World Business Quick Take

■ HK may sell Disney stake
Hong Kong's government may sell its controlling stake in the territory's recently opened Disneyland theme park, its financial services chief told legislators yesterday. Fred Ma said the government's 57 percent stake in the US$3 billion resort could be sold off in keeping with the adminis-tration's belief that the private sector is best suited to run major businesses. "In the long run, the govern-ment may consider in the light of the `Big Market, Small Government' principle to divest its shareholdings in the company at an appropriate time when it is in the overall economic interests of Hong Kong to do so," Ma told legislators. The territory's leaders were criticized in 1999 when they decided to foot most of the bill for the US entertainment giant's first resort in China.

■ Communications
China tackles SMS fiends
China has declared war on scams using mobile phone short messages that promise everything from fake cash prizes to sexual services to contract killings. Laws governing China's mobile-phone market have fallen behind its explosive growth, which has generated huge profits for short message service providers. The new campaign is an extension of a crackdown started last year on pornographic and subver-sive content and spam messages sent by mobile phones or through the Internet. China's Ministry of Public Security would work with the Ministry of Infor-mation Industry and the China Banking Regulatory Commission to stamp out messages that duped people into turning over personal account information or involved prostitution, gambling, contract murder, guns for sale, fake lotteries and more.

■ Biometrics
System guesses sex, age
Customers stopping to gaze at the store window may soon be less anonymous than they think -- the store will instantly know their age and gender. Japanese bikemaker Yamaha Motor has unveiled a camera system that recognizes if a person is a man or woman and puts them into one of five age groups. "This could be used at entrances and gates to some facilities or set up at eye-catching spots to profile those who entered the places or stared at them," Makoto Yoshida, Yamaha Motor's advanced system research division supervisor, said yesterday. Yamaha designed the system by building up a computer database of 10,000 people's faces. It said the system gets it right on gender 88 percent of the time -- about the same accuracy rate as the human eye -- and 77 percent of the time for age.

■ Taxation
US tax code may change
A high-level panel appointed by US President George W. Bush on Tuesday recommended the first wholesale revisions to the byzantine US tax code in two decades to encourage savings and economic growth. The panel's report said that without comprehen-sive reform, the tax system would only grow more bewildering and it stressed the need to tax spending more than income in a country where the savings rate is abysmally low. The panel offered the adminis-tration two separate proposals. One is called the Simplified Income Tax Plan,to replace the current six tax brackets with four, ranging from 15 percent to a top rate of 33 percent. The other is dubbed the Growth and Investment Tax Plan, which would increase incentives for savings by slashing taxes on capital income.