Chiru's son-in-law jailed

This is straight out of a Tollywood potboiler. Only, this one does not end so well. Sirish Bhardwaj, the son-in-law of actor-turned-politician Chiranjeevi, on Wednesday surrendered before a local court after evading arrest for over four months in a dowry harassment case.


Bhardwaj's estranged wife Srija, who is Chiranjeevi's youngest daughter, had accused him and her in-laws of harassing her for dowry. The couple had married against the wishes of Srija's family in 2007 and have a two-year-old daughter.


Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate sent Sirish to judicial custody till August 8. The Supreme Court had rejected his anticipatory bail plea in May.


It advised him to surrender before the concerned local court and seek regular bail after arrest. Following a bitter break-up, Srija has filed a complaint with the police on March 15 alleging that Sirish and her mother-in-law had tortured her mentally and physically for dowry.

Indore Family on picnic swept away by wave

A picnic turned tragic for a family of five when a torrential wave caused by heavy rain swept them away at a waterfall in Patalpani in Indore.

Three blasts in Mumbai

Serial blasts struck Mumbai this evening, less than three years after the 26/11 terrorist attacks of 2008. The three blasts, in sequence, were timed at 6.30 pm, 6.45 pm, and 7 pm IST, and targeted in that order Zaveri Bazaar, Opera House and the Kabutarkhana area of Dadar West. Zaveri Bazaar, centre of the jewelry industry, is adjacent the iconic Mumbadevi temple from which the city derives its name; both Zaveri Bazaar and Kabutarkhana were also targeted in the 1993 serial blasts

Vijay Awards 2011

 

Shriya Saran, Vikram, Trisha Krishnan, Karthi, Bharath, Dhanush, Karthi, Lawrence, Shankar, Gautham Menon, Vetrimaran, Prabhu Deva, Amala Paul, Poorna, Sonia Agarwal, K Balachander, Santhanam and Piaa Bajpai were among the stars present at the 5th Annual Vijay Awards.

China opens world's longest sea bridge

QINGDAO, Shandong - The world's longest cross-sea bridge, spanning Jiaozhou Bay of Qingdao in East China's Shandong province, opened to traffic on Thursday amid a major effort to further consolidate this coastal city into an international shipping center for Northeast Asia.


The 41.58-km, eight-lane Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, connecting the urban district of the city to its Huangdao district, cost 14.8 billion yuan ($2.3 billion). Construction started in May 2007.


The bridge will shorten the route between the two centers by 30 km, cutting travel time from more than 40 minutes to about 20 minutes, said Han Shouxin, deputy director of the city's traffic management committee.


Previously, the longest cross-sea bridge in the world was the 36-km-long Hangzhou Bay Cross-sea Bridge that connects the cities of Jiaxing and Ningbo in East China's Zhejiang province.


"The bridge has been a long-time dream for Qingdao residents," said Qingdao Party Chief Li Qun at the inauguration ceremony.


He said the bridge will greatly improve travel from the eastern tip of Shandong's Qingdao, Yantai and Weihai, through central Shandong's Rizhao, Linyi and even to the northern areas of neighboring Jiangsu province.


It makes the one-hour economy ring for downtown Qingdao and its surrounding districts a reality and strengthens the prospect of a four-hour economy ring among cities on the Shandong Peninsula, Li said.


Guan Hua, a 30-year-old woman at a local shipping company, was excited about the bridge.


"I have to travel back and forth between Huangdao and downtown and other places in Qingdao for work and sometimes for fun with friends," she said. "It was annoying to have to fight the downtown traffic for the expressway entry to reach the destinations.

Google+ Project Registration Close today

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER



What is Google+? It’s the super top-secret social project that Google has been working on for the past year. You know, the one being led by General Patton (Vic Gundotra) and General MacArthur (Bradley Horowitz). Yes, the one Google has tried to downplay as much as humanly possible — even as we got leak after leak after leak of what they were working on. Yes, the one they weren’t going to make a big deal about with pomp and circumstance. It’s real. And it’s here.
Sort of.

You see, the truth is that Google really is trying not to make a huge deal out of Google+. That’s not because they don’t have high hopes for it. Or because they don’t think it’s any good. Instead, it’s because what they’re comfortable showing off right now is just step one of a much bigger picture. When I sat down with Gundotra and Horowitz last week, they made this point very clear. In their minds, Google+ is more than a social product, or even a social strategy, it’s an extension of Google itself. Hence, Google+.


How’s that for downplaying it?


“We believe online sharing is broken. And even awkward,” Gundotra says. “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public,” he continues. “Real life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software,” is the last thing he says before diving into a demo of Google+.


What he proceeds to show me is a product that in many ways is so well designed that it doesn’t really even look like a Google product. When I tell Gundotra and Horowitz this, they laugh. “Thank you,” Gundotra says very enthusiastically. Clearly, they’ve put a lot of work into both the UI and UX of Google+.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone quits

Biz Stone, the co-founder and public face of Twitter, is to cease his work with the micro-blogging company and team up with his former colleagues in an attempt to invent the next big thing on the internet.

According to a report in The Independent, the 37-year-old entrepreneur is restarting the company that spawned Twitter five years ago -- a venture called The Obvious Group -- to experiment with making 'systems that help people work together to improve the world'

IIFA Awards

Transformers: Dark of the Moon Review

Time will tell whether Transformers: Dark of the Moon really is the final Transformers film for both director Michael Bay and star Shia LaBeouf, but it's certainly the best one in this hugely successful, but widely loathed franchise. It's devoid of Decepticon testicles, Autobot heaven, offensive robots -- and Megan Fox.

Here's the plot to the threequel in a nutshell: A sweet prologue (marred only by a phony-looking digital JFK) recounts the war for Cybertron and the real reason behind the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s. Cut to the present where Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) struggles to find his first post-college job, while the Autobots led by Optimus Prime and the U.S. military's NEST team led by Lt. Col. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) work in tandem to take out the remaining Decepticons around the world. However, the evil 'bots eventually get the upper hand and begin an invasion to conquer the Earth with Chicago as Ground Zero in this final war between the Autobots/humans and Decepticons. There's more going on, but for the sake of spoilers we'll keep it at that.

Bollywood Performance at IIFA awards 2011

 

From impish spoofs to stunning performances, from crazy fanfare to Hollywood stars, there is almost nothing
that this year’s IIFA 

India International Film Awards (IIFA)

India International Film Awards (IIFA) show kicks off today and Bollywood stars are all geared up for a star studded eventful weekend in Toronto.

We bring here several Bollywood biggies, who've left to be a part of this annual filmi extravaganza

Summer Pool Party

Hot summers are when laziness finds respectability and some glam quotient too. A hotel in Delhi hosted a pool party where the guests were making the most of the rising mercury in their best glam avatar. What less can you expect if there is a pool at hand? The pool frolic was followed by a feast. Later the sporty ones chose water polo while the ‘enlightened ones’ chose to sip beer on their way to nirvana.