NSE is reportedly interested in selling its 1% stake in MCX. Meanwhile London Stock Exchange is in talks with MCX SX.

National Stock Exchange (NSE), one of the major stock exchanges in India, is planning to offload its stake in the Financial Technologies promoted commodity bourse, Multi Stock Exchange (MCX). NSE no longer sees any strategic importance in the investment in MCX, PTI reported, quoting an official as saying. Financial Technologies has agreed to the offer and has said that it will facilitate the transaction at an appropriate time, the report added. NSE holds 1% stake in MCX.

MCX too holds 1% stake in NSE. But the privately owned exchange said it would not sell its stake in NSE. It seems NSE's decision is following MCX's proposed foray into equity trading. MCX has set up MCX SX which currently undertakes currency derivatives trading. It's awaiting SEBI approval for beginning equity trading on the new exchange. This could compete with NSE's business.

Besides, NSE has also become the anchor investor in NCDEX, which is MCX’s rival commodity bourse.

Reports also suggest that MCX is planning an IPO and may soon approach the regulator for the same. MCX had planned an IPO last year as well but had to shelve the plans in the wake of adverse market conditions. MCX could hit the markets in the second half of this year as it generally takes about 3-6 months for the IPO to start from the time of filing a draft prospectus with SEBI. Last year, MCX was looking at raising Rs 500 crore through the IPO. The amount that it would look at raising with this IPO is not yet known.

It also believed that MCX’s plans to revive the IPO may have resulted from the increasing pressure from its shareholders such as Fidelity and Citigroup, who wanted to exit after MCX’s listing. Last week, reports of Fidelity and Citi planning to sell their stakes in MCX had also surfaced, to which Financial Technologies had clarified saying that Fidelity and Citi continue to be stakeholders in the commodity exchange. Last Friday, Fidelity-affiliated mutual funds sold 8.20% of its 10.65% stake in Financial Technologies in a block deal to Reliance Capital.

In another development, the London Stock Exchange (LSE), has initiated talks with Financial Technologies to buy a stake in its stock exchange, MCX-SX, reports Business Standard. The information has not been independently verified. The new exchange has to start divesting its stake by the end of the first year of operations to comply with the licensing conditions. MCX is already in discussions with various global investors for the same, and LSE happens to be one of them.

According to the SEBI regulations, overseas investors can only hold up to 5% stake in Indian exchanges. LSE is too understood to have asked for a 5% stake in MCX-SX. LSE is world’s third largest Stock exchange in terms of market cap.

Source

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow, which aims to bring a major performance boost to the Python programming language by making runtime speed five times faster. The project is being implemented as a branch of the conventional CPython runtime and will be fully source-compatible with regular Python applications and native extensions. This will make it possible to eventually merge the improvements into Python trunk.

The goal of the Unladen Swallow project is to use LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure, to build a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that can replace Python's own specialized virtual machine. This approach offers a number of significant advantages. As the developers describe in the project plan, the project will make it possible to transition Python to a register-based virtual machine and will pave the way for future optimizations.

Adopting LLVM could also potentially open the door for more seamlessly integrating other languages with Python code, because the underlying LLVM intermediate representation is largely language-neutral.

The Unladen Swallow project also encompasses several other initiatives to improve other characteristics of the runtime and take advantage of modern hardware. Parallelization and higher utilization of multicore processors is one area where the developers are placing strong focus. They are considering the possibility of implementing a concurrent garbage collector, for example. They are very serious about fixing multithreading in Python and hope to slay the Global Interpreter Lock, a mechanism that provides thread safety but imposes limitations on the kind of scalability improvements that applications can get from concurrency.

Although the project is at a very early stage of development, an experimental prototype is already available. The source code can be downloaded from the project's version control system at the Google Code site. The current implementation is said to already provide a performance increase in some specific testing scenarios, but it's still only a flesh wound compared to the improvements that are coming.

For their second milestone, which is scheduled for the second quarter of 2009, they hope to replace the Python virtual machine with a functionally-equivalent LLVM-based implementation.

The Unladen Swallow developers hope that the project will eventually make it possible to use Python instead of C for a wider range of performance-sensitive tasks. They are building it on top of Python 2.6 (2.x is not dead yet) because it will allow many existing projects to adopt it and will also provide a clean glide path to Python 3.

