Preity Zinta Biography

Born (born 31 January 1974) in Shimla, native of Rohru, she studied at the Jesus and Mary Simla Convent School after getting a degree in criminal psychology at the St. Bedes College, Zinta began her career as a model, and commercial (ad films) actress (she was seen in Lyril (soap ad film). Her father, Durganand Zinta died when she was thirteen in a car accident in which her mother, Nilprabha Zinta was also involved. Her mother was bedridden because of this incident. Zinta has two brothers, Deepanker Zinta and Manish Zinta, a year older and a year younger respectively.

Preity Zinta's first movie was supposed to be Kya Kehna but due to delay Dil Se was released first. The film was her breakthrough role and she won the Filmfair Best Debut Award for her performance. Since then her career was that of a typical Bollywood star: not many hits but not many flops either.

In 2003, Zinta had two smash hits, Koi... Mil Gaya and Kal Ho Naa Ho. She is currently among the most successful actresses in Bollywood. In the year of 2003, she won many awards for her role in the film, Kal Ho Naa Ho. Her performance got her the Filmfare Best Actress Award. Since then she has appeared in two other box office hits, Veer-Zaara (2004) and Salaam Namaste (2005).

Preity Zintajoined a group of top stars (Shahrukh Khan, Rani Mukerji, Saif Ali Khan, Arjun Rampal, and Priyanka Chopra) in the Temptation 2004 concert, which was a huge international success. She also modeled for Manish Malhotra during Lakme Fashion Week, and has received a invitation to represent Bollywood at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006 along with Karan Johar.

Preity Zinta narrowly escaped death twice in late 2004, once after an explosion at a Temptation concert in Colombo, and later in the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Zinta has written three columns for BBC South Asia.

Her next releases will be Krrish, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna and Jaaneman.

Preity Zinta has been linked with a few of her co-stars such as Salman Khan, Abhishek Bachchan and Aamir Khan but has always dismissed them as rumors. She is currently dating the heir to the Bombay Dyeing company Ness Wadia.

Savvy entrepreneurs tapping risk

-- Deborah Cohen covers small business for Reuters.com. She can be reached at smallbusinessbigissues@yahoo.com --

