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WASHINGTON (AP) Rejecting Bush administration arguments, the Supreme Court reversed course and agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees can use the civilian court system to challenge their indefinite confinement.

The administration argues that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases. The justices took the action without comment along with other end-of-term orders.

In April, the court turned down an identical request, although several justices indicated they could be persuaded otherwise.

The move is highly unusual.

The court did not indicate what changed the justices’ minds about considering the issue. But last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military lawyer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full-blown review by civilian courts.

“This is a stunning victory for the detainees,” said Eric M. Freedman, professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School, who has been advising the detainees. “It goes well beyond what we asked for, and clearly indicates the unease up there” at the Supreme Court.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that “we did not think that court review at this time was necessary, but we are confident in our legal position.”

Five of the nine justices must agree to take a case that previously has been denied a hearing, according to an authoritative text on the Supreme Court.

Court officials could not find a similar instance in records going back more than 30 years where the justices first denied a petition and later agreed to hear it.

The case is expected to be heard in the fall.

In February, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a key provision of a law the Bush administration pushed through Congress last year stripping federal courts of their ability to hear the detainees’ challenges to their confinement.

On April 2, the Supreme denied the detainees’ request to review the February appeals court ruling.

The detainees then petitioned the court to reconsider its denial.

Dismissing the petitions would be “a profound deprivation” of the prisoners’ right to speedy court review, lawyers for the detainees said.

The administration asked that the detainees’ Supreme Court petitions be thrown out.

Many of the 375 detainees have been held at Guantanamo for five years.

In recent months, the main arena in the legal battle over the detainees has been the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The appeals court is considering how to handle the detainees’ challenges to military tribunals that found them to be enemy combatants, which left them without any of the legal rights accorded prisoners of war.

The White House is considering closing Guantanamo and transferring some of the most dangerous suspects to a prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a Navy brig in South Carolina.

The detainees’ attorneys want the appeals court to allow a broad inquiry questioning the accuracy and completeness of the evidence the tribunals gathered about the detainees, most of it classified.

The Justice Department has been seeking a limited review, saying that the findings of the military tribunals are “entitled to the highest level of deference.”

The White House has been weighing closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, which has brought global criticism of the Bush administration and condemnation from Democrats on Capitol Hill.

The cases are Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195, and Al Odah v. U.S., 06-1196.

Investors yanked $9.99 billion from mutual funds focused on U.S. stocks in May, even as the market bobbed and weaved to higher ground.

The redemptions, vs. $1.71 inflow in April, were the most since February 2003, when investors pulled $10.3 billion from U.S. stock funds. In June ‘06, domestic stock funds waved goodbye to $9.5 billion amid a 15% summer slump in the Nasdaq.

What investors took from home funds, they gave to those aimed at foreign markets.

World equity funds saw an inflow of $11.54 billion in May. That continued a strong performance in April, when they got $16.5 billion in new money.

All told, stock funds brought in $1.55 billion in new money in May, down from $18.21 billion in April.

So far this year, investors have put $84 billion into stock funds. That’s far less than the $121.3 billion they’d enlisted between January and May in 2006.

“In 2006, funds that invested overseas had net new cash flow of $148.5 billion, and funds that invested domestically had net cash flow of $11 billion,” said ICI spokesman Chris Wloszczyna. “And that was a trend that was in place through much of 2005.”

In May, the S&P 500 ended 3.26% higher and the Nasdaq composite gained 3.15%. The Dow Jones stood out with a 4.32% gain.

The MSCI EAFE index, which tracks stocks from Europe, Australasia and the Far East, edged up 2%.

U.S. equity funds tracked by Lipper on average climbed 3.82% in May, while world equity funds returned 3.46%. They returned 9.76% and 10.95%, respectively, for the year through May.

Investors put $2.02 billion into hybrid funds, which hold both stocks and bonds. That was roughly the same as the $2.55 billion inflow in April.

Mixed equity funds returned 2.09% in May and 6.54% year to date.

Bond Fund Flow

Bond funds won over $21.28 billion in May, up from $13.52 billion in April. Taxable bond funds swelled by $17.71 billion in May vs. $12.20 billion in April. Municipal bond funds got $3.58 billion in May more than double April’s inflow of $1.33 billion.

Wloszczyna cites the growing popularity of target-date funds, which buy both bonds and stocks, as one of the driving forces behind the trend in bonds.

