Category: Other

BEIJING, October 29, 2008 (AFP) – Supermarkets in Beijing stopped selling eggs from one of China’s major producers on Wednesday as fears about the toxic chemical melamine spread to the Chinese capital. The retailers acted after Hong Kong health authorities said they had detected melamine, which has killed four babies and sickened 53,000 in China, […]

SAMUT PRAKAN, October 29, 2008 (AFP) – At the Elite Thai Leather factory in Bangkok, craftsman contort tough Thai crocodile hides into any style of luxury handbag a fashion designer wants. To receive instant alerts from LBO on your Dialog mobile type ‘lbo’ and send to 678 Bright blue handbags made from the dyed rough […]

JAKARTA, October 29, 2008 (AFP) – A former governor of Indonesia’s central bank was sentenced to five years in jail and a relative of President Susilo Bambang was named a suspect Wednesday in a snowballing corruption scandal. Burhanuddin Abdullah was convicted in the anti-corruption court of embezzling 10.3 million dollars in bank funds to bribe […]

LONDON, October 28, 2008 (AFP) – Britain’s central bank urged new constraints on banks Tuesday to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis, saying there needed to be a “fundamental rethink” of how the institutions manage risk. The Bank of England warned banks had overextended themselves during the economic boom years, lending out more than […]

WASHINGTON, October 28, 2008 (AFP) – The Federal Reserve opens a two-day meeting Tuesday widely expected to cut key interest rates further as part of an unrelenting effort by the central bank to restore confidence to battered markets. The US central bank, which led a coordinated global rate cut earlier this month that pushed its […]

TOKYO, October 28, 2008 (AFP) – The euro dropped to 1.2328 dollars in Asian trade on Tuesday, the lowest level since April 2006, pressured by growing fears of recession in Europe. The euro later recovered slightly to 1.2357 dollars, still sharply lower compared with its level of 1.2520 dollars in New York overnight.Worries about the […]

HONG KONG, October 28, 2008 (AFP) – Hundreds of senior staff at one of Asia’s top brokerages, CLSA, have been asked to take a pay cut of up to 25 percent in a bid to avoid redundancies, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.A total of 500 senior brokers, analysts and managers at the Asian brokerage unit of […]

BEIJING, October 28, 2008 (AFP) – Wal-Mart said Tuesday it had pulled a major brand of eggs from its stores in China, as concerns rose that an industrial chemical found in Chinese dairy products was in the nation’s wider food chain.The announcement by the US retail giant came after authorities in Hong Kong said eggs […]