By Deborah L. Cohen
CHICAGO (Reuters.com) - Cari Sommer and Lauren Porat are matchmakers of a sort. The thirtysomethings also are among a group of savvy entrepreneurs who see small businesses as a big opportunity.
"With the economy doing what it's doing, there are a lot of people looking for work and a lot of small businesses looking to get more efficient," says Porat, a former investment banker whose site launched in February. "That notion has been absolutely validated by the traction we've gotten."
Their online start-up, Urban Interns LLC, matches a talent pool of job-hungry students, actors, freelancers and others in the New York area looking for part-time work with small companies seeking flexible staffing options.
Using advanced search filters, employers use the service to identify candidates interested in helping with a wide range of jobs, including professional tasks such as scheduling and administrative support to personal assistant duties like shopping, organizing and running errands. They can also post specific jobs and call for applicants.
Urban Interns is just one of several emerging concepts attempting to tap the needs of small to mid-sized companies whose tolerance for risk has diminished with the worsening recession and for whom keeping costs at bay has become a matter of survival.
"Screaming needs increase during times like this," says Rich Sloan, co-founder of Startupnation.com, an online support community for entrepreneurs. Sloan notes the preponderance of solutions "that address urgent needs" of small businesses, including re-examining how precious cash is being allocated.
Companies like Rural American Onshore Sourcing Inc. are betting that these needs will become more acute as the global economy worsens.
The Cincinnati-based startup founded by Christopher Hytry Derrington is taking a different spin on staffing needs, offering small- to mid-sized firms an alternative to overseas outsourcing of high-skilled jobs such as information technology and marketing. It is matching those companies up with home-based workers in third-tier U.S. cities and rural areas whose hourly rate is considerably lower than their counterparts in major U.S. markets.
"If you're a mid-sized Chicago architecture firm, you can't outsource," says Derrington, who launched his company in August and says business is brisk. "Large companies have more resources to throw at it."
Even though American workers in outlying areas might still be more costly than those in outsourcing hotspots like Bangalore, India, smaller companies that opt for Derrington's service don't have to worry about installing overseas managers to supervise their work. In addition, they and their customers have the benefit of relying on workers in similar time zones.
"The labor costs in India are increasing," notes Derrington. "We have talented people in rural areas and we match them up with (companies) that want to save."
Cost containment startups extend well beyond the realm of human resources; they include technology-oriented businesses such as Israel-based CTERA Networks, which is launching a service to provide so-called cloud-based network storage for smaller companies. Cloud technology allows for offsite data storage on a remote network server, freeing a company of the costly investment in network infrastructure.
"If you own equipment, scaling down is very expensive," says CTERA Chief Executive Liran Eschel of the needs of small companies to adjust their resources quickly as demand shifts. "But if you buy Cloud (storage), scaling down is very easy. You spend as you go."
CTERA's product was introduced in January; the company, which has funding from Benchmark Capital, is now developing partnerships with service providers and expects to be available in the market later this year, says Eschel.
Suresh Pothiraj, who formerly sold financial services for news and information provider Bloomberg LP, believes he has come up with a novel solution for companies to reduce the risk associated with supply chain management.
His newly launched venture, Service Options Exchange LLC, or SOPTEX, takes a financial trader's approach to procurement: it offers options on the materials that companies purchase in large supplies, not unlike those available in the commodities markets.
By buying an option for paper products, for instance, a company can protect itself if its primary supplier fails to deliver. And for a vendor, the exchange offers the ability to raise much needed capital from pre-qualified buyers at a time when credit is tight.
Whether or not the idea will catch on remains to be seen; as of now Pothiraj is still hunting for users, offering free membership to those companies and suppliers willing to give his service a try. Eventually he plans to make money by charging for the listings and offering additional services such as helping buyers find new suppliers when they have tapped out their own resources and those of the SOPTEX exchange.
"Projects are getting bigger and pieces of projects are getting bigger too," says Pothiraj, who officially launched two weeks ago. "We reduce the risk."

Cities and States Plan Strange New Taxes on Pretty Much Everything

The government is having a hard time making do with the meager trillions you're throwing their way, so they're pressing some controversial new customs to buy their way out. Here's a look at some of the more egregious new taxes you're sure to be seeing soon.

Behold, America: the taxman cometh.

