New Delhi, Oct 22 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a petition filed by Vikas Yadav, convicted for murdering Nitish Katara, seeking transfer of the appeal proceedings outside Delhi.

A bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and H S Bedi found no merit in the plea.

Vikas Yadav had pleaded that the appeal against his conviction in the Katara murder case should be heard either by the Allahabad High Court or any other High Court in the country barring the Delhi High Court.

Reno (Nevada, US), Oct.

Seoul - South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co said Wednesday that it was scrapping its 5.85-billion-dollar bid for US memory card maker SanDisk Corp, citing its third-quarter loss and a partnership with Samsung's rival Toshiba Corp.

Lee Yoon Woo, Samsung's chief executive officer, said in a letter to SanDisk's board that the Milpitas, California-based company faced "uncertain earnings prospects," which could worsen with the downturn in the global economy and the outlook for the chip industry.

He added that the two companies had been in negotiations for half a year without making progress on a deal.

Madrid - The Spanish government Wednesday won initial parliamentary support for its 2009 budget despite being accused of downplaying the impact of the country's deepening economic crisis.

The backing of two regionalist parties allowed the governing Socialists to reject amendments that several parties had proposed to the budget, which is still pending definitive approval.

The amendments were scrapped with 177 votes, while 170 legislators voted for them and one abstained.

The opposition conservatives have argued that the 1 per cent growth forecast the budget is based on is unrealistic, given that growth has plummeted from 3.8 per cent in 2007 to close to zero this year.

Harare - The leader of President Robert Mugabe's notorious war veterans militia has threatened prime minister-designate Morgan Tsvangirai over his failure to turn up this week for a regional summit on the Zimbabwean crisis in Swaziland.

The meeting of the politics and security troika of the Southern African Development Community, the 15-nation regional alliance, was meant to discuss the five-week stalemate in the implementation of a power-sharing agreement between Mugabe's Zanu-PF and the two groupings of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change.

Tsvangirai refused to travel to the summit after Mugabe's regime refused to issue him with a new passport, giving him only an emergency travel document.

Ankara - Prosecutors on Wednesday launched an investigation into a speech made by the leader of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in which he attacked the government's policy regarding the Kurdish issue, the Anadolu news agency reported.

"The policy of denial, assimilation and eradication has affected people. Only the Kurds resisted. They still resist," DTP leader Ahmet Turk told supporters in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir.

The speech came after days of protests in south-eastern cities where Kurds angry at reports that Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan had been mistreated in prison have held running battles with police.