The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, under the chairmanship of foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, is meeting on Wednesday to discuss reduction in fuel prices. It may take final decision on much awaited reduction of prices of petroleum products on accounts of decline in crude rates in the international market.

Prices of petrol can be reduced by Rs 4 a litre, diesel by Rs 1 per litre and cooking gas LPG by Rs 25 a cylinder, much lower than expected by transporters and general public of the country.

Decline in input cost prices and strong performance by hair and skin care category helped Dabur India Ltd to show good results in the third quarter of current financial year. The firm posted a rise of 16.1% in net profit for Q3 ended December 31, 2008 despite low customer spending and tight financial conditions.

Sunil Duggal, Chief Executive, Dabur India said, "Even in the current economic scenario, demand for our everyday use products continue to be strong and we have not seen any significant impact on consumer spending." He hoped that the firm would continue to expand its business in next financial year despite global slowdown.

Due to a limited role offered in PCB, former test captain Javed Miandad quit as director general of the Pakistan Cricket Board on Wednesday.

Miandad informed, "I have tendered my resignation to the chairman PCB because I was only confined to look after affairs of domestic cricket and was never consulted in other cricketing affairs."

Back in November, Miandad was appointed by incoming PCB Chairman Ijaz Butt.

On Tuesday in the ninth round at Wijk aan Zee, Abhijeet Gupta defeated Ukrainian tailender Oleg Romanishin and maintained an impressive finish in Group 'C'.

With this win, obtained with total of 48 moves with white, Abhijeet's tally has risen to 5.5 points and now he has come to the third place in the 14-player field.

Following this, he claimed a central pawn on the 32nd move and pressed home the advantage with a well-placed bishop and an active rook, Abhijeet finally called the shots.

The superstar bubbly actress of bollywood, Preity Zinta, who also happens to own Kings XI Punjab of the Indian Premier League (IPL), is planning to give a chance to promising cricketers at the grass-root level.

A cricket seminar and a T-20 tournament would be held by her team in Chandigarh and Mohali where teams from Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir will participate.

Priety informed, "My aim is to promote cricket at the grass-root level and to nurture new talent. I also want everyone involved to have fun."

As we all know, the Indian market is flourishing with novel netbooks and the latest edition is the Dell's newly launched Inspiron Mini 12 netbook.

The new and Inspiron Mini 12 is supported by the 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530, and is equipped with a 533MHz FSB, a Intel US15W chipset, and a 1GB DDR2 533MHz and 80GB 4200RPM HDD.

Other exciting features of this 1.24 kg netbook are WiFi (802.11b/g), 1.3 megapixel webcam, and Bluetooth. Mini 12 runs on the Windows XP Home edition instead of Windows Vista offered in the US.