With Kuwait threatening to disallow landing of India's state-owned carriers at its capital from Sunday, an Indian high-level delegation will visit the Gulf country on Thursday to sort out the issue.

Kuwait's proposed action is likely to hit thousands of passengers planning to fly to India during summer holidays.

The crisis for passengers between India and Kuwait was aggravated after the latter issued a notice to 'Air India' and 'Indian' saying it will not receive flights of the airlines from July 1.

While civil aviation authorities of both the countries are engaged in a second round of negotiations in New Delhi, the team, which will include representatives from the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Director-General Civil Aviation, Air India and Indian Airlines are arriving in Kuwait on Thursday, said Indian officials over phone from Kuwait. The Indian ambassador to Kuwait, M Ganapathy will also take part in the talks.

The talks are part of an ongoing process which will discuss all the matters on the table, the official added.

Kuwait authorities are demanding enhanced capacity as well as increased number of destinations.

"If the flights between the two countries are halted, the services of India's national carriers, Air India and Indian to Kuwait will be heavily disrupted," Kuwait Times reported.

Travel agents said that they had not received any word from Air India or Indian Airlines regarding Kuwait DGCA's decision to stop their flights.


Courtesy : Expressindia.com

It takes a person about 10 minutes to read a 2,500-word, front-page feature story in the Wall Street Journal. Computer programs increasingly being used by investors to parse news stories can process one in about three one-hundredths of a second.

Algorithms -- problem-solving programs based on mathematical formulas -- are making it easier for investors to filter the massive amount of text produced by news wires, newspapers, industry journals, clinical studies, and legal filings for kernels of information, and trade on them in the blink of an eye.

Though the expanding array of news on nontraditional media like blogs and chat pages is a challenge for the robot readers, the speed and efficiency offered by news mining algorithms are helping hedge funds with just a handful of staff generate as many trades as a giant investment bank and becoming a potential boon to the media industry.

"This is a new class of information technology," said John Partridge, vice president of industry solutions with StreamBase Systems, a technology provider that specializes in processing and analysing real-time streaming data.

High-frequency investors such as hedge funds are using news mining platforms like those offered by StreamBase to troll through thousands of electronic feeds of streaming text to identify key phrases on which to trade.

Popular phrases include 'lowers its outlook' or 'raises guidance' or even buzzwords like 'stellar performance' that could potentially push a stock lower or higher.

Hedge funds, with their rapid-fire trading style, often allow the news mining platforms to make trades on their own, capitalizing on the technology's speed.

However, longer-term investors are less interested in flooding the market with orders after a particular headline. They are using the platforms to keep track of developments that may affect companies in their portfolios or influence their strategies, technology developers said.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com