Free Republic

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has made great strides in protecting patents and copyrights and a U.S. complaints over commercial piracy would "seriously harm" cooperation, Vice Premier Wu Yi said on Tuesday.Earlier this month, the United States launched two cases at the WTO claiming that Beijing was not doing enough to punish illegal copiers of films and music and that Chinese restrictions on entertainment imports violated trade rules.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A raft of stronger-than-expected U.S. economic reports on Friday, including data on personal income, inflation and manufacturing, buttressed the view that the economy was on solid footing and interest rates were unlikely to fall any time soon. Personal income rose 0.6 percent in February, below the unrevised 1.0 percent gain for January but double the 0.3 percent increase forecast by analysts in a Reuters poll.February consumer spending also rose 0.6 percent, outpacing forecasts for a 0.3 percent gain after an unrevised 0.5 percent increase in January, according to Commerce Department data.

Wal-Mart has withdrawn its July 2005 application to open an industrial loan company, saying it was surrounded by "manufactured controversy" over its bid to acquire its own bank."This action follows January's FDIC decision to extend the moratorium on a number of pending ILC applications," said Jane Thompson, Wal-Mart Financial Services president. "Unlike dozens of prior ILC applications, Wal-Mart's has been surrounded by manufactured controversy since it was submitted nearly two years ago. At no stage did we intend to use the ILC to establish branch banking operations as critics have suggested -- we simply sought to reduce credit and debit...