Python is gaining some traction in enterprise environments and it's used extensively by Google within the company's own infrastructure and its hosted App Engine system. Google's investment in improving Python performance will make the language even more compelling for rapid web application development.

Source

For its second edition, Harper’s Bazaar India has roped in Deepika Padukone as their cover girl. The gorgeous girl talks about the whole experience, her fear of creepy crawlies and lots more. While Deepika was braving the heat in Phuket, photographer Atul Kasbekar and his assistants were pulling all strings to get the perfect light, the tone and the shot

Freida Pinto, the star in the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, has leaped ahead of her Indian rivals to become the highest paid actress in Bollywood, a news report said on Thursday.

Following the success of Slumdog, which took home eight Oscars and whose worldwide box office receipts so far are estimated at over USD 270 millions, the Indian model turned actress' has landed a series of lucrative roles with top directors, including Woody Allen and Julian Schnabel.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, she has pushed ahead of her rivals, Kareena Kapoor, Katrina Kaif and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai, to become the highest paid actress in India.

The Indian actor is in Israel to shoot for a new film that focuses on the interwoven lives of a Israeli and Palestinian women from the early years of the state through the early 1990s.

The British daily, quoting sources close to the Indian star, said her earnings have now topped 2 million pounds to overtake top Bollywood actresses. "Freida is fast reaching top status in the international arena. The actress's projects with big film-makers like Woody Allen have helped her join a league which no other Indian actress has achieved so far," said a film analyst.

"Freida can't be compared to Aishwarya, because we're not pitching her as an Indian girl in international films. Freida is a true global face," Anirban Das, CEO of her management company, was quoted as saying in the report.

Source

YouTube confirmed its website was being blocked in China, although the California firm offered no explanation for why Chinese
authorities were barring access to the popular video-sharing service.

"YouTube has been blocked in China since yesterday," company spokesman Scott Rubin said.

"We do not know the reason for the blockage, and we're working as quickly as possible to restore access to our users in China."

Chinese authorities have a history of blocking websites they deem politically unacceptable or offensive.

A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in San Francisco told AFP he didn't have any information about YouTube being blocked in China.

The YouTube blockage came as government officials there publicly challenged the authenticity of a video that purports to show police beating to death a pro-Tibet demonstrator last year.

China's official Xinhua News Agency quoted an unidentified government source saying supporters of the Dalai Lama were "fabricating lies" by doctoring video to "deceive the international community."

In March of last year YouTube access was barred temporarily in China after video clips appeared showing violent unrest in the Tibetan capital Lhasa that triggered a virtual lockdown of the city by security forces.

Footage of Chinese troops apparently beating Tibetans last year in and near Lhasa following the deadly riots has appeared on YouTube in recent days. The source, date and location of the footage, posted by a Tibetan exile group, could not be independently confirmed.

The video shows hundreds of uniformed Chinese soldiers running through a Tibetan monastery, some of them beating a man with batons.

In another scene, uniformed soldiers kick, drag and beat several men and women who are lying on the ground, some of them with their hands bound behind their backs.

The narrator of the video said the violence was part of China's crackdown following anti-Chinese unrest in the Tibetan capital March 14, 2008, which Beijing says led to the deaths of 21 people by rioters.

This March, China deployed a heavy security presence in Tibet and neighboring provinces to head off unrest ahead of two significant anniversaries.

In addition to the March 14 anniversary, March 10 marked the 50th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule that led to Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama fleeing the Himalayan region for India.

Marc van der Chijs, a Dutch Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Shanghai-based video-sharing website Tudou.com, offered another theory for the YouTube blockage in a Tuesday message on his website.

"I suspect the real reason might be that YouTube just launched a Chinese version, which would make the site much more accessible for Chinese users," van der Chijs wrote.

"Not a very smart idea to do that in the middle of the National Congress, and I am surprised nobody at mother company Google's China offices rang an alarm bell about this before launch."

California-based Google bought YouTube in 2006 in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal.

"I don't like sites to be blocked; even not those of our competitors," van der Chijs wrote. "But, it will be an interesting discussion point for our Tudou board meeting tomorrow."