Even as taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet in a crumbling, tumbling economy, your friendly neighborhood (and state and federal) government is having a hard time making do with the meager trillions you're throwing its way, so it's relying on an old maxim:
If it exists, it can be taxed.
New York's resident grinch, Gov. David Paterson, tried suggesting a kind of omnibus fun-busting budget that would have taxed New Yorkers for skiing, golfing, camping, being fat, being skinny, going to the movies, going to plays, wearing clothing, going to strip clubs and having more than six fingers or toes. The governor, who is up for re-election next year, came to his senses about three weeks ago and renounced the budget, perhaps when an adviser noted that political contributions aren't tax-deductible.
Things haven't been all downhill for the taxman, though: some surprising new tariffs, like supersizing the tax on AIG bonuses, have had a measure of popular support, but most are being opposed hand and foot over wallet.
Cigarette taxes are jumping so much on April 1 that it will soon be cheaper to run a tobacco farm than to buy a pack of cigarettes. So as you stockpile your smokes for the coming decade, here's a look at some of the more egregious new taxes you'll be seeing soon.
IT'S ELECTRIC
Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty has proposed a slew of new taxes (for taxes are no longer solitary creatures like wolves, but herd together in dangerous slews) to meet his city's massive deficit. His first target: budget-busting street lights, which Washingtonians will now fund with an extra $51 monthly tax. Bottom line: if you expect to be kept safe from monsters lurking in the District night, it's really going to cost you.
DO THE MASH
Kentucky is called the state of the "unbridled spirit," but when a new 6 percent tax hike on booze goes into effect April 1, that slogan might have to change. Lawmakers are going to be taxing their very own Kentucky bourbon, which is, along with Col. Sanders and the Bowie knife, among the greatest contributions of the Bluegrass State. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
OLD PROFESSION, NEW FEE
Nevada's hidebound lawmakers are finally going after prostitution in their state. Well, not really ... but one Las Vegas Democrat has proposed a $5 surcharge on all, ummm, transactions, which he says will boost the state's economy by $2 million. While you finish doing the math on how many rendezvous there are annually in Nevada (answer: a lot), it's worth noting that most bordellos charge a minimum of about $100 to $200 for their services, and don't object much to the suggested tax. Five bucks is a paltry thing next to the prices some people are willing to pay in the Silver State.
GET IN AND STAY OUT
Nevada has also raised its so-called bed tax, which isn't nearly as fun as it sounds. Its 3 percent hike was levied in March on travelers spending the night in Nevada hotels, most of whom end up in Las Vegas. Nevada isn't alone: nearly half of states have a hotel tax meant to punish suckers foolish enough to leave their own homes, but as more sign on there's danger of an interstate tax war. Once everyone has imposed a stiff nightly rate, who will be safe from harm?
STRIPPED BARE
Texas led the way in 2007 by levying a $5 tax on patrons of gentlemen's clubs, exotic dance parlors and all other places where women disrobe for money. Now Florida and New York are among states considering their own "pole taxes," which have already netted the Lone Stars $11.2 million in revenues. The money was supposed to be used to fund sexual assault services (and no, the irony is not lost on anyone). Only hitch: a Texas judge ruled the tax an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. Yes, stripping is free speech. Let freedom ring.
CASH CROP
Billions of dollars in the hole, California's legislature is considering a blunt proposal from a San Francisco assemblyman: taxing legalized marijuana sales at $50 an ounce, a move its sponsor thinks could net the state about $1 billion a year. Oregon is considering a similar measure, taxing medical marijuana at nearly $100 an ounce. The taxes could really help excite the states' economies, even if everything else gets sluggish for a while.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
If you live in America and your name starts with a letter, you're probably going to be seeing higher gas taxes soon. States and municipalities from Massachusetts to Michigan are planning gas hikes to help rev up their stalling fiscal engines. So any of you planning to travel across state lines to stock up on cigarettes before April 1 had better get on the road fast, before new highway taxes, raised tolls, speeding cameras and apocalyptic moths bar your way for good.
PORNOGRAPHY!
A Washington state representative was beaten back in February when he suggested taxing pornographic materials to save programs that serve the poor and disabled. A noble gesture indeed, which would have taxed adult magazines, adult photographs, adult videos, adult phone services and a few things even adults wouldn't want to talk about. The flesh lobby (and the rep's fellow Democrats in the state house) stopped the bill in its tracks, a rare win for anti-tax forces this season. The ACLU opposed the bill, too, arguing that taxing pornography is a tax on free speech. So what happens if you put it on mute?

O no, not again! Oprah's school rocked by second sex scandal in 2 years

Getty

Oprah christens her new school in South Africa in 2007.

