Tha Asian Wall Street Journal reports:

[Xinhua reporter] Guan Xiangdong... was on duty in Hong Kong Saturday while financially savvy colleagues took the day off, and she cobbled together a story on the impact of a possible appreciation of the Chinese currency using bits and pieces of news and analysis gleaned from that day's local newspapers...

...From her computer screen in the China News Service's modest Hong Kong newsroom, Ms. Guan's story, bashed out in Chinese characters, worked its way yesterday afternoon onto the Web site of the People's Daily -- the organ of the Chinese Communist Party -- in the form of an English translation so badly garbled it hardly made sense. The mangled translation of the story stated boldly that China was going to announce an appreciation after a meeting of U.S. and Chinese economic officials next week.

The People's Daily article was picked up and published by Bloomberg yesterday afternoon, causing a panic buy-up of Asian currencies in European markets as they started their trading day.

Later on, Bloomberg published a report titled "China's People's Daily Says Yuan Report Was Mistake", saying that the People's Daily had sent a fax to Bloomberg's offices, telling them that "The English story is mistranslated and has already been pulled from our Web site".

We can probably expect more of this type of thing, because foreign news agencies seem to be losing the plot:

Reuters recently reported that Google was setting up "operations" in China because they had registered a rep office, and any Danwei reader knows that the main reason to visit China's state-owned websites is to find soft porn, something which has evidently escaped the notice of Bloomberg's reporters.

LINKS:
Interfax has screenshots of the dodgy People's Daily article: Ambiguous People's Daily article on RMB reform stirs international markets
Asian Wall Street Journal: An Errant Translation Roils Global Currency Markets (subscription required)
Bloomberg: China's People's Daily Says Yuan Report Was Mistake
China Herald blog: People's Daily announces revaluation?

Thanks Andrew for link and document