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned the blocking of YouTube in China. The Paris-based group devoted to press freedom branded China an "enemy of the Internet" in a report published this month.

Chinese routinely censors Internet searches and conversations with sophisticated controls that essentially make the country's Web "the largest prison in the world for cyber-dissidents," according to an RSF statement.

RSF praised Internet users in China that have been cleverly mocking censors with satirical videos, songs and tales based on a "grass-mud horse" character referred to as "Caonima." The alpaca-like character is a comic play on a Chinese epithet.

Government officials have reportedly been ordering websites and online chat rooms to erase the spoof character through methods such as eliminating "caonima" as an Internet search key word.

RSF said wordplay was used to slip past censors in "a collective thumbing of your nose" at China's propaganda machine.
Source

South Africa will host the second edition of the multi-billion dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) from April 17 at six venues.

The IPL Twenty20 championship will be played at Durban, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth.

With South Africa saying yes to IPL, League Commissioner and Chairman Lalit Modi's search for a country to host the second edition of the Twenty20 championship is finally over.

Modi met Cricket South Africa CEO Gerald Majola at an undisclosed venue to discuss the possibility of hosting the second edition of the Twenty20 event here. And after the meeting, sources told CNN-IBN that the deal was sealed to host the league in South Africa.

South Africa says there will be no trouble staging the League and has assured full security. Cricket South Africa, it is reported, has also offered full support to the IPL.

Source

We all know Asin.The Beautiful South Indian Star.And after her successful film with Amir Khan she has become more popular.Check out some of the photos of Asin at her home.

For more Click Teentweensblog

Actress Freida Pinto poses during a photocall before the Fall/Winter 2009/10 women's ready-to-wear fashion collection presented by German designer Karl Lagerfeld for French fashion house Chanel during Paris Fashion Week

For more Click Teentweensblog

1.Nayantara
Current Salary: Rs. 70 lakhs per film.

Movies: Kuselan, Billa, Satyam, Aegan

Nayantara's traditional beautiful looks became an instant hit with Tamil fans. Even before the release of her first film, she was roped into Chandramukhi by P Vasu for the role of Rajnikanth's love interest. Nayan started her career with 5-6 lakhs but now demands about 70 lakhs per film. Hot and dangerous curves in her body at the right places had made her the numero UNO billing actress in Tamil cinema.

2. Shriya Saran
Current Salary: Rs.60 lakhs per film.

Movie: Sivaji, the Boss, ATM

Shreya came into Tamil films with a small role in Enakku 20, Unakku 18. She was paired with Jeyam Ravi in Mazhai. She is a bold girl when it comes to dropping clothes and appearing in skimpy outfits. She commenced her career with 15 lakhs per film. In Sivaji, her salary was twenty lakhs but an additional 5 lakhs was given to ensure that she does not accept any other films till its completion. Shreya was paid 15 lakhs just for one item song with Vadivelu in "Indralogathil Azhagappan". People don't care much about this actress' acting skills. She is seen more as a song and dance material. She is going to find it tough to shed that image.

3. Trisha
Current Salary: Rs.50 lakhs per film.

Movie: Kuruvi

When Trisha's first venture in Gilli with Vijay became a super hit, the industry stamped this pair as a lucky one. One of the very few native Tamils who made it big in Tamil Nadu - ironically - Trisha was not new when it came to facing the flashlights. Her successful stint with modeling, entry into the top 10 finalists of Miss India, and looks that would make any girl go green with envy, made Trisha's entry into Tamil cinema a cakewalk.

4. Bhavana
Current Salary: Rs. 40-45 lakhs per film.

Movie: Jeyam Kondan

Bhavana fit the bill for the girl next-door character perfectly in Chitiram Pesudadi. The movie became an instant hit paving way for the Malabar beauty to shift her base to Tamil movies. Bhavana showed her skills in Deepavali and Veyil that went on to bring her loads of impressive projects. Bhavana is reviving the ‘girl next door' image that Tamil cinema had been devoid of ever since Devyani's vanishing act from movies.

