The Economic Times reports:

The next IPL Twenty20 extravaganza may unfold at Lord's as well. The tournament, which had a smashing debut earlier this year, is expected to be split with five weeks of action in India and three weeks in UK where it is expected to draw in sub-continental diaspora as well as English fans. The IPL proposal has been discussed with the English board which has evinced keen interest in the possibility of staging a part of the competition that was won last time by Jaipur Royals.

The competition is scheduled for April-May and the player auction for the second season will be held in February next year.

The IPL governing body is expected to consider the proposal for two venues when it meets on January 3 and even though the schedule and revenue model need to be finalised, the scheme is expected to go through.

It's likely that the tournament will kick off in India and then move to the UK for three weeks before it returns to India for the final matches.

"IPL will become more of an international event and other cricket boards are also likely to be supportive. Indian interests will be safeguarded in the revenue model and the game will benefit overall," said well-placed sources.

What organisers have to look at is whether the scheduling clashes with major fixtures in England or India.

The eight-week IPL window is any way inked into India's cricket calender and any hitches are expected to be resolved with technical teams already carrying out a survey of facilities in England.

Given that IPL drew in top talent from across the cricketing world, adding an England leg will make the event even more high profile.

English cricketers missed out in the first edition of the game as their board held them to domestic commitments. With IPL's impressive revenues being shared and the event being played at home, the English board could reconsider its objections.

From the Guardian's '21st Century Sport': A year on:

Twenty20: Auctions, helicopters and India's big win

In September 2007, India's victory over Pakistan in the final of the first World Twenty20, played in Johannesburg, drew a worldwide TV audience of more than 400 million. India had caught the Twenty20 bug and this was the catalyst for the Indian Premier League, launched last spring. The IPL has changed world cricket for ever.

'Cricket is a religion in our country,' said Lalit Modi, who dreamed up the IPL with a senior executive from IMG, the sports marketing group. Modi sold the TV rights, for a league in which not a ball had been bowled, for $1.026bn. He lured India's richest men and Bollywood's A-list to the IPL player auction, one of the strangest events of the year. Franchise owners spent $35m in eight hours of bidding. The first tournament ended in June, but its aftershocks are still being felt as cricket governing bodies around the world race to create new properties to take to market. The second World Twenty20 is in England next June and the unloved ICC Champions Trophy will become another 20-over competition in the West Indies in 2010.

ESPN Star, the Asian pay-TV broadcaster, paid nearly $1bn for rights to the Twenty20 Champions League, a new competition for first-class sides rather than countries, though that has been postponed because of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Most of the money goes to India, Australia and South Africa, with England picking up scraps. The deal puts further pressure on English cricket. The Indians have the economic power – and they are using it – to change the cricket calendar.

England will almost certainly have to move or give up their May Test matches, releasing their best players to the IPL, and have pinned all their Twenty20 hopes on a new domestic competition (due in 2010) and their deal with the Texan billionaire, Sir Allen Stanford, to play T20 in Antigua. There was outrage when Stanford promoted that five-year deal by landing a helicopter at Lord's and showing off $20m in $50 bills in a Perspex box – an event that matched the IPL auction for novelty value. Money talks. The biggest winners are India and all the players who get IPL contracts. To many cricket followers the biggest loser is the game itself, with Test cricket under threat.

Plus • Half of England's players say they would retire from international cricket if it was the only way of clearing the way to play in the IPL. • The ECB talk of hosting 'foreign' Test matches at Lord's. Pakistan and Australia have both discussed the idea.• Pakistan move all home one-day games to Dubai for three years from 2009.

It was the late Estée Lauder who, in the midst of rough economic times, said: “When things are bad, if a woman has a little perfume and a new lipstick, she feels like a queen.” And it was by knowing a thing or two about how women felt that Estée Lauder became very rich. Grim though things are, it's encouraging to know that somewhere is buzzing and, you've guessed it, it's the perfume counters that are reporting booming business....

The world wide web has encouraged a new breed of what American Elle called “perfume fanatics, supersniffers who... seek out esoteric notes, celebrate superior dry downs, host sniffing parties and swap samples of their latest discoveries”.

Read the whole Times Online article HERE.

UPI reports:

Market researchers said online shopping perked up dramatically on Cyber Monday, the digital deal-making day that is the Internet's answer to Black Friday.

Web monitor Akamai Technologies said a record 6.7 million visitors per minute clicked on approximately 280 Internet retail sites by 3 p.m. Monday, up from last year's 4.6 million visitors per minute tally, the newspaper said.

"Things are better than expected," said David Fry, whose company operates online retail sites for major retail chains. Traffic was up 30 percent to 60 percent and revenue up 10 percent to 20 percent compared with a year ago, he said.

If you are not sure what 'Cyber Monday' is, click HERE.