News Wrap: Rupee spirals; Rave party busted

- The rupee fell to an all-time low of 55 to the dollar today, marking its fourth consecutive record low in as many sessions, as the euro retreated from the day’s highs. A combination of weak fundamentals and negative sentiment has squeezed the Balance of Payment position, thus setting up the bearish trend for the rupee.

- The Government tabled the White Paper on black money in Parliament which did not disclose any names but made a case for setting up Lokpal and Lokayuktas to deal with the menace. The White Paper, tabled by Pranab Mukherjee did not provide the estimate of black money, within and outside the country. It did, though, quote various estimates of other agencies on the issue.

We have a CNNIBN report.

- After the 14-day-old pilot agitation in Air India, two more pilots from the agitated group have returned to work, taking the total number of sick pilots resuming work to five. At this rate, it seems that the Indian Pilots Guild, the derecognised union of pilots is slowly losing its hold on their members. The IPG, however, denied that any of its pilots had left them and instead claimed that three more pilots have reportedly joined the agitation.

- Over to the IPL controversies and another one broke out today after a rave party was busted last night in Juhu. Cricketers Wayne Parnell and Rahul Sharma were also part of the partying group. Both are saying that they were at the hotel, but were not at a rave. Following the late-night raid, Additional Commissioner of Police Vishwas Nagre Patil said that about 110 grams of cocaine had been seized along with other popular drugs like ecstasy, and charas.

Also, the case about Luke Pomersbach and the alleged molestation attempt took a few twists today… we have a CNNIBN report.

- At least 96 soldiers were killed and 300 others injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up during a rehearsal on Monday for a military parade in Yemen’s capital city, Al Arabiya news agency has reported. BBC, quoting officials, put the number of casualties at 63. However, it said unconfirmed reports placed the toll at 96.

- According to a Bloomberg report, Nasdaq is under scrutiny after shares of Facebook Inc were plagued by delays and mishandled orders on its first day of trading, blamed poor design in the software it uses for driving auctions in initial public offerings.

- And finally…are you a Chrome user? Then according to data released by statcounter, you have just contributed it overtaking Internet Explorer as the most used web browser on planet earth!