unsolicited bid, financed entirely with cash,

American officials said that they had reached an agreement under which COLOMBIA will strengthen its efforts to protect trade unionists, clearing the way for a free-trade agreement between the two countries to be sent to the UNITED STATES Congress.



After long insisting on going it alone, PORTUGAL announced that it would seek a bail-out from its euro-zone partners. The country follows Greece and Ireland in asking for help. The decision came after ten-year government-bond yields came within a whisker of 9% and rates on 12-month and six-month treasury bills sold in a EURO1.0 billion ($1.4 billion) auction jumped by more than one and a half percentage points compared with similar sales in March.



Further stress tests of IRELAND'S BANKS revealed that they need an extra EURO24 billion ($34.4 billion) of capital. That would push the total cost of the government bail-out to around EURO70 billion, bringing almost all of the Irish banking industry under state control.



TEXAS INSTRUMENTS, a maker of computer chips, offered to buy NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR, an American rival, for $6.5 billion. American and European technology stocks rallied on the news.



Australia's government said it might thwart an A$8.4 billion ($8.7 billion) bid by SINGAPORE EXCHANGE for ASX, the main Australian bourse, citing "national interest". The combined exchange would be Asia's second largest by the number of listings.



A Chinese state-owned mining company, MINMETALS RESOURCES, made a C$6.3 billion ($6.5 billion) offer for EQUINOX MINERALS, an Australian-Canadian owner of a large copper mine in Zambia. The unsolicited bid, financed entirely with cash, is the biggest yet for a Chinese mining firm. China consumes around 40% of the world's copper and is concerned about competition for supplies of the metal. Copper's price remains high, though it has slipped by around 5% from February's stratospheric levels.



Increasingly alarmed by an overheating economy, the PEOPLE'S BANK OF CHINA raised interest rates for the fourth time in five months. The rise of a quarter of a percentage point, to 6.31% for the one-year lending rate and 3.25 for the deposit rate, came as a surprise, leading analysts to suppose that inflation in March had been higher than expected.
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his dam issue has become the first major test of environmental diplomacy for the four countries in the lower Mekong, members of the Mekong River Commission (MRC). An inter-governmental body that came up after a 1995 agreement, the Vientiane-based body aims to manage the development of the Mekong basin in consensus. Any plan to dam the Mekong has to be scrutinised for its cross-border impact under a special mechanism, formally known as the Procedure for Notification Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). "This is the first time that we are going through the prior consultation process," Jeremy Bird, MRC’s chief executive officer, told IPS. "Countries do not have a veto right (to stop a dam being built in a neighbouring country) yet countries cannot proceed without consultation."

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