Here’s good news for the Indian tennis fans. Continuing his great touch, India's Somdev Devvarman defeated fourth seeded Ivo Karlovic of Croatia 7-6(4) 6-4 and storm into the semifinals of the Chennai Open ATP Tour tennis tournament here.

Playing before the home crowd, Somdev, who earlier crushed former world no.1 and two-time champion here Carlos Moya, played his heart out to win the quarterfinal match in 86 minutes. With this win, he became the only second Indian after Leander Paes to figure in the semifinals of the 14-year old prestigious event.

In order to continue with its aggressive expansion planning, country’s fixed line and broadband operator, Tata Communications (formerly VSNL) has approached the government, a 26 per cent shareholder, for a rights issue to raise Rs 1,000 crore and another Rs 2,000 crore through debt to finance acquisitions in the US and the UK and bid for spectrum for wireless broadband.

It is believed that the operator is trying its best to raise equity since early last year, yet, the state has not approved any of the company’s previous proposals.

A new offer is in the offing from the world’s largest PC maker, Acer!

On its complete range of netbooks, Acer has announced its new limited period special offer from January 9 to January 20, 2009.

After this declaration, the world’s most-demanding netbook, Acer Aspire One will be available at just Rs 14,499.

For its Aspire One netbook Linux edition, the company has also announced a special price of just Rs 14,499, while the Windows XP Home version will be priced at Rs 16,499. Both these prices are excluding taxes.

With the aim to provide its customers with lot of entertainment, productivity and connectivity, Dell recently launched its novel Inspiron 15 multi-purpose and well-configured laptop.

The new and unique addition to the Inspiron family, which has smarter features and style, has got solid performance too. The users would be happy to know that the device that boasts a 15.6-inch LCD screen with 16:9 screen aspect ratio would let them enjoy a whole new experience of movie watching. This slim and smart notebook that would be available with 320 GB of storage also comes along with up to 4 GB of memory.

Bhojpuri actor and director Kamal Khan can now hope to breathe easy. The Bombay High Court on Friday lifted the ban from his film Deshdrohi.

With this nod from the High Court, the movie is now all set to hit the box-office across the Maharashtra. The ban on the film was imposed for the 60 days in the state in November last year.

Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee won the Nandigram by-election by steering the CPM and other left parties, while the young Congress candidate Masum Benajir Noor retained her mother’s, late Rubi Noor’s seat at Sujapur (Malda). The results of these elections were declared on Friday.

In these two by-elections, both the Trinamool Congress and the Congress fought jointly on a common understanding in order to overcome the CPM and other left parties and they were successful in their project.