Oprah Winfrey's elite boarding school for girls in South Africa has been rocked by its second sex scandal in fewer than two years.
Seven students were suspended last week for sexually harassing their schoolmates, the "Afrikaans on Sunday" newspaper reported.
One 15-year-old was accused of preying on another pupil and forcing other girls to lie to investigators about it, the paper reported.
"You have been found guilty of physical contact of a sexual nature with another pupil on campus, harassment, bullying other girls on campus and of being dishonest by not telling investigators the whole truth," a letter to her parents read.
Other girls were caught fondling each other or trying to get other girls to join them in lesbian liasons, the paper reported.
Oprah's spokesperson, Lisa Halliday, confirmed the girls had been suspended from the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy School for Girls - but gave few details.
"It is because they contravened the school's code of conduct," she said. "We regard the incident as confidential."
Winfrey called it the proudest moment of her life when she opened the $46 million school near Johannesburg in January 2007 to help high achieving but poor South African girls.
Nelson Mandela dedicated the school and luminaries ranging from songbirds Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige to filmmaker Spike Lee and actor Sidney Poitier attended the opening.
The school, which aims to house 450 girls in grades 7 through 12 by 2011, offered free tuition, books and uniforms, as well as room and board.
In return, the girls were required to follow the rules.
Ten months later, Winfrey sobbed uncontrollably after 15 girls eported they had been sexually abused by a matron who was supposed to be watching over them.
The talk show queen said the sex abuse charges hit her especially hard because she was raped and molested by a cousin, uncle and family friend when she was 9.
"I am a mama bear when it comes to protecting my children," she said at the time.
"These girls are like my children. That's not just rhetoric for me. I take their futures and the possibility for what their futures hold very seriously."
Dorm matron Virginia Tiny Makgobo, 27, was charged with indecent assault, common assault, soliciting a minor to perform an indecent act and verbal abuse of girls at the school. She denies the charges and is due back in court on June 1.
Vowing to "clean house," Winfrey also fired the school's headmistress and announced she would hand out cell phones - with her number on speed dial - to each student.
It was not clear if any students used their phones to report the latest outrage.

Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

Play Video 13 News, WVEC Hampton Roads  – Unknown light and loud boom over Hampton Roads

Andrea Thompson

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Jeff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.
Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.
He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.
The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi - the world's first two-time space tourist - to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.
Chester ran a satellite tracking program that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area where the fireball was spotted.
"This is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.
Chester said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is."
The descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were "entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something this big," Chester said.

Delta airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.

"We saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com. "It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were daylight."

James Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering rocket was very plausible. It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.

A rocket stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he said. And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over so wide an area.

The Soyuz rockets jettison their second stage after entering orbit in such a way that the second stage will slowly fall back to earth in a few days. But "you can control precisely where these things are going to come down," Chester said.

It's possible that some fragments of the rocket made it to the Earth's surface, but they would likely have a couple of hundreds of miles east of Cape Hatteras, Chester said.

"I don't think anybody will find anything on land," he said.

Getting more from Moore’s Law: BBC

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
For more than 40 years the silicon industry has delivered ever faster, cheaper chips.
The advances have underpinned everything from the rise of mobile phones to digital photography and portable music players.
Chip-makers have been able to deliver many of these advances by shrinking the components on a chip.
By making these building blocks, such as transistors, smaller they have become faster and firms have been able to pack more of them into the same area.
But according to many industry insiders this miniaturisation cannot continue forever.
“The consensus in the industry is that we can do that shrink for about another ten years and then after that we have to figure out new ways to bring higher capability to our chips,” said Professor Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard.
Even Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel and the man that gave his name to the law that dictates the industry’s progression, admits that it can only go on for a few more years.
“Moore’s Law should continue for at least another decade,” he recently told the BBC News website. “That’s about as far as I can see.”
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Getting more from Moore’s Law: BBC

Producers admit to contestants’ lip-synching on ‘American Idol’

Los Angeles, March 29 : Producers of American singing competition “American Idol” have admitted that there is some degree of lip-synching on the hit Fox reality show.

Accesshollywood.com reports, Manfred Westphal, a representative for FremantleMedia North America, which produces the show, said that occasionally the contenders sing to a track but not when they’re vying for votes.

“Due to extensive choreography and to balance their voices with open mikes against a screaming audience, the Idols do sing along to their own prerecorded vocal track during the group performances only,” he said.

He did insist, however, that during their solos, the contestants absolutely do not employ the use of a backing track.

The controversy over whether the “Idol” contenders sang to tracks came up when Season 1 finalist Justin Guarini bashed the show’s group performances during his show, “Idol Wrap,” last week.

“Every single year, we can’t stand the group performances. I know they can’t stand it either. And I think what makes them even worse now is that they’re lip-synched. They’re really prerecorded now,” Guarini said on his post-”Idol” show.