News

IndianExpress: REBEL Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Shalinitai Patil met with violent demonstrations by workers of the Republican Party of India (RPI) and other Dalit organisations when she came to Pune to participate in an anti-reservation rally organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Maratha Mahasangh in Pune on Saturday.

Over 2,000 workers of the RPI stalled Shalinitai’s car outside the Balgandharva Rangmandir, hurled footwear towards her car, burnt her effigies, indulged in fierce stone pelting and ransacked banners and hoardings put up by the organisers in the vicinity. Three policemen were injured in the stone pelting. A Pune Municipal Transport bus and a police vehicle were also damaged. The situation came under control only after the police resorted to a mild lathi charge. The police also arrested 24 men and four women domonstrators. Later in the evening, RPI’s Athavale group issued a press release condemning the lathi charge

IndianExpress: THE State government has not only bought 60 inflatable, motorised boats, but is also setting up rescue teams in 12 flood-prone districts of the State. City-based Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (Yashada) has been assigned the task of training the members of the rescue teams, who will be armed with the newly-procured boats.

‘‘Special training is needed to handle the inflatable boats, as they have a flat bottom. With the help of the Rescue and Rehabilitation Department and the Fire Department, we are conducting two-day training camps for the rescue teams,’’ Amit Kumar, officer-in-charge, Centre for Disaster Management, Yashada, said.

Each team has 10-15 members, comprising government officials, who are nominated by the respective district collectors. The 12 earmarked districts are under Konkan, Aurangabad and Pune divisions.

IndianExpress: MOTORISTS using the 2-km Khadki stretch of the Pune-Mumbai highway better watch out. For, the stretch has now developed as many as 200 potholes and a clutch of craters making it the most dangerous spot on the highway in the city.

While the Khadki Cantonment Board (KCB) continues to remain indecisive, Bopodi MLA Chandrakant Chajjed is angry. ‘‘The KCB officials are useless. They don’t have any regard for public safety,’’ Chajjed said. Stating he was instrumental in KCB getting the possession of the highway from the PWD, Chajjed said the board refused to carry out any repairs. ‘‘I don’t understand this kind of an attitude. There is no logic behind its indecision. Public safety should be its priority and nothing else,’’ Chajjed said.

IndianExpress: IT’S a trifle ironic to hear that the very vehicles that are often blamed for the chaotic state of Pune’s traffic are being positioned in the Great Britain as a solution to their congestion woes. But that’s precisely the situation with one of India’s best known stereotypes — the ubiquitous autorickshaw.

Come Monday and the Brighton roads will be a witness to a dozen three-wheelers ferrying passengers.

The idea is the brainchild of politician-cum-businessman Dominic Ponniah, who visited Pune two years ago and was fascinated by the dexterity with which the autorickshaws cut through the city’s gridlock. Convin-ced that he had got the answer to Britain’s traffic jams, Ponniah contacted a local autorickshaw dealer and placed an order for 12 rickshaws that were delivered to him last week. And with a trial launch that took place on July 6, the dashing dozen, more popularly called ‘tuktuk’ over there, is now all set to take the British roads by storm.

IndianExpress: LEENA Anil Deosthali (50) and her daughter Deepti (25), who have been arrested for suspected involvement in abduction and murder of orthopedic surgeon Deepak Shridhar Mahajan (42), on Saturday created quite a ruckus by alleging before the Judicial Magistrate (First Class) that the police had given third degree treatment to Deepti to force her to confess.

The allegation was made when Leena and Deepti were produced before JMFC A S Chaudhari for a remand hearing on Saturday afternoon. Leena and Deepti were been remanded to police custody till Monday after a medical check-up of Deepti at Sassoon Hospital.

IndianExpress: ARVIND Ramlal Kothari, a 34-year-old jeweller, was injured when attacked by a gang of four dacoits who targeted his Mahaveer Nivas bungalow at Maji Sainik Nagar area on Alandi Road early on Saturday.

Kothari’s wife Nitu also suffered some injuries. The dacoits decamped with cash, jewellery and valuables totally estimated to be worth over Rs 17.83 lakh.

Kothari runs a jewellery shop. Police said he normally packs up all jewellery at the shop while downing the shutters at night and brings it home to ensure that it does not get stolen even if the shop is burgled.

BBCNews.com: Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, which is due to go on widespread release in January 2007 will make big demands of your computer’s graphics capabilities.

Only high-end graphics cards will get the best out of Vista

In the old days the PC did not have much in the way of graphics. On WordStar, just about the first ever word processor for the PC, you could have any colour you liked - as long as it was green.

For PC users that has all changed, the world is full colour and funky is now the watch word.

DailyTechNews.com: IBM introduced two new entry-level versions of its enterprise search and content integration software.

The two new offerings are designed for departmental projects and mid-sized businesses, providing a lower cost of entry for organizations. These quick-start offerings provide fast deployment of secure enterprise search and content integration while providing the flexibility to add advanced search and discovery features as needed. In addition, they provide the ability to connect to information from numerous data sources and applications from other vendors including EMC, FileNet, Hummingbird, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, Stellent and CRM applications.

IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Starter Edition provides easier and more affordable business-focused search. It analyzes and indexes information stored throughout an organization, and allows users to quickly and securely search intranet portals, databases, public Web sites and file systems to obtain highly relevant results. It also includes the ability to plug in advanced information extraction capabilities through the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), an open source framework for building advanced search and text analytics applications, enabling users to search for facts and concepts within the underlying content.

TechNewsDaily.com: Cornell researchers have created a broadband light amplifier on a silicon chip, a major breakthrough in the quest to create photonic microchips. In such microchips, beams of light traveling through microscopic waveguides will replace electric currents traveling through microscopic wires.

A team of researchers working with Alexander Gaeta, Cornell professor of applied and engineering physics, and Michal Lipson, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, used the Cornell NanoScale Facility to make the devices. They reported their results in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature.

The amplifier uses a phenomenon known as four-wave mixing, in which a signal to be amplified is “pumped” by another light source inside a very narrow waveguide. The waveguide is a channel only 300 x 550 nanometers (nm = a billionth of a meter, about the length of three atoms in a row) wide, smaller than the wavelength of the infrared light traveling through it. The photons of light in the pump and signal beams are tightly confined, allowing for transfer of energy between the two beams.

DailyTech.com: Earlier this month, Intel released design guidance for its upcoming Santa Rosa platform.  Santa Rosa is the Centrino G965-derivative platform for mobile devices. Intel’s upcoming Merom processor will headline the platform on Intel’s Socket P.

The design guide (right) claims the launch for Santa Rosa will fall somewhere around late April, with the thermal design guide getting a 1.0 revision right around late March.  In the past these timeline forecasts have been more accurate than the corporate roadmaps, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.