Hong Kong - Hong Kong shares surged by more than 5 per cent Wednesday as confidence in stimulus and bailout packages announced in China and the US pushed prices up.

Beirut - Officials from the radical Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah have refused to meet former US president Jimmy Carter, who is on a two-day visit to Lebanon, Carter's spokesman Rick Jafculca said Wednesday.

Carter requested the meeting with the Iran-backed movement, which is listed as a terrorist group by Washington, as part of a visit to Lebanon to assess whether his Carter Centre will monitor a legislative election next year.

On Tuesday, an interesting piece of information was given by the astronomers that Carbon dioxide has been traced on a hot planet outside our solar system -- another piece of evidence supporting the possibility that life could develop elsewhere.

It was informed by NASA that their Hubble Space Telescope has found carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of "hot Jupiter" planet. The planet orbits a nearby star, 63 light-years from Earth.

The planet basically is too hot to support any life as its surface is about 1,800 degrees F (1,000 degrees C).

Stockholm - Ball-bearing maker SKF that also makes seals and lubrication systems said Wednesday it planned to shed 2,500 jobs worldwide, citing lower demand from the car industry and other industrial sectors.

The group has some 42,800 employees.

SKF, which has headquarters in the Swedish west coast city Gothenburg, said the cuts would mainly impact plants in the United States, France, Italy, Ukraine, Brazil and Argentina.

In the past recent years, tremendous achievement gains have been made by American fourth- and eighth-grade students in math, claims an international survey of student achievement, released on Tuesday. However, performance in Science was flat.

It was put forward by the results that many Asian countries continued to outperform the United States greatly in science and math. Both these subjects are really important for economic competitiveness and research.

The Indian scientists, after seeing the success of India's first lunar mission Chnadryaan-1, are now looking towards the sun and are busy preparing a solar probe for this purpose.

Though India had never ventured beyond Earth's orbit before Chandryaan-1, India's constellation of seven earth-observation satellites is the largest in the world. As of now, Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have reached at an advanced stage of designing a spacecraft named 'Aditya' with the aim to study and analyze outermost region of the sun.