Nomura to buy UK's Thistle for 1.5 bn: Japanese finance house Nomura is poised to buy the British hotel group Thistle Hotels Plcfor up to 1.5 billion pounds, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported. The report, which did not cite sources, said Nomura had been chosen from a shortlist of five potential buyers, and was believed to have held talks with Bankers Trust about the offer. Thistle is Britain's largest domestic hotel company. The report said Brierley Investments of New Zealand, which owns 46 per cent of Thistle, had hoped to raise around 1.8 billion pounds from the sale.

Internet overseas sales up, says Dell: Dell Computer Corp Michael Dell said on Friday that the company's sales through the Internet had risen to $6 million a day. He also said he expected overall sales outside the United States to rise to $6 billion this year. "A year ago our sales on the Internet were about $1 million a day. We are now selling about $6 million a day on the Internet," Dell said at the annual shareholders meeting. "And this is not just a US phenomenon. Our business in Europe is selling about $1 million a day," he said.

Oman H1 98foreign trade surplus at $39.5 million: Oman's foreign trade surplus in the first half of 1998 stood at 15.2 million rials ($39.5 million), the economy minister said. The official Omani News Agency (ONA) quoted the minister, Ahmed bin Abdul-Nabi Mekki, as saying that exports during the first six months reached 1.06 billion rials while imports stood at 1.0448 billion rials. ONA gave no comparative figures with the same period last year. Official figures covering the first nine months of 1997 showed a trade surplus of 714.4 million rials. Mekki said that government revenues during the same period reached 934.2 million rials, a drop of 97.4 million riyals from the same period last year. He attributed the drop to a decline in oil prices.