Chinese inflation at two-year high
Hong Kong: China's inflation rose to a more than two-year high in May increasing the likelihood that interest rates will be raised further in the world's fastest-growing major economy.

Consumer prices gained 3.4 per cent from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday which was more than the 3.3 per cent expected by economists.

April's inflation rate was 3 per cent matching the central bank's 2007 target.

The central bank said it is "closely" watching rising food costs and will study the inflation data before any interest-rate change, governor Zhou Xiaochuan said June 5.

The Chinese government is expected to increase lending and deposit rates for a third time this year, a survey showed.
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Apple takes on Microsoft with Safari internet browser
San Francisco: Apple plans to introduce a version of its Safari Internet browser for Windows, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said.

However, investors were disappointed that Jobs did not have bigger news to unveil and Apple shares sank nearly 3.5 per cent, their biggest one-day fall in about four months.

Speaking at Apple's annual developers' conference in San Francisco, Jobs said that test versions of the new Safari 3 showed that it was twice as fast at loading web pages as Internet Explorer. Safari has 5 per cent of the browser market compared to 78 per cent for Internet Explorer.

A free test version of Safari 3 is available to the public now as a download and the final version will be available as a free download to users of both Mac OS X and Windows in October, the company said.

The launch of the New Safari may mean the onset of a new browser war after nearly a decade after Microsoft knocked off pioneering rival Netscape by including Internet Explorer for free in Windows.
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London beats NY as business top spot
Hong Kong: London stood at the top of a list of 50 cities as the world's biggest commerce centre, beating New York, Tokyo and Chicago, according to a report by MasterCard, the world's second-biggest credit-card company.

London beat New York in four of six areas in the report covering economic stability, ease of doing business, volumes of financial flow and attributes as a business centre.

The study is the latest saying New York lags London as a global commerce centre.

New York was once considered the unchallenged financial capital of the world but has now ceded ground to London primarily because bond market regulations in New York affect the volume of listed sales MasterCard said.

The report also said the US would lose its place as the world's leading financial centre in the next decade if legal and regulatory changes were not made.

The total amount of money raised in Europe so far this year is 78 per cent greater than the value of US offerings, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as stricter financial-reporting requirements in New York deter some companies from listing there.

Critics blame the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002, for a decline in public share sales in US markets. The US accounted for 20 per cent of all IPOs last year, down from 35 per cent in 2001, according to the Financial Services Forum, which represents the country's largest banks and insurers.
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