Washington, Dec 23 : Danny Boyle's `Slumdog Millionaire' is among the `10 Best Movies Of 2008'.

Despite its cast of relative unknowns, Danny Boyle's `Slumdog Millionaire' has become this season's buzz film and is now being tipped as a frontrunner for an Oscar.

`Slumdog Millionaire' is a fictitious story about an 18-year-old Indian, who wins India''''s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Meryl Streep's `Doubt', a 2008 film adaptation of the John Patrick Shanley play of the same name, was also included in the list.

Washington, Dec 23: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who has been named to the same Cabinet post by the incoming President-elect Barack Obama's Administration, has asked experienced members of the Bush war team to stick around to smooth the transition process in the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has asked most Bush Administration political appointees except those targeted for dismissal to stay on in the Pentagon until replaced by the Obama Administration in the coming months, The Washington Times reported.

Melbourne, Dec 23 : U. S. president-elect Barack Obama has been likened to George Clooney after photographs of him leaving a gym in Hawaii without his shirt surfaced on the Internet.

On the net, people are raving about the next US President's body.

Celebrity website Celebuzz claimed Obama was "the hottest president ever" while the Sun said "His buff chest and toned tum belie his 47 years and show he's got more in common with George Clooney than George Bush."

Washington, December 23 : People in Hawaii, a state in the U. S. that shaped Barack Obama's life, are banking on the President-elect's name to generate business.

To draw more and more tourists, Hawaiians have been arranging for Barack Obama-inspired ice cream flavours and special bus tours around his old Honolulu neighbourhood.

Air conditioned mini-buses full of tourists wind around the narrow streets of Makiki, and breeze past the school Obama attended and the apartment building where his grandparents raised him.

Some guides let tourists hop off to snap photographs in the lobby of the hospital where Obama was born.

About 25 million handsets could be disconnected by telecom operators from January sixth onwards as the department of telecom (DoT) ordered them to cut off cell phones without an international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number.

The move is likely to deter terrorist outfits to make use of mobile phone for their immoral acts, by assuring that no calls made are unidentifiable.

IMEI, an exclusive 15 digit code identifying a cell phone, prevents the use of stolen phones for making calls and therefore permits lawful interception of all calls.

London, Dec 23 : Malaysia has launched a national plan to double the country's wild tiger population by 2020, which has fallen from 3,000 to 500 in the last 50 years.

The numbers of tigers in Malaysia have fallen sharply in recent decades because of the illegal hunting.

Now, according to a report by BBC News, conservation groups and the government have set an ambitious target of expanding the tiger population from 500 to around
1,000 over 12 years.

Known as the National Tiger Action Plan, the project is the government's first concerted effort to reverse the decline in tiger numbers, instead of merely slowing it.