“European countries, including France, have reason to rejoice in an announcement that raises the hope of a favourable outcome to this twofold tragedy, with a possible speedy extradition of the six prisoners to Bulgaria”, comments Le Monde (19/7) on the outcome of the trial in Libya against the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor accused of having deliberately inoculated the Aids virus in 438 children. “The sentence of Libya’s highest court – points out Avvenire – was expected after the families [of the victims] had withdrawn their demand for a death sentence in the afternoon and after they had received in the morning a sum of 460 million dollars in compensation, roughly a million dollars per family, agreed on in the preceding days through the Gheddafi Foundation. The five nurses, according to Libyan sources, should be extradited and serve their life sentence in prison in Bulgaria. The nurses, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valya Cherveniashka, Valentina Siropulo and Kristiana Valcheva have been in prison in Libya since February 1999 together with the Palestinian physician Ashraf Juma Hajuj. All of them were sentenced to death last year. The six has repeatedly denounced that the confession on which the prosecution based its case was extorted from them by torture. Numerous Western virologists have maintained that the negligence and the poor hygienic conditions of the hospital in Benghazi were responsible for the infection”. “The relief that those condemned to death in Libya will not be executed is combined with the anger aroused by this case that began as far back as 1999”, writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (19/7). “Over the past weeks a squalid game has been played that can only be defined by the term human trafficking. Nor is it redeemed by the fact that a large part of the compensation to the families of the victims comes from the Gheddafi Foundation, directed by Saif al Islam, a son of the revolutionary leader. In Germany, a country usually so alert to human rights, there was not even a protest demonstration against such a trade in human beings. Was it respect for a different culture?”. And in the Frankfurter Rundschau (18/7), Ralph Schulze writes: “A happy end is quite something else. The trial against the five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor was a farce right from the start”… “Libyan justice had a need for a scapegoat, because the anger of the people about the Aids scandal in Benghazi, the country’s second city, is still great. So great that the anger about the institutional incompetence in the country’s healthcare sector and the catastrophic hygienic conditions in the hospital could have become dangerous also for those in power. That explains why the Head of State Gheddafi struggled so fiercely against a solution of the case”. “The revival of Europe will only endure if the governments grasp the opportunity of these more favourable times to make more decisive reforms”. That’s the basic thesis of the cover story in the Economist (14/7). Since the end of 2006, says the editorial, “the European area has overtaken that of America: in 2007 it is set to grow by 2.7% outstripping the USA and Japan: the euro is once again appreciating against the dollar and the yen. Unemployment has dropped to 7%, the lowest level since the introduction of the euro in 1999”. In the light of these data, comments the English magazine, “some Europeans could be tempted to conclude that their economic problems have been overcome”. On the contrary, according to the Economist, the economic recovery of our continent risks being episodic or an end in itself, unless it is accompanied by more decisive action in terms of reforms, essential for being able to “prosper in an ever-more competitive and globalized environment”. “The decision to install the anti-missive shield in Poland was taken without the knowledge of Parliament or even of the government itself, but more especially it was taken against the opinion of over 60% of the Polish people. Moreover, we have largely got to know of this decision of such vital importance for our country, not from Warsaw but from Washington”. That’s how the leading Polish daily Trybuna (17/7) has criticized the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski who, on his visit to the USA and after his meeting with President George W. Bush, announced the results of his talks. In reporting on the press conference given by the two Presidents the Polish paper comments: “Neither of the two even mentioned the doubts and the reservations of NATO partners and of the Congress of the USA, which would like to limit the funds destined for the building of the American military base in Poland. Nor did either even raise the question of the contrary opinion of Russia or the proposal presented by the Kremlin to the USA (to install the American bases in Azerbaijan)”. “However we evaluate the position of Moscow, it cannot be irrelevant for the global security of Poland”, points out the paper.