For the year to date, bond funds’ inflow tally was $79.77 billion, not far behind stock funds’ $84 billion and up from $21.01 billion in the year-earlier period.

Government bonds on average fell 0.77% in May, but have returned 1.33% year to date.

Money market funds which are more volatile, as institutions account for two-thirds of the action had an inflow of $57.57 billion in May vs. an outflow of $11.26 billion in April.

In all, investors poured $24.85 billion into long-term mutual funds in May. Total assets in all funds, including money market funds, increased by 3% to $11.396 trillion in May. The figure stood at $10.414 trillion on Dec. 31.

Fidelity took in $7.5 billion in new money in May. It’s received $23.3 billion year to date. Contributions have slowed significantly from last year. Fidelity investors had plopped down $38 billion between January and May in 2006, says Fidelity spokesman Adam Banker.

Vanguard reported $8.3 billion in net flows in May vs. $6.7 billion in April.

American Funds’ inflow into stock and bond funds amounted to $5.4 billion in May, according to Strategic Insight Mutual Fund Research and Consulting.

Barclays Global Investors pulled in $4.4 billion in net flows. Dodge & Cox pulled in $2.2 billion, BlackRock $2.2 billion, Franklin Templeton $2.0 billion and Schwab $1.6 billion, according to Strategic Insight data.

June Bloom?

Investors seemed to have a slightly better disposition toward U.S. stock funds in June. They put in $5.88 billion of new money, according to TrimTabs.com. But investors still favored world equity funds, which got an estimated $12.82 billion.

UNIVERSITY friends of Alex Salmond recall that as a student he sometimes stayed up all night playing Diplomacy. The board game, which requires strategy and negotiation as well as bluff and backstabbing, is good training for any politician.

But the practice he got at St Andrews in the mid-1970s in having to think ahead and build unlikely alliances to advance his cause must stand him in particularly good stead in his new role as First Minister of Scotland’s first minority government.

With 47 Scottish Nationalist MSPs up against 81 from all the other parties, Mr Salmond knows he faces a continual challenge in getting anything agreed.

And many believe the minority SNP administration will not be able to continue right through to the next Scottish Parliament elections in 2011.

In these early days of the new session, Mr Salmond has gone out of his way to say he wants to co-operate with other parties, is ready to consider their ideas and will put the interests of Scotland first.

One Labour insider concedes Mr Salmond has struck the right tone so far, saying: “He is playing a very clever game, talking about being willing to listen to ideas from other parties, coming across as very statesmanlike. It’s an effective strategy. The country is not in any mood for dogfights between political parties.”

But the insider believes the First Minister’s Mr Nice Guy image has a limited life: “It won’t last. They will have to get their budget through in the autumn - that will be the key thing. That’s when they have to make some real decisions and put their money where their mouth is. That’s when the battles will start.”

There will be issues where Mr Salmond and his colleagues can build a majority by negotiating with other parties. But the closeness of the numbers - the SNP’s 47 to Labour’s 46, the Tories’ and Lib Dems’ 16 each, the two Greens and one independent - mean these majorities will often be fragile.

And the door will be open to the opposition to use procedural devices never previously explored at Holyrood to ambush or frustrate the Executive’s plans. A surprise amendment here or unexpected motion there and the government could be in trouble.

And it only takes unexpected illness or bad weather to prevent MSPs from getting to parliament on the day of a crucial vote and the result could be an embarrassing defeat. Already there is the prospect of the SNP temporarily losing its one-seat advantage over Labour when Livingston MSP Angela Constance takes time off to have a baby in the autumn.

Mr Salmond has said he does not believe the opposition will “stoop so low” as to exploit the situation for political advantage. But in response Labour has made clear it will make no concessions, pointing out it was the SNP who abandoned the practice of “pairing”, where parties agree MSPs who have to miss a vote can be matched with each other to keep the numbers even.

And then there is the possibility of rebellion on the backbenches. Most of the Nationalist MSPs are likely to feel a duty of loyalty to the leadership which has got the party elected to power for the first time in its history, but it only takes one or two to decide they want to make a stand on some issue close to their hearts and the government is in trouble again.

A parliament source says the SNP business manager Bruce Crawford probably has the most difficult job of all: “He is going to have to have eyes and ears everywhere, second guess people all the time and try to build alliances wherever he can.”

