London - Stallholders in the English town of Hexham have been ordered to mute the cries they use to advertise their wares, sparking an outcry at the ending of an
800-year custom, British media reported Monday.

The local authority in the town with a population of around 11,000 issued the order silencing centuries of tradition in response to complaints from office workers who said they suffered from headaches as a result.

Beijing, Aug. 18: China will not suffer from a "post-Olympic recession", senior officials have said.

"The Olympic Games won''t be a watershed for China''s economic growth," Wang Yiming, vice-president of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research, said.

"The fundamentals propelling the country''s economic development over the past 30 years will remain" even after the Games, The China Daily quoted him as saying further.

The country''s economy grew 11.9 percent last year. But after the growth slowed to 10.1 percent in the second half of this year, it raised concern that the economy could suffer after the Games, which in some ways has acted as booster.

Hanoi - Flooding from heavy rains over the past two weeks has severely damaged 15,000 hectares of rice paddies in far northern Vietnam, the Vietnamese press reported Monday.

The Agriculture Ministry had sent an urgent message Sunday to farmers in northern provinces to transplant seedlings to rescue their autumn rice crop if floodwaters recede before August 25, the website VietnamNet. vn reported.

If the fields remain flooded past that date, farmers would have to wait for the winter crop in October, and the government has promised food aid.

Manila - Remittances from overseas Filipinos reached nearly 1.5 billion dollars in June, the highest monthly inflow in 19 years, the central bank said Friday.

The central bank said the 1.45 billion dollars sent home by overseas Filipinos in June was 30 per cent higher than remittances in the same month last year.

It is the highest monthly inflow recorded since 1989 when the central bank started to classify foreign exchange inflows from overseas Filipinos as a separate category.

Jakarta - Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono unveiled Friday a draft state budget for the fiscal year 2009, forecasting economic growth of 6.2 per cent.

In a state of the nation address ahead the August 17 independence day, Yudhoyono said the government's revenues and grants in the 2009 draft state budget would amount to 1,022.6 trillion rupiah (112.37 billion dollars), while the total expenditures were forecast at 1,222.2 trillion rupiah (134.3 billion dollars).

Yudhoyono said the 2009 budget marked a 14.3-per-cent increase compared with the 2008 revised budget, predicting a budget deficit of 1.9 per cent of GDP, which will be mostly funded from domestic sources - mainly derived from the issuance of government bonds.

Madrid - Spain's economic growth slowed to 0.1 per cent in the second quarter, down from 0.3 per cent in the first quarter, the National Statistics Institute said Thursday.