News

IndianExpress: They come from all corners of the world. Their mission: To get Indian degrees in management, IT, arts and architecture. With each passing year, their numbers are growing and so are the countries they represent. If it was Destination Pune for students from Iran, Palestine, Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia for over two decades, joining the rush for admission to colleges in Pune are students from Djibouti, Fiji Islands, Vietnam, South Korea and Indonesia.

Numbers tell their own story. Pune University drew 2,455 foreign students from 90 countries in 2005, a two-fold rise from 1,431 in 2003. Symbiosis International Education Centre (SIEC) that had 600 offshore students at the beginning of the decade is set to have 2,000 enroll for the studies this academic year. The story is the same in Bharati Vidyapeeth, another deemed university like Symbiosis, where another 600-odd foreign nationals are chasing degrees.

IndianExpress: Having revived the acting course at the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) after 26 years, the alumni are now embarking on a new project: A mobile acting academy that aims to reach out to the interiors of the country. Beginning July-end, when the reels on wheels roll out from the FTII campus in Pune, it will take to the roads less travelled through the interiors of the country to reach out to different sections of society.

‘‘Our objective is simple. We just want to reach out to the lower strata of society. A whole lot of these people are talented, their only problem is that they belong to small cities and cannot afford expensive acting academies,’’ says FTII acting department course director Paintal, who along with tele-serial director Ravi Rai, will be in-charge of the project.

IndianExpress: In the 1980s, when the University of Pune (UoP) noticed that several foreign students who took admissions dropped out after a few months, it decided to get to the root of the problem.

The reason they found was with English, the mode of instruction. Most students from Japan, Korea, Iran and Nepal, found it difficult to follow what was being taught and dropped out in frustration, says International Students’ Centre director Shantishree Pandit. ‘‘This trend was noticed in students pursuing the Bachelor’s degree. They left after the first year as they accumulated backlogs,” she explains.

IndianExpress:  Ruling out any possibility that the proposed flyover at Nal Stop Chowk would ease traffic snarls on Karve Road, Municipal Commissioner Nitin Kareer today fully supported the ambitious Skybus project. ‘‘We must have sky-bus or some other likewise transport system in a congested areas,’’ he said.

Speaking at a discussion organised by Bharatiya Janata Party to find solutions to traffic problems in Karve Road, Kareer minced no words saying, ‘‘The flyover will be only able to solve the traffic woes of vehicles coming from Law College Road and Mhatre Bridge side. However, traffic snarls will remain below the flyover. The other alternative is to develop the proposed Balbharti-Paud Phata Road.’’

Indianexpress:  With Lt General Saibal Mukherjee taking over as the Director and Commandant of Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC) a slew of new projects and courses are in the pipeline to take this prestigious institution to a new height.

Though Lt Gen Mukherjee insists that the focus would remain on the undergraduate training in coping up with the varying needs and changing scenario of an Armed Force, nevertheless AFMC is gearing for a new lease of life with a host of projects.

IndianExpress:  Shirish Pandurang Mane, a resident of Somwar Peth, has lodged a complaint with the Nigdi police accusing an officer from a hospital in Nigdi of extracting Rs 4 lakh from him under the garb of giving him contract to run the canteen at the hospital. Mane, in his complaint alleged the hospital officer P K Mukherjee took the money from him in the form of cheques and demand drafts on various occasions over the past few weeks. However, Mane alleged, he was not given the contract

IndianExpress: In a shocking incident, a group of eight youths beat to death Motilal Nihalchand Agarwal(60) following a squabble over petty reason with one of his relatives at Thergaon on Friday night.

Five of the eight alleged killers were arrested by the Hinjewadi police after Motilal’s son-in-law Rakesh Deendayal Agarwal (29) lodged a complaint

News.com: The latest version of Xandros desktop Linux has arrived, continuing the operating system’s mission to welcome Windows users–a mission that’s led some in the Linux community to dismiss it as “Linux with training wheels.”

Xandros 4.0, the first version of the operating system in 18 months, includes features to read and write Windows-formatted drives and import user settings from Windows installations. It’s based on v3.1 (”sarge”) of Debian, with improvements from the Linux Standard Base (LSB), thanks to the DCC Alliance’s Common Core.

Xandros’ distinctive feature is its effort to carve out a commercial niche as an easy replacement for Windows. “The target audience of Xandros is primarily corporates looking to switch their workstations from Windows NT/2000 to Linux,” commented one user on a Debian discussion board. “They’ve gone to great lengths to mimic the look and feel of Windows for this reason.”

News.com: Microsoft plans in August to publicly release the privacy rules its employees have to follow when developing products.

The move, which offers a look behind the scenes at Microsoft, is meant to give the industry an example of what the software giant sees as best practices in customer privacy, said Peter Cullen, the chief privacy strategist at Microsoft
The privacy rules offer guidelines on providing people with proper notification and options in certain situations–for example, when a software application is about to send information via the Internet to its maker, Cullen said. Microsoft believes it is the first major software company to publish these guidelines.
 

betanews.com: France unveiled a new service Friday that would allow residents to view ultra-high resolution images of the country as well as its territories.

Called Geoportal, the site offers the ability to zoom in to as close as 20 inches off the ground, the best resolution available in Europe. 400,000 images comprise the tool along with 3,700 maps, which are updated every five years.
In a ceremony unveiling the new technology, President Jacques Chirac called the move significant as it “places France at the forefront of new technologies.” Although some may see it as a bid to compete with Google Earth, Geoportal differs in the fact it can only show images of French territories