TOKYO - THE cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama enjoys approval ratings of more than 70 per cent a month after taking office, surveys showed on Monday.

The cabinet, installed on September 16 after Hatoyama's centre-left Democratic Party ousted the conservative government, received an approval rating of 73 per swing machines cent, a poll by the Nikkei business daily and TV Tokyo showed.

While the approval rating stands two percentage points lower than the previous poll, the cabinet's efforts in the past month got the thumbs-up from 61 per cent of respondents, according to the survey of 1,008 voters.

Another poll taken by the Mainichi daily said Mr Hatoyama's approval rating after the first month stood wholesale pearl jewelry at a comfortable 72 per cent, although it dropped by five percentage points from the previous poll.

More than 70 per cent of respondents endorsed the Hatoyama administration's efforts to tighten budgets, according to the survey of 1,067 voters.

As part of its war on waste in the public sector, the new government announced last week that it akoya pearl necklace would freeze spending of about 2.93 trillion yen (S$45 billion) from the previous administration's extra budget and plans to use the money to fund its campaign promises, such as expanded childcare allowances, free public high school education and an end to expressway tolls

BEIJING - CHINA will move 15,000 residents living near the country's biggest lead smelter base after more than 1,000 children were found to have excessive amounts of the metal in their blood, a Chinese newspaper reported.

The weekend edition of the inflatable bouncers English-language China Daily said the residents of Jiyuan in central Henan province would be relocated from the smelters, which have become a source of local discontent and another symbol of China's often unbridled industrial growth.

Chinese state media reported last week that over 1,000 children in Jiyuan had excessive levels of lead in their blood. The smelter operator, Yuguang Gold and Lead, said its wholesale pearl jewelry plants bore some responsibility.

A child exposed to heavy concentrations of lead can develop anaemia, muscle weakness and brain damage, and a rash of reported poisonings across several Chinese provinces has raised pressure on officials and companies to deal with the problem.

The mayor of Jiyuan, Zhao pearl jewelry wholesale Suping, said 15,000 people in 10 villagers around the plants would move at a total cost of about 1 billion yuan (S$204 million), allowing the lead plants to keep operating, the China Daily reported.

An official in one of the villagers set to move said the residents were likely to be shifted to a site 4 km from their present homes.

NEW DELHI - A LONG-AWAITED legal face-off between the billionaire Ambani brothers in India's highest court begins on Tuesday in a corporate battle that has transfixed the nation.

The two sides have drafted top freshwater pearl jewelry lawyers to argue the gas supply case, which pits India's biggest private sector company Reliance Industries Ltd, led by Mukesh Ambani, against Reliance Natural Resources Ltd, headed by Anil.

A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan will hear the case in which billions of dollars pearl jewelry wholesale are at stake for the two companies.

In the lead-up to the hearing, younger brother Anil, 50, has fired almost daily volleys at his elder sibling Mukesh, 52, over the gas pricing row which stems from a 2005 family pact splitting their corporate empire.

Anil is demanding the honouring of a 2005 settlement brokered by their mother that would allow his freshwater pearl jewelry company to buy gas from Mukesh at 44 per cent below the government-set rate.

Mukesh, India's wealthest man, is insisting the government price must prevail, after a lower court upheld Anil's arguments and Mukesh appealed to the Supreme Court, and rebuffed a bid earlier this month by Anil to patch things up.

TAIPEI - THE owner of a recycling centre in Taiwan made a gruesome discovery when he found a decomposing body inside a used refrigerator, according to an official and reports on Monday.

Hsu Chiu-feng, from the northern port city of Keelung, told police on Sunday he bought the medium-sized fridge from four young men for 150 Taiwan dollars (S$6.47), the dancing pearl Apple Daily newspaper said.

He noticed a dark liquid trickling from the old and rusty fridge, which was also giving out a foul smell, leading him to the grisly find.

A prosecutor who examined the freshwater pearl jewelry body said it was so decayed that it was impossible to immediately determine its sex.

'All we can say is it was an adult,' the prosecutor, Cheng Ya-fang, told reporters on Monday, adding that the body was dressed only in underwear, and had been found along with some wine bottles and a few comic books.

Mr Hsu led police to the four pearl jewelry wholesale young men, who said they had no idea how the body had ended up in the fridge which had been placed in a store room and had previously been used to store seafood.

 BEIJING - CHINA will move 15,000 residents living near the country's biggest lead smelter base after more than 1,000 children were found to have excessive amounts of the metal in their blood, a Chinese newspaper reported.

The weekend edition of the inflatable bouncers English-language China Daily said the residents of Jiyuan in central Henan province would be relocated from the smelters, which have become a source of local discontent and another symbol of China's often unbridled industrial growth.

Chinese state media reported last week that over 1,000 children in Jiyuan had excessive levels of lead in their blood. The smelter operator, Yuguang Gold and Lead, said its wholesale pearl jewelry plants bore some responsibility.

A child exposed to heavy concentrations of lead can develop anaemia, muscle weakness and brain damage, and a rash of reported poisonings across several Chinese provinces has raised pressure on officials and companies to deal with the problem.

The mayor of Jiyuan, Zhao pearl jewelry wholesale Suping, said 15,000 people in 10 villagers around the plants would move at a total cost of about 1 billion yuan (S$204 million), allowing the lead plants to keep operating, the China Daily reported.

An official in one of the villagers set to move said the residents were likely to be shifted to a site 4 km from their present homes.