Boeing's UK jobs

The Late Ticker

Boeing has pledged to bring jobs and orders to the UK as part of the $639m (pounds 390m) contract it has won from British Aerospace to supply avionics to the upgraded Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. The US aviation giant has made a 100 per cent offset commitment to the UK over the next 10 years.

APPLE COMPUTERS has been dealt another blow by Microsoft's decision to phase out development of its Windows NT operating system for computers using the PowerPC chip. IBM and Motorola announced in December they would stop developing new PowerPC machines that use Windows NT. All of Apple's computers run on the PowerPC chip.

LUKOIL HOLDING, Russia's largest oil company, and Atlantic Richfield have finalised a $5bn agreement to jointly develop oil and gas projects in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. The venture will be called Lukarco.

JAPAN will begin final talks with Hong Kong this week on a pact designed to protect Japanese investments when the colony is returned to China in July.

CREDIT-CARD companies Visa and Mastercard are facing a possible anti- trust lawsuit from the US Justice Department over rules that bar most US banks from doing business with competing credit-card companies. The policy prevents competitors such as American Express and Dean Witter Discover from courting thousands of bank customers for credit-card business.