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Reliance Industries Ltd has further raised the bid for acquiring LyondellBasell Industries to $14.5 billion. LyondellBasell is a petrochemicals major facing bankruptcy.

Reliance plans to acquire the firm after it exits bankruptcy under its restructuring plan. The offer if goes through would give the Indian firm a minority stake in Lyondell and control of the board.

Reliance MediaWorks has launched a counter bid to acquire a majority stake in the theater chain Fame India Ltd in an open offer.

The shares of Fame India recorded a rise after the bid with a steep premium was announced on Monday by Reliance Group Company. The move is expected to start a price war in the market.

The counter bid is 63.5 percent higher at 83.40 rupees a share from 51 rupees a share offered by Inox Leisure to acquire 20 percent equity in the company. Reliance intends to acquire 62.08 percent stake in the company.

HCL Technologies has signed an agreement lasting for five years for providing IT infrastructure management services with Electrolux.

Electrolux has emerged as a major player in the home appliance sector in the country. The agreement between the two companies cover monitoring and management of network, servers, IT security and end-user computing.

The agreement will cover Electrolux facilities in 12 countries in Asia-Pacific region, including Australia. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the deal.

Firms that suspended recruitments last year have begun hiring this year in a reiteration that recession is over and that all is well, again.

At Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) Indian investment banks and global FMCG firms among others constituted the Cluster (week) Two of placements that started on Friday evening.

The placement season, which started last week, marked the return of names like Merill Lynch and Bank of America that suspended their recruitments last year, in the wake of the recession. A few new ones like Gaja Capital also made their presence.

Investment firms and strategic consultants - J P Morgan, HSBC, Bain, BCG, Mc Kinsey, AT Kearney – recruited several students.

Winters in Nepal are tough. Daily power cuts stretching to 16 hours a day are common from December to March. Unusual for a country that boasts of a hydropower potential of 83,000 MW — almost 100-times the peak winter demand of around 810 MW.

But despite a century-old history of power generation, which started with the Pharping hydroelectric plant in 1911, the country has to resort to power cuts or look to India for help.

Last winter the situation was so bad that the government had to declare a national electricity crisis and incidents of public venting their ire on the Nepal Electricity Authority’s offices occurred. But nothing much has improved and the situation is almost similar this winter too.

The New Zealand team is go to India for the hockey World Cup scheduled to start in New Delhi on Sunday despite a reported terrorist threat, officials said.

Hockey officials, who put the team's departure on hold following last week's threat, said Monday they had assessed advice from the New Zealand government and an independent adviser on security arrangements in India.

"The detail we have received has reassured us that the required level of security is in place, therefore we have kept the team in the tournament," Hilary Poole, chief executive of Hockey New Zealand, said.

Poole said one player, Simon Child, had made a personal decision to pull out.