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Thinks there could be more hits like Jai Ho in the future.

Universal music

Thinks there could be more hits like Jai Ho in the future. The largest of the four major record companies,Universal believes that Western audiences might have an appetite for more music with an Indian flavor. It has decided to team up with Desi Hits! a company that promotes South Asian entertainment on desihits.com ,to create a label for musicians from India or with South Asian roots. Desi Hits! had good timing,starting just a year before the release of Slumdog Millionaire which grossed more than 140 million at the domestic box office and set off a mini-boom of interest in Indian culture in the United States. The Slumdog soundtrack sold nearly 400,000 copies,and Jai Ho won a Grammy in addition to an Oscar.

Franz Kafkas

list of manuscripts,letters and journals that languished in safety deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich for decades will soon be released. The documents have been the subject of a legal battle between Israels National Library and Eva Hoffe,the woman who inherited the documents. Ms. Hoffes mother,Esther,was the secretary to Max Brod,a close friend of Kafka who served as the authors executor after he died in 1924. Although Kafka requested that all his personal papers be incinerated,Brod,who emigrated to Israel in 1939,never complied. The library contends that the Kafka papers are cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people, David Bloomberg,chairman of the National Library,said. Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept there are accessible to all without cost,the library will continue its efforts to gain transfer of the manuscripts that have been found.

Leopold Museum

In Vienna has agreed to pay 19 million for Portrait of Wally,painted in 1912,a work lent to the Museum of Modern Art in 1997 for an exhibition of and eventually seized by the US government amid claims that it did not rightfully belong to the Leopold.

The Leopold,which acquired the painting in 1954,has agreed to pay the money to the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray,a Jewish gallery owner in Vienna,from whom the work was seized by a Nazi agent . As part of the deal,the United States government has agreed to dismiss its case against the Leopold museum and release the work,which will go on display briefly in New York at the Museum of Jewish Heritage before returning permanently to the Leopold.