were increasing prices by huge margins in anticipation of fresh hikes in inflation figures.

Meanwhile, the Zimbabwe dollar has sunk to record lows on the parallel market for foreign exchange, it has emerged.

The Zimbabwe dollar is now trading at at least 50,000 to the greenback, the Sunday Mail said. Dealers in Harare however say the figure is as high as 65,000.

http://tinyurl.com/38lwu4

NEW ORLEANS The bodies are no longer being dragged from houses and buildings toppled by Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two years later many in the medical community think the storm is still killing.

Storm survivors are dying from the effects of both psychological and physical stress, from the dust and mold still in dwellings to financial problems to fear of crime, health experts and officials say.    ...

The official death tolls in New Orleans stands at about 1,100. State health officials said deaths have not been listed as Katrina-related since the end of 2005, except for bodies found under storm wreckage. But Minyard said he believes the hurricane is still behind many deaths.   ...

"There are high rates of mental health problems among the survivors and previous research has found that mental disorders are predictors of earlier death rates," Kessler said. "So putting the two together in New Orleans is not surprising."   ...