5. Asin
Current Salary: Rs.40 lakhs per film.

Movie: Pokkiri, Dasavatharam

Asin was earning around two to four lakhs in advertisement campaigns, charged five lakhs for a Malayalam film with Dileep. Eventually when her movies started doing well, her rates have also catapulted to a greater height. Asin is very smart and accepts films only with leading stars and big banners. Ghajini was a major hit Tamil film that is remade in Hindi where she acts with Aamir Khan.

6. Genelia Dsouza
Current Salary: Rs.35 lakhs per film.

Movie: Santosh Subramaniam

The bubbly Genelia D`Souza debuted opposite Riteish Deshmukh in Tujhe Meri Kasam and was later seen with him in the comic-caper Masti. Subsequently, she acted in a lot of Telugu and Tamil films, most of which were blockbusters. She is now back with a bang in Bollywood and would first be seen alongside Akshaye Khanna in the family entertainer Mere Baap Pehle Aap and Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na.

7. Sneha
Current Salary: Rs.18 - 20 lakhs per film.

Movies: Pandi (tried glamor role, but failed miserably)

Sneha enjoys a good fan following in Telugu films too. Her link up with Nag Ravi had proved her dear with a loss of many films. She is very cautious while accepting roles and has no qualms about pairing with anybody.

8. Namitha
Current Salary: Rs.22 - 30 lakhs per film.

Movies: Billa, Jagan mohini

Busty Namita replenished the long-vacant spot of a voluptuous dream princess in Tamil cinema perhaps ever since Silk Smitha's demise. Namitha is nothing lesser than a diva and a crowd puller causing stampedes wherever she goes. Fans go crazy looking at her enormous curvy figure drooling over her unseen assets.

9. Priyamani

10. Reema Sen
Current Salary: Rs.10 - 15 lakhs per film.

Reema Sen burst onto the Tamil screens with Minnale. She had a quite time after her first film. It was more than a year later that she landed her next hit with Dhool opposite Vikram. She was also getting offers from Telugu and Kannada industries. In 2004, Chellame became a runaway hit with major contributions from Reema Sen in the form of showing her assets liberally. Then came Giri and a year later Thimiru followed making her a lucky heroine to work with.

Esha Gupta (Desi Angelina Jolie) Miss India finalist in 2007, has stormed the fashion and advertising world over the last two years and set ramps afire by walking for established designers like Rohit Bal and JJ Vallaya at the India Fashion Week. She also appeared in some big print and TV ads. But what made Bollywood sit up and take notice of the Delhi beauty is her uncanny resemblance to the gorgeous Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie.
This lass is all of 22 years and is ready to make her debut in the world of films. The girl in question is the former Miss India finalist Esha Gupta, who will be making her entry in tinsel ville with the film Hum Aap Aur Pyaar, a romantic comedy set in South Africa. The film is being produced by the Desai Brothers.

The Pink Panther 2 is a 2009 spy comedy film directed by Harald Zwart[2] It is the sequel to the 2006 film The Pink Panther, a reboot of the popular comedy series.[3] The film was released on February 6, 2009 in North America. In the film, Inspector Clouseau must team up with detectives from other countries to rout the daring cat burglar, The Tornado, who has returned after a decade of inactivity. Steve Martin, who reprised the role of Clouseau, originated by Peter Sellers, polished the original script written by Scott Neustadter and Michael M, Weber in November 2006.[3] Columbia Pictures, partnering with MGM on the sequel, hired the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel to perform a further rewrite in January 2007.[5] Principal photography began in Paris on August 20, 2007, then moved to Boston several weeks later, where filming ended on November 2, 2007.

This is the first official onscreen kiss in the history of Bollywood.Famous actress of that time Devika Rani in kissing her real life husband Himansu Rai in the film "Karma".This film was released in the year 1933.

These are the stunning pictures of a rare pink bottlenose dolphin spotted swimming in a Louisiana lake.

The mammal was pictured by local charter boat captain Erik Rue, who has been studying the dolphin since it first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in Southwestern USA.

Since it was spotted with its pod of normal coloured dolphins last year the animal has been wowing visitors on the lake.

Capt Rue, 42, originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its side.

Source

M Girl is the new, fun and fearless line by Maria B. It promises a complete look, with not only great clothes, but exceptional accessories range. It's current, it's hip, it's trendy and it's certainly not for the faint hearted!