AsiaNewsAgencies - China: Xintang: police and army occupy city to stop protests. Climate akin to martial law, with police patrolling every street, road blocks, orders for shops and restaurants to close early, people advised not to go out at night. Tens of thousands of migrants are ready to protest on the streets for justice and recognition, tired of constant harassment.Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The police are now patrolling the streets and putting roadblocks on main thoroughfares of Xintang in the city of Zhengcheng, to end to urban guerrilla warfare that first broke out June 10. But it is a deceptive calm, with tens of thousands of immigrants ready to explode with further protests and violence. Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The police are now patrolling the streets and putting roadblocks on main thoroughfares of Xintang in the city of Zhengcheng, to end to urban guerrilla warfare that first broke out June 10. But it is a deceptive calm, with tens of thousands of immigrants ready to explode with further protests and violence. summoned the managers of 1,200 companies in the area telling them to "pay close attention to their employees." In an atmosphere akin to martial law, shops and restaurants have been ordered to close early. Residents have been "advised" not to go out at night and not to post pictures of the clashes on line.
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With Europe's debt crisis intensifying by the day, fear appears to be the single biggest factor motivating those in charge of policy on the common currency. But as finance ministers from the 17 euro countries debated how to bail out Greece for a second time in a year, before an EU summit on 25 June, the signs are not promising. In Athens, a day after Standard and Poor's gave Greece the lowest rating of any country it covers – lower even than Pakistan and Ecuador – the omens appeared to be particularly poor. Differences over involvement of private investors in the rescue package – which is seen as the key to getting Europe's paymaster, Germany, to agree to it at all – this week pushed the cost of insuring Greek government debt against default up to 1,600 basis points, a record high even by the standards set so far. More than ever, Papandreou appears stuck between a rock and a hard place. Faced with a €340bn (£300bn) debt projected to hit 160% of GDP by 2012, Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. In a country plagued by a shadow economy that accounts for almost 30% of GDP, the medicine prescribed by the EU, IMF and ECB in exchange for €110bn of emergency loans last May, has resulted in a deeper than expected recession with further cost-cutting measures now seen as crucial if Greece is not only to rein in its debt but make it sustainable.

- Romania’s major grain traders such as Cargill, Alfred C. Toepfer, Glencore and Nidera exported grain worth EUR1.3 billion from June 2010 through 2011, according to Victor Beznea, president of the Romanian Association of Farm Product Traders (ARCPA).

- The record-high EUR1.5 billion raised by the Finance Ministry last week from the foreign markets brings to over EUR4.5 billion the foreign currency debt accumulated by Romania since the beginning of the year.

According to the source, the U.S. carmaker will produce over 70 B-Max prototypes in Romania this summer. The car parts needed to assemble the B-Max models were produced at Ford's car plants in Germany. The B-Max minivans will be tested soon in Belgium, at Ford Lommel Proving Ground and in other countries. After tests are finished, the cars will be dismantled. Ford Romania will start the production of the new car model next year. B-Max will be produced exclusively in Romania. At the end of March, Ford finished installing the production lines for B-Max and a new family of engines at the Craiova car plant. Ford produced about 3,000 Transit Connect light commercial vehicles in Romania. The U.S. carmaker has invested EUR450 million so far in operations carried out in Craiova.

BUCHAREST - Romania sold EUR1.5 billion in five-year bonds at an annual yield of 5.29%, in the first issue of the country's EUR7 billion medium term notes (MTNs) program, with orders books closing at EUR3 billion, a Finance Ministry official said Thursday. Meanwhile - Greece's crisis-hit economy expanded by a sickly 0.2% in the first three months of this year – even worse than first thought – as its fiscal austerity measures strangled demand, official figures have revealed. The bailed-out economy is now shrinking at an annual rate of 5.5%, instead of an initial estimate of 4.8%, the Greek statistical agency said on Thursday. Bond yields jumped after the announcement, with the government now facing paying 25.08% over two years if it tried to borrow from the financial markets. The cost of insuring Greek debt against default also hit new record highs. Athens is widely expected to receive a fresh bailout from its eurozone partners in the coming weeks, but Germany is locked in a standoff with the European Central Bank about the terms of any new assistance package, and whether Greece's private sector creditors will have to bear part of the cost. The ECB is concerned that forcing bondholders to take a loss could spark a catastrophic loss of confidence in Europe's banks, many of which are sitting on millions of euros-worth of Greek debt.

HAMBURG, Germany — First they pointed a finger at Spanish cucumbers. Then they cast suspicion on sprouts from Germany. Now German officials appear dumbfounded as to the source of the deadliest E. coli outbreak in modern history, and one U.S. expert called the investigation a "disaster." Backtracking for the second time in a week, officials Monday said preliminary tests have found no evidence that vegetable sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany were to blame. The surprise U-turn came only a day after the same state agency, Lower Saxony's agriculture ministry, held a news conference to announce that the sprouts appeared to be the culprit in the outbreak that has killed 22 people and sickened more than 2,330 others across Europe, most of them in Germany, over the past month. Andreas Hensel, head of Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, warned, "We have to be clear on this: Maybe we won't be able anymore to identify the source." At an EU health ministers meeting Monday in Luxembourg, Germany defended itself against accusations it had acted prematurely in pointing to Spanish cucumbers. "The virus is so aggressive that we had to check every track," said Health State Secretary Annette Widmann-Mauz. The EU will hold an emergency meeting of farm ministers Tuesday to address the crisis, including a ban imposed by Russia on all EU vegetables.

