The finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, had also sought in his budget to extend indirect taxes from goods to services.

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There shall be freedom of transit for French goods through Haifa and by the British railway through the brown area, whether those goods are intended for or originate in the blue area, area (a), or area (b), and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against French goods on any railway, or against French goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.

BBC: Map detailing the Sykes-Picot agreement

Emerging markets are direct or indirect sellers of economic resources and final goods to mature economies, and a recession in these economies will certainly spread to mature economies.

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The biggest, an effort to prune the country's dreadful thicket of indirect taxes into a tidier form, an all-India Goods and Services Tax, has been pushed back by a year, to April 2012.

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