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/ 26 October 2004
The Medium Term Budget Policy Statement was tabled in the National Assembly on Tuesday by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. It addressed several issues, including South Africa’s financial commitment to continental bodies such as the African Union, and the country’s current account deficit.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-Business&ao=124422">’No major surprises'</a>
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za//Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-Business&ao=124405">Rand stability is policy goal</a>
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/ 26 October 2004
British artists Damien Hirst and David Hockney are to make gifts of some of their paintings to the Tate Gallery in London, which can no longer afford such works, its director Nicholas Serota said on Monday. It is so broke that it is asking for gifts and legacies to maintain its internationally famous collection of works of modern and contemporary art.
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/ 26 October 2004
The Durban High Court heard on Tuesday how Schabir Shaik signed an agreement with Thomson CSF International Africa to facilitate payments to his Nkobi group under the guise of a ”service provider” agreement. This is the latest evidence from forensic auditor Johan van der Walt who has been in the witness box at Shaik’s fraud and corruption trial for four days.
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/ 26 October 2004
Yasser Arafat’s medics flatly denied on Tuesday that the 75-year-old Palestinian leader needs hospital treatment after Israel gave clearance for him to be treated outside his West Bank headquarters. Israel’s Defence Ministry said late on Monday that Arafat will be allowed to leave his headquarters to be examined in a Ramallah hospital.
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/ 26 October 2004
Investigators have found that allegations of matric examination papers leaked in Gauteng were ”baseless and unsubstantiated”, the provincial education department said on Tuesday. It was alleged on Monday that a business economics paper was leaked in Lenasia, south of Johannesburg.
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/ 26 October 2004
The South African government, in its Medium Term Budget Policy Statement on Tuesday, said that stability of the rand was its main foreign exchange policy goal. "For many firms it is not the level of the rand, but capacity to absorb risk and adapt market strategies, that is critical. Smaller businesses and the poor generally have limited capacity to hedge against economic risks," the Treasury said.
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/ 26 October 2004
They’ve fought with fists. They’ve thrown paper at each other. And on Tuesday, Taiwan’s rowdy lawmakers had an old-fashioned food fight. Legislators began chucking white cardboard takeout lunch boxes full of rice, meat, hard-boiled eggs and vegetables at each other during a heated debate over whether Taiwan should spend billions on weapons sold by the United States.
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/ 26 October 2004
An unemployed ex-gangster in Japan in love with a 15-year-old girl chopped off his little finger and mailed it to her father twice in an unsuccessful bid to prove his commitment, police said on Tuesday. Hiroyuki Yoshikawa (36) was arrested on Monday after the teenager’s father told police the finger had been sent to him again.
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/ 26 October 2004
Modern-day Indian English or ”Hinglish”, as the variety of English spoken in India is called, has a distinct time-capsule flavour — harking back to the days of the British Raj. Phrases that are dying out elsewhere remain in common parlance on the subcontinent, where ”sleuths nab” their man, ”miscreants abscond,” youths engage in ”tomfoolery” and politicians say their opponents speak ”balderdash”.
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/ 26 October 2004
The JSE Securities Exchange was in the black in noon trade on Tuesday after a weakening in the rand from a three-month best seen on Monday morning and an
uptick in world markets helped it bounce from an oversold position. Volumes were light ahead of Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s medium term budget policy statement due at 2pm.