No new taxes in Kerala budget

Thiruvananthapuram (PTI): With an eye on the Lok Sabha polls, Kerala's Left Front government today unveiled a deficit budget with no new taxes, and a slew of welfare measures including a Rs 10,000 crore special package to tide over the slowdown in the economy due to the global recession.

Finance Minister T M Thomas Issac did not impose new taxes and came out with sops like waiver of loans up to Rs 25,000 taken from government institutions by Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and converted Christians.

The budget aims to mobilise an additional Rs 574.29 crore by tapping non-tax revenue. It shows deficit of Rs 934 crore and estimates total revenue at Rs 28,153.90 crore, expenditure at Rs 31,161.85 crore and a revenue deficit of Rs 3,007.95 crore.

A Rs 10,000 crore anti-slowdown package in the budget is a step towards increasing capital investment. The most important component of this would be schemes worth Rs 5,000 crore for implementing drinking water and irrigation projects.

An amount of Rs 250 crore has been earmarked as food subsidy with the objective of ensuring supply of essential commodities at reasonable prices for all. Rice would be supplied at Rs two a kg to families below the poverty line.

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NII launches BlackBerry Curve 8350i

NII Holdings, Inc. today announced that Nextel Argentina, Nextel Brazil, Nextel Mexico and Nextel Peru will offer the BlackBerry(R) Curve(TM) 8350i smart phone. The BlackBerry Curve 8350i is the first BlackBerry smart phone in Latin America to offer this unparalleled combination of services and features with Nextel's industry-leading Push-to-Talk (PTT) service along with premium phone features, the industry's leading email and messaging capabilities, web access, productivity applications and rich multimedia capabilities. Also, it includes Wi-Fi(R) and 128MB of internal memory. This powerful and flexible smart phone for mobile business users is available exclusively to Nextel customers in Latin America.

The BlackBerry Curve 8350i smart phone and the industry-leading Push-to-Talk service will provide one-touch, instant and effective communication between NII subscribers and over 10 million iDEN subscribers in North and South America. In addition to enabling easy access to personal and corporate email, the BlackBerry Curve 8350i comes with built-in Wi-Fi, a 2-megapixel camera, 128MB of memory and an expandable memory slot for additional storage to help subscribers in Latin America push their business to new heights.
RIM BlackBerry Curve (8350i) Features

* Built-in capabilities for assisted autonomous GPS capabilities
* 2.0-megapixel digital camera with 5x digital zoom, flash and video recording
* DataViz Documents to Go is preloaded to make it easy to edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly on the smart phone
* Speakerphone is optimized for sound quality with Direct Connect
* Advanced Media Player to listen to music, watch videos and show pictures
* Expandable micro SD memory card slot allows plenty of storage for pictures, videos, music and documents
* Bluetooth version 2.0 with support for (A2DP) stereo Bluetooth and more
* Group Connect feature enables group conversation up to 20 Persons.

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