“A lot of the problems were down to stock problems rather than bad trading.”. New York blue chips take a dive

Wall Street US blue chip stocks tumbled 50 points at one stage in New York yesterday, prompting authorities to call a halt to index-linked trading. The fall in the Dow Jones industrial average to 4,408 was ascribed to profit taking and computer program selling ahead of next Friday’s “triple witching hour”. Stock index futures were also sharply lower, with the fall blamed on weak bond prices.. Lloyd’s go-between role for Verey

David Verey, chairman of Lazard Brothers, has been asked by Lloyd’s of London to act as an intermediary between syndicate auditors and litigating names in an attempt to bring the auditors into the planned out-of-court settlement of all legal disputes dogging the market.. Hamper company down 17%

Shares in Park Foods, the hamper business run by Everton football club chairman Peter Johnson, lost 17 per cent of their value yesterday after the company reported problems in its wholesale hamper business. There is no indication that the President is in any way connected with the case against Mr Tucker..

“The surging columns on Shell House, away from the routes to their destination, shots fired and the fact that the few policemen deployed decided to run away gave credence to the information we had gathered,” he said.It was in that context that he instructed ANC guards to protect Shell House “even if they had to kill people”. Olisa Agbokoba, president of the Civil Liberties Organisation, was picked up at his law office by three state security agents, according to a statement from the CLO.
Abdul Oroh, executive director of the CLO, said his organisation “will not be daunted by this act of intimidation in our quest to ensure a free society governed by law, reason, and social justice.”Mr Agbokoba’s arrest came as the head of the police issued a stern warning to pro-democracy activists who may be planning demonstrations on the anniversary next Monday of the demonstration that led to the arrest of Moshood Abiola.Scores of people have been arrested since Nigeria’s military leader, General Sani Abacha, refused to accept Mr Abiola as the winner of the 1993 presidential election. The height of Tirana fashion is Benetton, but few can afford it.At 2am, the disco closes and we emerge to see a handful of gypsies sweeping the streets. The banners of AC Milan, his hero’s football team, hang behind the bar, while one window features a poster for Mr Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia.”We had the Italian foreign minister in here once,” he boasts Or the foreign trade minister He’s not sure.The night presses on, and it is time for food. “The militias have probably also fled there.”The Hutu militia – the Forces for the Defence of Democracy – had pledged to fight to the death but in the event the extremists seemed to have bowed to the superior strength of the army.By the time the first troops began their house-to-house search all but a small number of Kamenge’s 40,000 people had gone. Only a few score seemed to be coming out of the area through the “evacuation corridors” set up by the army.Three wounded people were evacuated by the Red Cross from the neighbouring districts of Gasenyi and Kinama.

Edith Baeriswil of the Red Cross said that while most residents had by last night returned to Gasenyi, Kinama was still empty.In the nearby suburb of Cibitoke aggressive gangs of Tutsi youths – members of the so-called Sans Echecs (Without Failure) militia swaggered about the streets shouting at anyone who ventured into the territory.The UN World Food Programme and the Red Cross have been getting food to thousands of destitute people in recent days. What was needed was a measure of trust in people, not another inquiry.For Labour, Baroness Gould of Potternewton said the party fully supported the need for an independent inquiry into funding. Its aim should be “not to stop political parties raising money, but to make sure it is raised in an open and demo- cratic way”.But Viscount Cranborne warned that an inquiry could “usurp the proper functions of Parliament itself”. The truth is that sin itself has largely fallen from the contemporary vocabulary And quite right, many will say, in this secular age.

The solution is therefore to end the marriage, not to address our own failings. We have lost much self- critical awareness which the biblical analysis of sin gave our culture in favour of an uncritical sense of self-rightness.l People are often “in love”, but in the egocentric terms of love as feeling, an ideal, having sex, or finding happiness These let them down. The full interpersonal Christian meaning of love is becoming lost to a generation.l Marital and family communication is often minimised by television and consumerism.These and other changes are pervasive. They should be challenged more directly by a Christian faith which dethrones the individual and recognises again the created relationships with God and our neighbour.Christian marriage is a universal God-given institution, and people enter marriage rather than constructing it on their own terms. It will replace the Privy Council after China takes over the territory in 1997.This is the first substantive Sino-British agreement on Hong Kong matters in four years and appears to have been reached after substantial British concessions.Chris Patten, the Governor of Hong Kong, has spent the past three years seeking to dispel the impression that Britain will make endless concessions to Chinese demands. Serbia, it seems, is more important to him now than Greater Serbia.. STEPHEN VINES

Hong Kong
There were dark mutterings about Britain returning to its old policies of “kowtowing to China” yesterday as the British and Chinese governments announced they had broken a four-year impasse by reaching agreement on establishing a court of final appeal for Hong Kong.