Cotabato City, Philippines  - Fourteen "high-risk" criminals escaped from a city jail in the southern Philippines, a jail official said Friday.

The detainees escaped from the Cotabato City jail, 930 kilometres south of Manila, late Thursday by overpowering the jail guards, according to city jail warden Inspector Panga Arab.

Arab said the escapees were facing murder, drug trafficking, robbery and illegal possession of firearms cases.

Shilpa Shetty: born 8 June 1975, is an Indian film actress and model.

Since making her debut in the film Baazigar (1993), she has appeared in nearly 40 Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada language films, her first leading role being in the 1994 Aag.

Her performances in Dhadkan (2000) and Rishtey (2002) were appreciated, while her portrayal of an AIDS patient in Phir Milenge (2004) won her many accolades.

Her younger sister Shamita Shetty is also a Bollywood film actress.

Shetty has been embroiled in various controversies including suspected Mafia links.

There was a sudden panic among the myriad friends and well-wishers of the movie-making maverick Mani Ratnam when on Tuesday he was admitted into the Apollo hospital in Chennai.

Since Mani has a history of heart ailment, the worst was naturally ,or not so unnaturally , presumed.

However it seems the news from Chennai is heartening and very very encouraging.

So says the poetic genius Gulzar who , as luck would have it, was in Chennai working on a song for Mani Ratnam’s Raavan with Mani and composer A R Rahman when Mani’s health scare occurred.

Shanghai  - Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton Friday topped the timesheets in the first practice for the Chinese Grand Prix.

The McLaren driver completed the fastest round of the 5.451-kilometre Shanghai circuit in 1:37.334 minutes, 0.116 seconds ahead of GP Brawn driver Jenson Button.

Button's Brazilian teammate Rubens Barrichello came third, followed by McLaren's Heikki Kovaleinen, indicating a closing gap between the two teams.

Manila  - A communist rebel was killed in a clash with government troops in an eastern Philippine town, a military report said Friday.

The report said the fighting erupted Thursday when patrolling troops encountered the guerrillas in a remote village in Esperanza town in Masbate province, 390 kilometres south of Manila.

The troops also recovered an assault rifle left behind by the fleeing rebels, it added.

Washington, April 17 : NASA's Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.

The new images show the mission's target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

One image shows millions of stars in Kepler's full field of view, while two others zoom in on portions of the larger region.