E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Aggressive New Strain - As the E. coli outbreak continues to ravage Germany and other parts of Europe, the World Health Organization said Thursday that the aggressive intestinal bacteria is a new strain never seen before. Meanwhile fears of the illness prompted Russia to ban imports of vegetables from the EU. Researchers are still desperately searching for the origin of the E. coli bacteria that has left 18 dead and infected hundreds of others in Germany and Europe. The number of cases within Germany continues to rise, with up to 2,000 reported cases of infection, several hundred more than at the beginning of the week. Following the death of another victim in Hamburg overnight, the World Health Organization announced that preliminary genetic sequencing had revealed the deadly strain is likely a mutant form of two separate E. coli bacteria that is new to scientists. The "unique strain has never been isolated from patients before" and has "various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing," WHO food safety expert Hilde Kruse told news agency AP.
The mutant bacteria was identified through cooperation between scientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and the Beijing Genomic Institute. "This strain is only a very distant relative of conventional EHEC bacteria," said UKE bacteriologist Holger Rohde. The newly discovered enterohemorrhagic strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli (EHEC) causes watery or bloody diarrhea. In severe cases, EHEC also attacks the blood, kidneys and brain, causing a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS). Thousands of people in nine European countries have been infected by the bacteria, with nearly 500 developing the HUS complication.

Google US accounts hacked

Google has warned that computer hackers in China had broken into the Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior government officials in the US and political activists. The internet giant said all victims had been notified and their accounts had been secured. The attacks, announced on Google's blog, are not believed to be tied to a more sophisticated assault originating from China in late 2009 and early last year. That intrusion targeted Google's own security systems and triggered a high-profile battle with China's Communist government over online censorship. The tensions escalated amid reports that the Chinese government had at least an indirect hand in the hacking attacks, a possibility that Google did not rule out. In the latest incident, Google believes Chinese hackers tricked people into sharing their passwords in so-called "phishing" scams

In Athens, the spirit takes hold just before the sun has set.

In Athens, the spirit takes hold just before the sun has set. - It is then that Greeks, young and old, married and single, employed and unemployed flood the square in a wave of protest against the austerity and recession that has brought their country to the brink of despondency and despair. "Openly we say that we have been inspired by the demonstrators in Spain," said Simos Adamopoulos, an organiser who has spent three nights sleeping in a tent in the square. "Our motto is 'the battle that is never waged is never won.' We will stay here, and in squares up and down the country for as long as it takes." While even protestors admit their endgame remains unclear, their motivation beyond the realms of party or political creed has surprised even the most cynical. As in Spain the demonstrators – estimated in Athens alone to have exceeded 50,000 on Sunday – have been lured into action by Facebook. Motivated by a peaceful desire to vent their spleen, they have turned up at rallies with pots and pans rather the more lethal Molotov cocktail preferred by violence-prone youngsters. "But," says Adamopoulos, "we're also really disgusted with the system, with the political establishment, with all those crooks and thieves. As we've got poorer they've got richer and that you could say is also spurring us." Greece is in a terminal debt trap. Further government austerity will just kill the economy, decrease the GDP further and hence increase the debt/gdp ratio . More bailouts that will never be repaid, will temporarily prop up the Greek economy but will also increase debt and will also make the situation worse. So the question is; "why won't the central banks simply allow a haircut?" The only reasonable answer is that they know a haircut would tip other Euro countries and banks into insolvency and set off a domino effect . Hopefully all persons reading this have hedged their positions against such a cascading sequence of defaults. If not, act soon, or forever live with the consequences. For the common person who expects decent employment opportunities, a government pension, and free health care, there is simply nowhere to hide.

IMF to judge Greece as protests swell

ATHENS (Reuters) - European Union and IMF officials are expected to deliver their verdict this week on Greece's faltering drive to bring its budget deficit under control, but ordinary Greeks have warned that their patience is running thin. Greece last year won a 110 billion euro (95.4 billion pound) rescue package from the EU and International Monetary Fund, but since then has struggled to meet its deficit reduction targets, heightening the risk of a default on its 327 billion euro debt -- equivalent to 150 percent of economic output. European Central Bank board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi issued a dire warning against default and told the Financial Times it was a "fairytale" to think that Greece's debts could be restructured in an orderly way. "If you look at financial markets, every time there is mention of a word like 'restructuring' or 'soft restructuring' they go crazy - which proves that this could not happen in an orderly way, in this environment at least," he said. He added: "If Greece defaulted, the Greek banking system would collapse. It would then need a huge recapitalisation -- but where would the money come from?" The Italian said Greece could instead reduce its debt by selling assets and changing its tax and expenditure systems. "If you look at the balance sheet of Greece, it is not insolvent." But Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou has failed to win backing from the opposition to adopt fresh austerity steps, more economic reforms and faster sales of state assets, as demanded by the EU and IMF.