But he will probably not find himself reduced to the practice used at Westminster in 1964-66, when Harold Wilson’s Labour government had a wafer-thin majority and seriously ill MPs from both sides were brought to the Commons from their hospital beds - sometimes unconscious - so they could vote in crucial divisions.

The closeness of the 1964 general election result - Labour had a majority of just five - meant the Tories had the potential to inflict embarrassing defeats on Labour, but having just suffered a rebuff from the voters, they were in no rush to bring the Government down. One comfort for Mr Salmond at the moment is that no-one wants to force a new election.

Wilson knew he could not be sure of getting some of his more radical measures through Parliament, but was eager to prove Labour was an instrument for change and put forward the proposals anyway, confident that they would be a good programme on which to fight the next election. And when the country went to the polls again in 1966, Labour secured a much healthier majority of 97 seats.

Mr Salmond intends to bring forward his proposals to scrap the council tax in favour of local income tax and his Bill for an independence referendum, even though both are almost certain to be rejected. It’s all down to tactics - letting the public see who is vetoing supposedly popular policies.

But if Mr Salmond’s student-day experience of Diplomacy is helping him negotiate the potential pitfalls of minority government, a more basic kind of diplomacy seems to be in short supply at Westminster.

The failure of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to pick up the phone and offer the new First Minister simple congratulations and best wishes has been described as childish, small-minded and petty. “It doesn’t look good, to say the least,” says one Labour MSP.

It will take at least 10 years before any work starts on a proposed Alaska Highway gas pipeline through the Yukon, a gas company executive says.

Ron Brintnell, director of gas development at Enbridge Inc., told delegates Tuesday at the Resource Development and Northern Transportation Conference in Whitehorse that the proposed project is at least a decade away and the cost of it would be anyone’s guess.

“There’s never been an infrastructure project of this magnitude in North America. It could quite possibly [be] the largest private-sector construction project in the world,” he said.

“When can you expect to see Alaska Gas? We don’t know; 2020-plus is not unrealistic. It depends on how the process goes.”

Enbridge is one of several companies that hopes to build the proposed 2,810-kilometre pipeline that would transport gas from Alaska’s North Slope through the Yukon and northern B.C. to Alberta.

But Brintnell said he anticipates several expensive hurdles: for starters, he estimated Enbridge will spend at least $1 billion to move the proposal through the regulatory process.

“Think about that: a billion dollars just to get through the regulatory process. Most projects don’t cost a billion dollars,” he said.

He also cited rising steel and other construction-related costs, and said the 132-centimetre pipe Enbridge wants to use has never been built.

“No one really knows what this pipeline project will cost. There hasn’t been an update for the Alaskan line for a long time,” Brintnell said, adding that the last major estimate was made in 2001.

“We think that just the A to B portion could be well in excess of $20 billion. If that’s Canadian dollars or U.S. dollars, we’re still talking about a lot of money.”

Brintnell also raised major concerns about skilled labour, as he said Canada does not have the qualified workers to build a pipeline.

He said the state of Alaska will be calling for proposals for the proposed project before the end of this summer.

WASHINGTON (AP) The United States and South Korea signed a free-trade agreement Saturday that reflected U.S. calls for stricter labor and environmental standards.

South Korean Trade Minister Kim Hyun-chong and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab signed the agreement in Washington, meeting a deadline under President Bush’s expiring special trade powers.

That “fast track” authority prevents lawmakers from amending the deal before voting on it. The trade deal still needs to be approved by lawmakers in both countries to take effect.

Bush said Saturday that the Korean agreement would generate exports for U.S. farmers, ranchers, manufacturers and service suppliers. He urged Congress to ratify the agreement.

The agreement would eliminate and lower tariffs and other trade barriers in a wide range of industrial goods and services, including automobiles, agricultural products and financial services.

South Korea also agreed to change its tax system for larger vehicles, which the U.S. contended was discriminatory. South Korea currently sells more than 700,000 vehicles a year in the United States, while U.S. makers sell about 5,000 in South Korea.

The two countries concluded the free-trade agreement in April after 10 months of tough negotiations, only to have it hung up over last-minute amendments requested by Washington. The amendments incorporate stricter labor and environmental guidelines set by the new Democratic majority in Congress for free trade deals.

The U.S. also concluded free trade deals with Colombia, Panama and Peru ahead of Saturday’s deadline.