By Alan Baldwin MONACO | Thu May 24, 2012 11:47pm IST MONACO (Reuters) - Force India expect Paul Di Resta to stay with them next season but would be understanding if the highly-rated British Formula One driver wanted to move elsewhere, team owner Vijay Mallya said on Thursday. Di Resta won the German touring car championship with Mercedes in 2010 and has been touted as a possible replacement at that team for Michael Schumacher should the 43-year-old seven times champion decide to call it a day.Schumacher's contract expires at the end of 2012.Di Resta has also been mentioned in media speculation as a candidate to take Felipe Massa's seat at Ferrari if they decide to drop the underperforming Brazilian."Paul is a huge asset and a ... Continue reading →

By Melanie Lee and Soyoung Kim SHANGHAI/NEW YORK | Mon May 21, 2012 11:38am IST SHANGHAI/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chinese Internet entrepreneur Jack Ma is buying back up to half of a 40 percent stake in his Alibaba Group from Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) for $7.1 billion, in a deal that moves the Chinese e-commerce leader closer to a public listing. Under the agreement, Yahoo will sell half of its stake in Alibaba for at least $6.3 billion in cash and up to $800 million in new Alibaba preferred stock. The deal, announced in a joint statement on Monday, caps years of talks between the two firms over Alibaba reclaiming some or all of the 40 percent stake that Yahoo bought for about $1 billion in ... Continue reading →

Connectivity in offices, home, cafes, trains, parks, cars and planes — I say bring it on. I have already shifted most of my life to the “cloud,” and it is not much of a surprise that I am a shameless believer in connectivity. That is why I am excited about Aeromobile, which is making it easy to use your phones on planes, including transatlantic flights. Aeromobile is a UK-based company that is jointly owned by Telenor, a telephone company, and Panasonic Avionics, which recently became a majority share holder. Panasonic has developed the satellite technology that makes the connections work. Aeromobile is working with several airlines such as Emirates to wire their planes for connectivity. Last week, Virgin Atlantic, part of the Virgin group, announced ... Continue reading →

New Delhi, May 20: Housing may be perceived to have gotten very expensive at the current sky-high levels, but data compiled by mortgage giant HDFC Ltd shows that home prices are near their most affordable level in over three decades. The home prices have indeed been rising for more than 10 years, except for a temporary slump in 2009, but the ’affordability’ of purchasing a house has been mostly on a declining trend for almost two decades now, as per HDFC data. Affordability ratio This affordability ratio, which takes into account the annual income of the home buyer along with the price of the house, declined to 4.6 in the previous fiscal, ended March 31, 2012, from as high as 22 in the year 1995. ... Continue reading →

ISLAMABAD | Sun May 20, 2012 5:42pm IST ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan on Sunday blocked access to Twitter in response to "blasphemous" material posted by users on the microblogging and social networking website, a senior government official said. "This has been done under the directions of the Ministry of Information Technology. It's because of blasphemous content," said Mohammed Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)."They (the ministry) have been discussing with them (Twitter) for some time now, requesting them to remove some particular content," he said.Pakistan blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and about 1,000 other websites for nearly two weeks in May 2010 over blasphemous content.Any representation of the Prophet Mohammad is deemed un-Islamic and blasphemous by many Muslims, who constitute the overwhelming ... Continue reading →