■ Fast food
US fast food giant McDonald's announced on Friday that it had gone hedgehog-friendly, following a long running campaign waged by British lovers of the prickly mammals. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) claimed that countless creatures had died by getting their heads stuck inside when trying to eat left-over ice cream. McDonald's said it had redesigned cups and lids for its McFlurry ice cream so that they were no longer a danger to the animals. McDonald's UK said it had invested "significant research and testing" into designing their new cup, which features a smaller opening meaning customers have to remove the lid to eat the dessert.
■ Internet
Sohu in tie-up with NBA
Sohu.com Inc (搜狐), China's third-biggest Internet portal, and NuCom Media Group will help the National Basketball Association add content including live video broadcasts of games to its Chinese Web site, the companies said. The agreement is between the NBA, Sohu and NuSports, a NuCom subsidiary, said the joint statement released by the companies and the association at a press briefing in Beijing today. NBA started the China Web site for the 2002/03 season, the year the nation's basketball star Yao Ming (姚明) started playing in the NBA with the Houston Rockets. The association says it has 30 million viewers a week in China for its games.
■ China
GDP mostly top firms' money
The total operating revenue of China's top 500 companies last year accounted for more than three-quarters of the Asian giant's gross domestic product (GDP), the state news agency Xinhua reported yesterday. The total of 14.14 trillion yuan (US$1.8 trillion) accounted for 77.6 percent of China's GDP, according to a report issued by the China Enterprise Confederation and the China Enterprise Directors Association, quoted by Xinhua. In 2001, operating revenue of the top 500 accounted for 55.7 percent of GDP. In 2004, the figure rose to 73.5 percent.
■ Precious stones
Myanmar sells jade, gems
Military-run Myanmar has sold over 540 lots of jade and gems during a two-day auction, state media said yesterday, in a bid to earn much-needed foreign currency for the cash-strapped junta. Some 1,250 merchants, including 500 foreigners mainly from neighboring China and Thailand, attended the auction last week, the official newspaper New Light of Myanmar said. While Myanmar sold over 70 percent of jade and precious stones offered at its biggest-ever gem auction in July, the daily said the government sold just 40 percent of jade and gems at the latest sale.
■ Trade
Mercosur wants clout in IMF
The South American trade bloc Mercosur on Friday demanded greater voting power in the IMF. "We think that as a bloc of South American countries, our participation should be bigger," Brazil's Finance Minister Guido Mantega said after meeting with Mercosur finance ministers in Rio de Janeiro. "Our representation is not proportional to our political or economic importance." The IMF is expected to finalize a decision to grant China, Turkey, Mexico and South Korea a greater voting share in its operations at a meeting this month in Singapore. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela are full members of Mercosur.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
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